Art history has always been a source of inspiration. Since 2010 she has been specifically interested in investigating Tibetan Tangkas. Visiting key collections nearby at the Newark Museum, the Metropolitan Museum and the Rubin Museum repeatedly studying their structure and content.
Pat Lay has used computer data and computer parts as source material in her art since 2004. As she started dismantling computers she discovered a beautiful interior world of colorful anodized aluminum cooling elements, colorful wires, the beautifully designed hard drive, the minimal geometry of the processor, but most exciting was the motherboard. Lay scanned the circuit board, cropped out small square sections, printed them, collaged them into larger, tiled structures. The logic of aesthetics.
The most recent iterations, since 2014, are collaged scrolls. Digital images scanned from computer circuit boards are printed on Japanese kozo paper and collaged into patterns that transform them into a new matrix. Her goal is to bring the beauty and power of the Tibetan Tangka to a contemporary art object. These new tangkas are not religious or political. They retain the spirit of the Tibetan Tangka but are a reflection of contemporary culture.
Pat Lay has received two grants in sculpture from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and a grant from the American-Scandinavian Foundation. She has been awarded three public art commissions including the installation of a large-scale site-specific sculpture in the sculpture park at the Henie-Onstad Kunstsenter in Oslo, Norway.
She has had solo exhibitions at the Aljira, A Center for Contemporary Art; Jersey City Museum; New Jersey State Museum; and Douglass College, Rutgers University. Work has been included in group exhibitions in Japan, Austria, Korea, China, Norway, Wales, Slovakia, across the United States and at the Jersey City Museum, Newark Museum, New Jersey State Museum, The Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, Montclair Art Museum, The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Everson Museum, and the 1975 Biennial Exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Lay's work is featured in a number of books including Lives and Works, Talks With Women Artists, Volume II by J. Arbeiter, B. Smith, S. Swenson.
January 2016 a survey of Pat Lay’s work from the 1970s to the present, “Myth, Memory & Android Dreams” part of Bending the Grid - an ongoing series was presented at Ajira: A Center for Contemporary Art, Newark, NJ. The exhibition was curated by Lilly Wei and a catalog of the exhibition was published. Pat Lay has been a professional artist since 1968.
A graduate of Pratt Institute and Rochester Institute of Technology, Lay is a retired Professor of Art, Montclair State University.