Artist Member
An Exercise in Vulnerability, 2023
Twisted, 2020
The 50 Card Project, 2017
Melanie Mowinski
www.melaniemowinski.com
Instagram @melaniemowinski
BIO
Melanie Mowinski likes paper: but she also loves what goes ON paper. Paper becomes a vessel on which she prints, collages, draws, constructs, and more. She draws inspiration from the landscape of her Berkshire Hills home and residencies/travels to places like Iceland, Morocco, Tasmania, Venice, and most recently, from along the Camino de Santiago in Spain. Her daily creative practice began over 20 years ago as a Peace Corps Volunteer. What began as a way to document the “toughest job she would ever love,” evolved into one of her most important artistic practices. This practice formed the foundation of “Collage Your Life”, published by Storey Publishing in 2022.
Her letterpress prints and artist books are in numerous collections, including Williams College, Yale University, Colorado College, Denison University Library, Lafayette College, The Newark Museum, Baylor University, The University of Iowa, Bainbridge Island Museum of Art, Ohio University, The Free Library of Philadelphia, The Ruth Hughes Collection at Oberlin College, Tate Modern Museum of Art in London, Simon Fraser University, Cornell University, UCLA, USC, Emory University, Lafayette College, Library of Congress, Smithsonian American Art & Portrait Gallery Library and University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
She’s taught workshops at Wells Book Arts Center, Williams College, Snow Farm, and other art centers around the world. She holds master degrees from Yale University and The University of the Arts. Mowinski is a Professor of Art at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts (MCLA) in North Adams, MA and is the founder and director of PRESS: Letterpress as a Public Art Project.
ARTIST’S STATEMENT
Observing the hidden natural world grounds my work. I look for patterns, textures and tiny stories in my surroundings. My work asks the viewer to slow down and be present to the details, with a narrative that reveals itself slowly, sometimes through text and images, other times only with color, pattern, image and book structure. My color palette ranges from bright, vibrant oranges and reds, to subdued earth tones, depending on concept. Documenting, recording, cataloguing my interactions with others and my surroundings links different sections of my work together conceptually, as I uncover what I discover walking out-of-doors.
I constantly ask myself, what is wilderness, what is wildness? Can I find it equally in a city street as a forested landscape? How can I draw attention to the fragility of the earth, and call myself and other to action towards protecting wilderness and wildness places within and without.
Walking and wandering grounds my practice as an artist. My work is about trusting the way and understanding the many paths to get to the same destination literally and figuratively. Some are direct others are tranquil. Some avoid obstacles. Some keep one’s moral compass in mind. And others are just variety and keep your mind alert for new things. I define this as cultivating a wilderness state of mind. WILDERNESS MINDSET means accepting that wilderness is about being present to the unpredictability of life, the knowledge that while we think we are on a safe path walking in the New England forest, a black bear could appear out of nowhere. Or your trust in your reality can be jolted when a person decked out in 17th century finery emerges from around a corner during Carnevale in Venice.