Abigail Vaughn
Abigail Vaughan is an artist now living in Portland, OR. She works in painting, drawing and sculpture. She is always experimenting with new techniques and mediums. Sometimes there might even be a little bit of performance thrown in for good measure. Her work is often colorful, vibrant and often explores color and our relationship with color. Most recently Abigail learned how to crystallize objects using the mystical magical Borax. Recently returned from an artist residency with Elsewhere Studios, her current work is inspired by science and nature. Experimenting with multiple mediums and techniques and documenting the human touch in the natural world her work explores the art and design that lives and grows all around us.
Sarah Burwash
Sarah Burwash graduated from the University of British Columbia Okanagan in 2009 with a BFA in drawing and print making. During her third year studied drawing and costume design for semester abroad in Hamburg, Germany at the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences. Working in a variety of media from collage and watercolour to video and sculpture, Sarah’s work most often takes form in narrative drawings and installation. Her work is included in private and public collections and has been shown across Canada and in Europe. She has participated in residencies in British Columbia, Ontario, Nova Scotia and Colorado and is Yukon-bound next. Sarah recently had a solo exhibition at the Ross Creek Centre for the Arts and completed her first animation through The Centre for Art Tapes Media Arts Scholarship program in Halifax where she currently resides, working full time as an artist and freelance illustrator.
Working in a variety of media, my work most often takes form in narrative drawings and installation.My work is guided by my desire to give voice to dormant and disguised histories, depicting people and places from another time through open-ended narrative drawings. I draw upon my personal history, literature, old newspapers, myths and tales told first hand. More specifically I am interested in investigating the changes in gender roles and our relationships to home, landscape and tradition. I work from my research and imagination to create characters, environments and subject narratives that are lyrical yet quiet, like frozen moments from dreams or nightmares. My interest lies in how history and the contemporary moment collide, and how this might be portrayed through human interactions, social behaviour and relationships to the land, nature, family and community. My work seeks the threads that connect the past and present, weaving imagery that urges people to wander through the drawings, discovering more upon each view and unfolding questions about the foundations on which our communities are built.
Meridith Friedman
Meridith was born in Madison, Wisconsin, and raised in Honolulu, Hawaii. She received her BA from Connecticut College, and her MFA in Writing for the Stage & Screen from Northwestern University. Her plays have been developed and workshopped at The Kennedy Center, Curious Theatre Company, the NNPN National New Play Showcase, New Repertory Theatre, The Lark, The Greenhouse Theatre Center, Actor's Express, Kitchen Dog Theatre, and Chicago Dramatists. She was the NNPN Playwright-in-Residence at Curious Theatre Company for their 2010-2011 season, and is currently a 2012-2013 Dramatist Guild Fellow. She has taught playwriting and screenwriting at Northwestern University, Kenyon College, and Curious Theatre Company. She recently became the literary associate at Page 73 Productions, a home for the development of new work by early-career playwrights.
For more information, visit Meridith's website: www.meridithfriedman.com.
"Elsewhere is a magical, soul-renewing experience for an artist. It provides a safe haven, a space to explore, stretch, and renew."
Warren Mather
My work is about seeing. I use my camera as virtual clay. In my mind the process of taking a picture is like sensing and recording an event by physically pressing clay against and around it. Normal vision is a narrow binocular cone. The picture we imagine our eyes see is a production and modification of visual information processed by our brain and filtered through our individual cultural history. All seeing is subjective. We don’t see in rectangles. Clay offers a hard copy of my vision.
I have been working with clay for thirty years, and in the last five years have developed the technical means to fire photographic, video and computer drawn images in ceramic glaze. My digital images are transferred onto silk-screens and printed with ceramic underglaze onto wet clay. After bisque, a clear glaze is applied and fired.
Warren Mather, BA Anthropology, University of Wisconsin (1969). Warren is the originator of sodium carbonate spray as a substitute for salt glaze firing. Recent work is of street imagery from video stills and digital photographs fired in ceramic glaze on tile murals and plates.
