Ponnapa Prakkamakul

Ponnapa Prakkamakul is a painter and a landscape architect. Growing up watching her artist mother diligently make drawing paper from natural materials, Ponnapa learned that the making of the essence of art emerges before the white paper and continues to evolve beyond the artist's hands. This idea inspired her to use the Earth as a canvas and pursued a study in landscape architecture at the Rhode Island School of Design where she started using soil as painting media. Ponnapa’s work explores the painting process as a tool to experience and understand the surrounding environment. Through her work, she aims to gain a better understanding of cultural displacement and isolation issues as an immigrant. She uses immersive experience, engaging with the landscape through the performative acts of searching, studying, and collecting natural materials and found objects to paint with, as well as sketching in situ. In the studio she applies collected materials on paper as a painting medium that depicts the landscapes where they originate. This painting process not only creates a connection between herself and site but also fosters a deeper connection to new places as an immigrant – cultivating a sense of place in a new land through art.

Ponnapa holds a master’s degree in landscape architecture with honors from the Rhode Island School of Design, a teaching certificate from Brown University, RI, and a Bachelor of Landscape Architecture with honors from Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, Thailand. In 2018, Ponnapa was a recipient of the Manoog Family Artist Residency at the Plumbing Museum in Watertown, with four paintings in the museum’s permanent collection. In 2019, she was awarded the David Bethuel Jamieson Artist of Color Residency and Fellowship at the C Scape Dune Shack in Provincetown. Her work has also been exhibited nationally and internationally. Several of her hybrid digital drawings have been published in two “Representing Landscapes” books by Nadia Amoroso. Ponnapa has been a guest critic and visiting speaker at Rhode Island School of Design, Boston Architectural College, Universtiy of Oregon and Roger Williams University. She works out of her studio in Boston, MA.

Fountain Street Exhibitions: Upended, Sharp Focus, In the Annex–March 2019