The interplay of light and space with color and pattern creates an optical magic.
I work at the intersection of painting and sculpture to create abstract, dimensional work. For over two decades, I have constructed visual labyrinths that engage perception and test the instability of color.
Using fiberglass mesh, metal mesh, and aluminum sheet metal, I balance industrial rigor with unexpected ethereality. Mesh, in particular, is integral to my work: its porous structure interacts with light, generating a wide optical range. Its malleability enables it to be draped, cut, painted, and shaped. When layered, it produces effects that shift from soft chromatic blending to the splitting of hues into bi-colored moiré patterns.
As the viewer moves, colors flow: blending, fracturing, and merging into new hues that animate the composition with a dynamic rhythm. Magnification, rising from space between layers, plays with the viewer’s perception, while subtle changes in lighting transform the palette, occasionally revealing a quiet luminescence.
Ultimately, the work is about instability – of color, of form, of perception – as an optical field of shifting interference between light, space and moiré patterns.
Joan Konkel is a Washington, D.C.–based artist whose work explores how material, light, and space are perceived. Working across painting and sculpture, she constructs layered, light-responsive surfaces that shift with the viewer’s position, producing subtle instabilities of form and color.
Originally trained as a sculptor (MFA, George Washington University), Konkel’s early practice extended into experimental fashion, incorporating metal into wearable garments. This body of work received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and was later presented at the Renwick Gallery in Washington, D.C., where it was recognized with the Anni Albers Designer Award.
Over the past two decades, Konkel has focused on a hybrid practice that merges painting and sculpture, developing a visual language informed by Constructivism, Op Art, and the Light and Space movement. Through moiré patterns, transparency, and spatial interference, her work engages perceptual ambiguity, destabilizing fixed readings and inviting active, investigative viewing.
Konkel’s work has been exhibited widely across the United States and in U.S. ambassadorial residences in France and Albania. It is held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Art – DeLand, the Polk Museum of Art at Florida Southern College, and the Golisano Children’s Museum of Naples, as well as in private and corporate collections in the United States and internationally.