Exhibitions include: "Ripple Effect, The Art of H2O, "Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA, "Art Encounters Preservation," Wentworth-Coolidge Mansion, Portsmouth, New Hampshire, "Craft meets Technology, Kentucky Museum of Art and Craft, Louisville, Kentucky (2011), "Photo Clay", Fuller craft Museum, Brockton, MA, "Earth Matters", NCECA Invitational, Philadelphia, PA, "Water Lines", Lacoste Gallery, Concord, MA (2010), "international Printmaking Symposium Exhibition,", Jingdexhen, china (09), "Urban Perspectives", Judy Ann Goldman Fine Art, Boston; Texting Print and Clay", Pewabic Pottery Detroit,Michagan (08)
His public art includes photo-clay installations for Fidelity Investments, Boston; and Cambridge Savings Bank. And in collaboration with Nancy Selvage ceramic murals for the National Park Service, Grand Canyon, Arizona: Keene State College, Keene, New Hampshire; and the State Zoo of North Carolina.
He has been an Artist in Residence at the Anderson Ranch in Snowmass, Colorado and has been an AIR in Sanbao, China; Kecskemet, Hungary; and Jurmala, Latvia. His work has been published in The Boston Globe, The Atlanta Constitution, Studio Potter, Ceramics Monthy, Soda Glazing, International Ceramic Studio, Bucher Ohne Worte, Images in Clay , Sculpture, and Low Fire.
“I reveled in the non structure of Elsewhere. I came with a plan and got it done surrounded by and within a magnificent landscape and culturally active community.”
Website: warrenmather.com
Email: warmather@aim.com
Gwen Shockey
Gwen Shockey is a visual artist currently living in New York City and working as an artist, medical illustrator and non-profit consultant.
Gwen's artwork deals with the concept of rethinking and reassembling the framework of the visually represented female body. She considers subversive desire and eroticism in relation to a history of “looking” upon the unclothed woman. She examines LGBT and female identity and the state of feminism in the 21st century through personal narrative and symbolic imagery.
Gwen received her B.A. from Connecticut College in 2010 with a degree in fine art, psychology and gender studies. She pursues studio and curatorial work as well as LGBT and women’s empowerment through art practices internationally.
For more information on Gwen Shockey's art work please visit: www.gwenshockey.com
"Thank you Elsewhere for being a truly creative, inspiring and energizing place for artists of all genres to live and work."
Lane Taplin
Lane is a fiber artist, and a community-based artist and educator whose creative practice includes a wide range of techniquest and processes such as woven sculpture, installation, ceramics, collaborative performance, mail art, weaving, and human dialogue.
As a social practitioner she teaches and facilitates art-making and community building projects that create new and unexpected connections within communities. She often facilitates this process by giving people the opportunity to tell their personal stories, whether visually or verbally, and uses mediums, such as weaving and bookmaking, to make these stories visible in new contexts. While at Elsewhere Studios Lane created “Woven Heart Spots: A Visual Collection of Memories From Paonia” by talking to over 15 residents of the town of Paonia about their memories of the town and translating their stories, photos, and writing into woven and silkscreended pieces. The Project was funded in part by the North Fork Valley Heart and Soul Project and was displayed at the Blue Sge Center For the Arts as well as the Paonia Public Library. During her residency Lane also created ceramice plates and bowls silkscreened with images of food, still growing in the ground , to be used as part of a “Mindful Eating Dinner”, facilitated by Lane. To see her work, visit Lane’s website at www.lanetaplin.com.
Margo Williams
In North America, more often than not, emphasis is placed on publication for a writer. I too am a product of this emphasis, especially considering that my MFA in writing was both costly and time consuming, and the program placed a high significance on this aspect of writing, as if writing for the sake of writing or connection with a community was somehow inferior to product. I have in the past, and admittedly still do from time to time, see publication as the benchmark of my craft. In other cultures expression or community seem to take precedence over publication. Art for art’s sake. I believe this is the correct way to approach one's craft. Not that excellence and striving for a superior "product" isn't without value. It certainly is.
