RA Brooks has been making figures since she was seventeen, when a series of nude studies won Best of Show at her first exhibition — and were quietly moved to the interior of the gallery out of Midwest modesty. That early tension — between what a body holds and what a room will allow — has never fully left her work.

Her practice moves fluidly across materials — charcoal, acrylic, watercolor, textile, and beyond — the medium chosen for what it can say, not out of habit. Her work exists along a spectrum. At one end: figures observed from life, abstracted until what remains is emotional rather than anatomical — the gesture of a body carrying something specific, from a specific time. At the other: fully abstract work with no figure present, only color, material, and the impression a memory leaves when you can no longer reach it directly. Between these two poles is a growing body of work that refuses to sit at either end — referential and abstract at once, figure and feeling dissolving into each other.

Each medium is chosen because it can say something the others can't. Each collection draws from a different period or experience — not one fixed source, but a practice that keeps returning to what has been felt and partially lost.