Artist Statement

FAYLINDA KODIS grew up in Maine and returned to the state in 2023 after years spent in urban environments shaped by teaching, travel, and cultural exchange. This return to rural Maine has transformed her artistic practice, inspiring new techniques and themes centered on memory, homecoming, and close observation of daily life.
Influenced by travels, including two Fulbright awards to Japan, Kodis incorporates repeating patterns, collected objects, and cultural references into layered still life compositions that blur the line between observation and imagination. Her ongoing series, Still Life Journeys, combines mementos, souvenirs, flowers, and small bird sculptures gathered over time into visual “collages” of memory and place.
Working with watercolor, gouache, and collage, Kodis builds surfaces through layering, sanding, cutting, and lifting paint from the paper. Vintage U.S. Geological Survey maps, collected during her studies at the University of Southern Maine, have become a signature element in her work, functioning as borders, frames, and symbolic references to navigation, geography, and belonging.

The still life tradition itself becomes expanded in Kodis’s hands. Rather than presenting static arrangements, her compositions behave more like emotional landscapes or memory maps. Objects shift in scale and spatial logic; patterns flatten and open space simultaneously; painted forms interact with collaged materials in ways that suggest accumulation over time. Everyday items become vessels for storytelling. The paintings invite viewers to consider how personal histories are assembled through fragments—through treasured objects, repeated rituals, collected artifacts, and remembered places. The resulting works feel both deeply personal and universally familiar, offering spaces where memory, place, and imagination quietly converge.