Selene Plum's paintings, anchored in the landscape, span abstraction and minimalistic representation. Her ongoing series Moon Mudras is created with oil paint, wax, and vintage nails on repurposed fragments of dramatically weathered tobacco barn wood sourced locally in the Blue Ridge Mountains. The series title refers to ritual hand gestures in eastern spiritual practices, and the imagery centers around circles, repeated marks, and responses to the found pieces of wood she paints on, reminiscent of Tantric paintings from Northern India. In her Blue Ridge series, elegantly reductive landscapes are pared down to the horizon line and a pure distillation of the elements below and above it, with incised grooves and planes of oil paint carved into the wax to suggest plants, water, hills, and sky. Plum's paintings are meditations about outdoor spaces observed, lived deeply in, and felt.
Plum lives and works in Asheville, North Carolina. She earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1996.