ELISE WIGLE
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I am a painter and installation artist with a BFA from Saint Vincent College and an MFA from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA.
I am a United States combat veteran and featured member of the United States Veterans Artist Alliance.
I have received fellowships from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the Jentel Foundation and have lectured about the intersection of Art, War and The Body.
Recently, I completed an Idea Furnace Residency at the Pittsburgh Center for Glass, a teaching workshop at the Mattress Factory Museum, conducted scent workshops using art and olfaction, and was the Fort Ligonier Musuem's first artist-in-residence where I absorbed the history of the battlefield as a way to enter into a conversation with narrative, history, nature and interpretation in installation and sculpture.
I live in rural Pennsylvania where I work as a studio artist, professor of art, and herbalist.
Artist Statement
My art is about the extremes of the human body: its relationship to death, the earth, its vulnerability and its resilience.
I am concerned with depicting human survival and the generational transference of collective cultural memories that are passed on and remain in our DNA.
Ritual figures heavily. Storytelling, to ourselves, to each other, from our ancestors, is at times, is all we have. The stories I want to tell are part past, part future; part mine and part other.
Work Statement
TITLE: OXYGENRICH
MATERIALS:
canoe skeleton, ashes, gauze, wax, salt, electircal insulators, turtle shell, deer bone, engagement ring, his clothes, pulley, wool, cow hide, compass, scent, fishing rope, logging rope
This piece is my way of dealing with emotion/water: senses of safety, heart break, grounding, electricity, the vibration of everything, animal and psychic protection, LOSS, thirst, direction, fate.
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What connects us all through the bellybutton of the world, the convex lens, kaliedoscope, tunnel, mirror, reflection. Ritual.
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Recovery of parts of self otherwise unknown...as I was cutting clothes, I imagined the way to skin an animal; up the center, along the shoulder and leg seams...seems all is undone but can still be mended, the fabric of reality, the veil between worlds, the web from which everything comes. Just since time immorial when we choose when we need the sword and when we need the harp; here the warrior holds the scissors the healer holds the thread.