Daryne Rockett
Restoring Liberty
Exhibit Location: McDade Gallery
Meet the Artist: Thursday, October 8 | 6:00-7:00 pm
Workshop: Daryne will lead Gelli Printing Make and Take on Saturday, November 7 from 2 to 4. Free registration required.
Notes: Daryne’s artwork is for sale. Please stop by the reference desk for more information.
About Daryne and Her Work
Restoring Liberty explores freedom, democracy, and justice not as fixed ideals, but as things that require our continued attention, participation, and repair.
Half of the works in the exhibition are monotypes created through a multi-layer process on a gelatin printing plate. Embedded within their backgrounds are texts that have shaped the American conversation about liberty and responsibility: Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, the First Amendment, excerpts from Franklin D. Roosevelt’s fireside chats, and Rachel Carson’s prepared remarks before Congress, among others.
The Statue of Liberty is the central figure in these works, but she does not appear unchanged. In each piece, her image has been reimagined to reflect some aspect of our freedoms and the forces that threaten, sustain, or restore them. Several works draw upon the Japanese tradition of kintsugi, using gold to repair visible cracks rather than disguising them. Here, the gold becomes a metaphor for repairing fractures in our democracy while acknowledging that those fractures exist. Another work presents Liberty in the form of stained glass, assembling separate and fragmented elements into a new whole.
The other half of Restoring Liberty consists of mixed-media collages on 18-inch cradled panels. These works grew from responses to a deceptively simple question: What gives you hope?
Hope is essential to the endurance of a democratic people. It gives us reason to remain engaged when progress is difficult and to imagine that what has been damaged can still be restored. These collages explore some of the qualities that sustain that hope, including Truth, Solidarity, Resilience, and Generosity.
Many of their individual elements were also created on a gelatin plate, connecting the two halves of the exhibition through process as well as purpose. Together, the works of Restoring Liberty ask us to consider democracy not as something we inherit and simply possess, but something we continually create, protect, and repair.
Daryne Rockett, who creates under the pseudonym Doodle Rex, is a Maine-based mixed-media artist whose work explores resilience, justice, connection, and the complicated work of repair. A U.S. Air Force veteran and longtime clinical social worker, Daryne brings a perspective shaped by service, advocacy, and more than two decades of work with people navigating trauma and healing.
A self-taught artist, Daryne came to visual art following a brain injury in 2014. During a long recovery, drawing became both a creative practice and a way of rebuilding capacity. What began with short periods of doodling gradually developed into a multidisciplinary studio practice incorporating painting, gel printing, collage, textiles, image transfer, and found materials.
Daryne’s work frequently examines the relationship between individual experience and larger social systems. Themes of freedom, belonging, human rights, environmental responsibility, and collective resilience recur throughout the work, often alongside imagery drawn from nature and familiar cultural symbols.
In Restoring Liberty, Daryne turns to the visual language and foundational texts of American democracy, examining the distance between the nation’s stated ideals and the lived reality of those whose freedoms remain vulnerable. Rather than treating liberty as a finished inheritance, the work considers it something that must be continually tended, repaired, defended, and extended.
Daryne lives and works in Orono, Maine, and exhibits throughout Maine and beyond.
Visit Daryne’s website. Or, follow Daryne on Instagram and Facebook .
