Busy Beaver

Abstract

Artist's Statement
Bronwen recently discovered the thrill of painting with pieces of wool, imbuing impressionistic landscapes, flora, and fauna with moments of delight found within nature’s rhythms. She believes too many of us forget joy. We run against the clock, we enact our roles, we feel helpless against a world that seems to be going wrong.

When immersed in natural space, she believes we can feel a piece of life’s puzzle slip into place. Daily aspirations and whirring stresses can settle as we shift into being an observer of the greater whole. Whether it is the smell of moss wet with new rain, the sound of woodpeckers’ insistent drumming, the sway of limp-armed cedar boughs blowing in the wind, or the bright yellow of a dandelion pushing through rocks, everything is vibrating with life, is real, is now. And even as mother nature conducts her ruthless shuffle of life and death, of reuse and regrow, there is a back-current of joy as simple as being alive that is as sure and strong as the sun that feeds it.

In her 20’s, Bronwen ran a business creating batik clothing, lampshades, pillows, and other decorative items, eventually co-owning the gallery where her work was displayed. Decades later, she played with hand-painted and block-printed textiles, as well as loose-stitched and layered fabric collages. She has been creating felted pictures since 2018.

Using a mixture of both wet-felting and needle-felting techniques, her wool paintings are hand stitched onto fabric-covered canvas art frames, in order to enhance the three-dimensional and tactile element of the work.
Bronwen has shown her felt paintings in the group show “Fibre-Optics: Inspiration to Creation,” Northern Fibre Arts Guild show at Arts Underground gallery in Whitehorse May 2019, and in a solo show “The Nature of Joy” in the Edge Gallery of Arts Underground in August 2021 (https://www.artsunderground.ca/exhibitions/the-nature-of-joy).