The very nature of this wily beast--art--is what makes it worthwhile. For I believe all art is a peculiar combination of grunting-in-the-trenches work, of self-expression, of attention to craft, and of sheer determination to create against the odds. To birth in an environment that is often less than hospitable. I also believe that study is a part of art. I believe that a sensual appreciation of humanity, of the animals, and of the environment is also a part of art. In contradiction to both of these aspects, I also believe that art and the pursuit of art is an indefinable creation borne out of heart and soul and suffering and, dipping into hyperbole here, I believe that art is an extension of breath and soul and the gods whispering into our little mortal ears. It is a privilege and a burden, and have no idea where we humans would be without the arts. The arts define us individually and collectively, and can give rise or fall to a civilization, and our culture is invented and reinvented socially, politically, environmentally by that which is artistically conceived, invented, and reinvented. I am a tiny speck in the ever changing artistic creation, and I am happy to love it.
Margo's Bio: (In a nutshell).
Margo was conceived in a contradictory union. Her mother had a strong work ethic but a distaste for being a mother, and her father was a man was never very good at permanence. As a child she sang and danced and painted, and mostly made up stories to entertain herself. She became an avid reader and rather dissatisfied with school, dropping out the day she turned 16. A year later her mother died a rather painful and difficult death, and her father had long gone missing. (He joined the carnival and disappeared for a many years: no joke.) Margo went on the road to find herself working a long list of menial jobs, but then eventually decided she'd better return to school.
Margo then acquired a BA at an African American college, even though she is as white as any white girl can be. Reunited with her carney daddy, she went on to live through a series of awkward and difficult relationships while also acquiring an MFA in creative writing and even taking some classes at Harvard in playwriting and set design. She went belly-up broke at one point and loaded her Jack Russell Terrier and cat into a truck and back to home state of NC from Boston. Having nothing left to lose, she decided to live at the coast, worked some more crummy jobs, and then landed a relatively decent job as an English Instructor at a community college. She now teaches writing and literature at the college and she conducts workshops around the country.
Her publications include essays, interviews, reviews, poems, and fiction appearing in various publications which include: Beacon Street Review, Glimmer Train, The Southeast Review, Encore Magazine, Behind the Scenes Magazine, Frostwriting, and Prick of the Spindle Literary Magazine. Margo also has had work anthologized in a literature textbook entitled The Big Picture (2003) and has won numerous academic awards, and been a finalist for a playwriting contest, and two poetry contests. She is the recipient of an (Press 53 Open Awards) award for her poem "Caracas Morning" which was also the inspiration for a short independent film entitled "Equanimity: Caracas Morning,” from Big Bear Productions. The film has featured at several independent film festivals, premiering at Thalian Hall in NC. Her poem "Blue Robe" was also featured at the annual "Arts Poetica" an interpretive poetry festival. Her play Snake Oil made its premier at Brown Coat Theatre in 2008.
"Elsewhere lives up to its promise of transporting the artist elsewhere. It is a unique town with unique residents, and the property is charming and magical. The surrounding mesas provide for exploration both geographically and historically. I was able to gain new perspective on my work and my process, and I found the local culture fascinating and the people of Paonia colorful and friendly".
For more on Margo’s publications, education, and workshops please visit her website:
http://www.margowilliams.info or to visit her photojournal go to http://www.59outlaws.tumblr.com
Emma Senft
My work is an exploration of creative impulse, and a reflection of my curiosity for surface, texture and material. The intimate detail of this work conveys a sense of labour and personal engagement. What becomes important is how the material is transformed. The motivation for my work is often abstract, working through exploration or a recent discovery to create subtle work that invites the viewer in. Working with found materials, and my own photography, my creative process is a pursuit of my own investigative curiosity. The outcome is the result of a compulsive handling of the materials. I create work in response to the inherent beauty of the source material, and to the meditative experience of time consuming and repetitive motion.
