JUDY BALES
ICON front window installation
RECURRENCES, recycled plastics, mixed media, 2014
Photo: David Fleming
Photo: David Fleming
Photo: David Fleming
Photo: David Fleming
Photo: David Fleming
STATEMENT
Judy Bales is a multi-disciplinary artist who focuses on sculpture for the body, or “artwear,” mixed-media installation, and public art. In her work, she utilizes found, recycled, and/or repurposed materials in an ongoing effort to reveal beauty in unlikely places and stretch (sometimes literally) conventional notions of what constitutes art. Her installations - stunning, abstract tableaus composed of forms that are by turns jagged/chaotic and geometrical continue in this vein. With various combinations of fiber, metal, wood, and other materials, she takes seemingly intractable disparities between the visual and the tactile, between the industrial and the aesthetic, and reconciles them in favor of beauty.“Many artists utilize non-traditional materials, but for me it’s critical to transcend the material per se and the novelty of using it in an odd way, to create something that’s striking, something that makes the audiencere imagine beauty and actually realize that art can be created from anything. ”The broad range of Judy Bales’ work is clearly unified by a sensibility that asserts the power of an artist to create beauty from anything, and convey that simple but vital truth to an audience. By manipulating materials in ways and for contexts for which they were never intended, whether mangling the precise configuration of a plastic grid or turning a demure thrift shop dress into a cotton-and-steel amalgamation, she embraces creative transformation and a form of subversion that’s never less than alluring and whimsical, and always nourishing to the imagination.
BIO
Judy Bales has distinguished herself through multiple commissions garnered in the very different world of public art, specifically the sculptural and design elements she has contributed to trail and highway bridges in Iowa and Arizona. In numerous projects—such as her relief designs of local flora integrated into the piers and columns of the 35th Avenue and Salt River Bridge in Phoenix—she has worked with engineers, architects, and public art commissions to, again, conjure beauty from functional objects. Bales received both her BFA and MFA degrees from the University of Georgia, majored in painting as an undergraduate and completed her post-graduate work in fiber art. This combination of very distinct even unlike disciplines has served her well and helps to explain her unique work. While closer to a fiber artist in her choice of materials, she approaches her art more like an abstract painter, relying on improvisation and painterly techniques rather than the more precise, controlled approach traditionally favored by fiber artists.
Judy Bales has distinguished herself through multiple commissions garnered in the very different world of public art, specifically the sculptural and design elements she has contributed to trail and highway bridges in Iowa and Arizona. In numerous projects—such as her relief designs of local flora integrated into the piers and columns of the 35th Avenue and Salt River Bridge in Phoenix—she has worked with engineers, architects, and public art commissions to, again, conjure beauty from functional objects. Bales received both her BFA and MFA degrees from the University of Georgia, majored in painting as an undergraduate and completed her post-graduate work in fiber art. This combination of very distinct even unlike disciplines has served her well and helps to explain her unique work. While closer to a fiber artist in her choice of materials, she approaches her art more like an abstract painter, relying on improvisation and painterly techniques rather than the more precise, controlled approach traditionally favored by fiber artists.
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