INSIDE ART by AwA
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HEN WENDY KOWYNIA walks through the door, you immediately feel her aura. She is filled with something a little wild. She is free in a way that most people only dream of. Her wardrobe, inspired by earth colors and styles lets you know this is a woman who has seen the world and brought pieces of the outside home to her soul. Aside from fashionista, Wendy is also a weaver. “What I love most about weaving is that it is an ancient technology—one of our first as a species—which allowed us to manipulate fibers into material objects that provided warmth, structure, and adornment,” said Wendy. The simplest of weaving technologies, including the backstrap loom are still in use today and create finer, stronger textiles than any machine-driven loom. According to Wendy, a loom is as easy and intuitive to understand as modern-day keypads and iPhones. Hands and minds know what to do without much instruction. For her, that is a hallmark of successful technology: ease of use. Wendy utilizes another ancient technique, meditation, every morning. “I cannot face a day without first aligning myself with intention. Otherwise I find myself quite lost,” said Wendy of her morning ritual. Her weaving is an extension of her morning meditation. “Weaving is very much a practice, an act. When I weave I am taking a thread for a walk back and forth across the 8
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warp. Or perhaps I should say that the thread takes me for a walk, meandering through space and time, freeing my mind to wander.” Her works bring the water, sky and earth into new forms. “My current work is inspired by the materials themselves, exploring what they can do and looking for surprises as I manipulate them. My current inspiration is water, my favorite element. I love the color of water, the way it reflects light, its mysterious depths.” Wendy is working on two new bodies of art for her upcoming solo show, titled Following the Thread, at the Arvada Center in April of 2023. The Arvada Center, located in Arvada, Colorado, is focused solely on supporting and developing Colorado artists and are the only cultural non-profit in the state to do so. Their programming includes educational opportunities, exhibits, performances and more. The first body of work is a series of folded forms with a warp, the longitudinal yarns held steady by the frame or loom, dyed in natural indigo and then painted in shades of pink. “In this series I am thinking about that time of day when the sky is pink and blue. I have long wanted to do a series in pink and blue. They are an iconic pair of colors. Is there anything quite like bubble gum pink and baby blue? Why are baby girls dressed in pink and boys in baby blue? Just because?” Art with Altitude
Making Sense of the World
with Weaver Wendy Kowynia
Art with Altitude
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The second body of work continues an ongoing collaboration between Wendy and master indigo dyer Rowland Ricketts, professor at Indiana University’s Eskenazi School of Art, Architecture and Design. Rowland is trained in the Japanese tradition of indigo dying. His sustainable practice includes the growing of indigo, harvesting and composting. He has dyed yards and yards and yards of silk yarn, for Wendy, in a gradation of light to dark and back to light again, which she will be weaving into 4 270" long panels that will be suspended like waves. Wendy admits Steamboat Springs seems like a strange place to launch her career in the arts, expecially as an artist working in a less traditional medium than nature photography or painting. New York would likely be a better fit. “I have to laugh because as a young artist I was constantly being told that if you wanted to be an artist you had to live in New York City. This was the advice of all those very well-meaning East Coasters I met while attending college in Massachusetts. Well, I hated everything about New York City and could not imagine living there. I yearned for the mountains. Quiet. Beauty. A place where I could hear myself think, and hear nature think. Random things like dark and starry skies and snowflakes were hugely important to me then. They still are.” Here she is on the other end of that decision to lead an artist’s life in the state of Colorado. “I was part of the first wave of artists to populate studio space in downtown Denver. The art scene was about as big as a postage stamp. My car got broken into regularly, and if I left a window open the dust and grit went everywhere. Sounds
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romantic, doesn’t it? But gosh look where we’ve come as artists in Colorado. Thanks to visionaries like retired head of Colorado Creative Industries Margaret Hunt, I live in a state with a burgeoning creative sector. Thanks to Michael Burnett of Space Gallery in Denver, I get to show my work with the finest contemporary art and rub shoulders with artists from all over the country. Thanks to visionaries like Kim Keith of Steamboat Creates, and Dagny McKinley and Barb King of Art with Altitude, I live in a community that values and supports the arts as an economic driver and understands the importance of the arts’ ability to keep Steamboat Springs vital, alive, and real. Thanks to people like Collin Parsons of the Arvada Center, I get recognized as a life-long contributor to the arts scene in Colorado. How could NYC ever compare to the richness of that?” Wendy’s passion for the arts, and for life, is balanced in the act of creating. There are times for up and times for down, times for living and time for reflecting. “I think the whole reason I do the work of weaving is in search of calm and awakening. I have an inherently anxious and fraught state of mind. I use the slow methodical practice of weaving to center myself and make sense of the world. That has always been terribly important to me as a person, as an artist; to make sense of the world. I’m still trying.” ELEVATE THE ARTS: Visit wendykowynia.com to see her work and find out when her next exhibits will be at W Gallery in Steamboat Springs and Space Gallery in Denver. Buy a piece of art that is unlike anything else you own. AwA
Art with Altitude
CREATIVE INSPIRATION by Wendy Kowynia
I WAS REMINDED of the following creative inspiration while on a walk with my good friend, Charlotte, the other day. Take a walk. See three things. Smell three things. Touch three things. This will bring you out of your mind and into the world. It will awaken you to all kinds of possibilities. This is the creative mindset: awakening to possibilities. WK
Art with Altitude
Page 8: Studio shot showing wave form work in progress. Page 9: Surge Series 2022.13. Woven silk, paper, natural indigo and fiber reactive dye. The Surge series explores the way waves break upon the shore and their rhythms. Page 10: Alar 2020.23. Woven silk, paper, natural indigo dye, watercolor pigment. Alar is a form sculpted from one continuous length of textile. Page 11: Indigo warp being painted with watercolor pigment.
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