Since 2010 my work has often explored themes of light and shadow. I am drawn to the opportunity for subtlety; to the non-permanence and shifting ambiguous beauty of shadow. The work that inspires me is often subtle, slow and elegant. It requires patience and time from the viewer, rather than coming forward and giving too much away. It is exciting that a seemingly minimal piece, upon further reflection, may reveal itself to be layered and intricate.
Emma Senft lives and works in Montreal, Canada. She earned her BFA from NSCAD University in Halifax, including a term at Glasgow School of Art in Scotland. Her practice includes a variety of media, often focusing on drawing and printmaking, sculpture and installation. Emma creates intricate works that require time and curiosity of the viewer.
I recently earned a Master in Fine Arts at WCSU with a thesis in poetry and essay from Western Connecticut State University. I worked on the manuscript, called All Things That Rise, over the last 4-5 years in spurts of research in public archives and online, wandering the abandoned and often crumbling mills by the river in Holyoke, Massachusetts, writing, outlining, re-writing, and finally writing some more and then shaping, editing a lot away.
I also hold a Masters in Public Health (Policy) from Yale University and work as the Director of Strategic Planning for the Connecticut Department of Social Services. Before this I was a graphic designer and I love the intersection of graphics and data.
I am interested in travel and minimalist living, studying Russian language and history, making artist's books, and researching the social sciences. I like architecture but don't do enough about that interest (yet). I live and work in Connecticut and Massachusetts.
Rachael Gorchov
Rachael Gorchov's current work depicts imagery of mundane American landscapes: industrial parks, the sides of highways and apartment complexes. Often referencing 18th century picturesque landscape paintings, her work creates an environment where one can stop and closely observe how this imagery, often found, represents American’s collective dreams, daily lives, pasts and presents.
Rachael received her BFA from Tyler School of Art, Temple University and her MFA from Hunter College, City University of New York. She is Full Time Faculty at The Art Institute of Pittsburgh, Online Division. She currently works and lives in New York City.
Visit www.rachaelgorchov.com for information on Rachael
Hilary Emerson Lay
Hilary works with a variety of media, from acrylic and gouache to reproduction line-drawings to socks and buttons. Her primary forms of art are her cityscapes, sock critters and portraits of animals in hats, although she has recently started playing around with the idea of modernizing vintage pin-up girl photographs in mixed media paintings. Her art is playful, colorful and friendly, much like Hilary herself.
Her goal during her time in Paonia is simply to see what adventures her artistic inclinations will take her on when given the time and space to devote all of her time to making art. Having managed an independent bookstore full-time since graduating college, Hilary has never had time to properly explore her artistic boundaries; her art has always been forced to take a back seat to her demanding "real" job. Also having never had a proper studio, and having made art on her living room floor for fifteen years, Hilary is eager to experiment with the ability to make art on a larger scale.
While at Elsewhere, Hilary is also excited to become involved in the Paonia arts scene through the Blue Sage Center for the Arts, rekindle her love of horseback riding, un-ironically wear her newly-acquired cowboy hat, and spend lots of time exploring the area.
To see more of Hilary's art, and to find out more about her, visit www.hilaryemersonlay.com. You can also follow her on Facebook at www.facebook.com/hilaryemersonlayart and find her on Etsy at http://www.etsy.com/shop/hilaryemersonlay.
Elle Bits
Hi, my name is Elle Bits and I am an artist living in Norman, Oklahoma. I work in a variety of mediums, from collage to painting, but sewing is my passion. I make stuffed monsters using faux fur, felt, safety eyes, and materials ranging from vintage ribbon and fabric scraps to bones and pieces of my grandmother’s jewelry.
I am inspired my the monsters of children’s books, cartoons, cryptozoology, myths, and folklore.
What I love most about plush art is it’s tactile quality. It’s not art meant to be looked at from afar. It is meant to be touched, examined, even played with. I like to take pieces of cloth, thread, and stuffing, and bring it to life.
More of Elle’s art can be found at these sites:
https://www.facebook.com/ellebitsart