The Artist

Dominique Gustin is a multi-disciplinary artist working across photography, digital and mixed media, encaustic painting, poetry, contemporary collage, video and sound.  She created SomnMigratory Studio to share her contemporary digital collage and encaustic paintings. Dominique studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and has been making art and working in the arts for over thirty years. She lives in St. Johnsbury, Vermont.

The Work

Dominique's work is rooted in the surrealist collage tradition - the practice of taking pieces photographs, ephemera, and found imagery to assemble new narratives that reimagine the possible. Drawing on the symbolic storytelling of magical realism, her pieces carry a playful or contemplative touch: birds thinking, bees working, cats daydreaming. Quiet myths and imagined narratives, made luminous through encaustic beeswax, damar tree resin, and colored pigment.

The Process

Each piece begins with a visual daydream - something beautiful, impossible, absurd, emotionally resonant, or quietly political. Using her own photographs and digitally generated imagery as raw material, Dominique creates a digital collage in Photoshop: cutting, layering, and reshaping fragments of figures, landscapes, and objects - drawn from photographs, licensed stock imagery, and digitally generated visuals - into a unique compositional foundation. These source elements are altered, unmoored, and recombined until the original materials become something entirely her own.

The resulting image is printed with archival pigment ink, mounted to a wood panel, and remade by hand: watercolor, charcoal, pencil, oil pastel, and encaustic - a luminous blend of beeswax, damar resin, and pigment - applied in layers and fused with heat. Once cooled, the surface is carved, incised, and textured, revealing layers beneath and adding depth and dimension. The result is a wholly handmade work of art - shaped by touch, intuition, and close attention - balancing encaustic’s smooth luminosity with texture, incised line, reflection and shadow.