Bio

Colleen Wampole lives and works in northern California. She earned her BA at Principia College in Illinois, and her MFA at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. Her artwork has been included in shows in Illinois, Pennsylvania, and California.

Artist Statement

The medium and subject matter changes dramatically in my portfolio, but the conceptual themes and artistic sensibility are fairly consistent.

If you dig back a whole twenty years to my preoccupation with oil paintings of still lifes, it is worth noting that those still lifes tended to feature humble, domestic items like teacups. If you think it’s a bit funny to obsessively and meticulously record the interplay of reflections on dishware, I promise you that was a significant motivating factor at the time.

If you look at the painted polyptychs, you might catch a whiff of the comic book about them. When I made them I was indeed very invested in that mode of ambiguity between traditional narrative painting and contemporary graphic novels. It’s half-joking, but all in earnest.

If you look at my MFA thesis project Toying with History, you’ll see a lot of obsessive, meticulous watercolor copies of women in the canon of art history. Is it perhaps silly to expend that effort in a format clearly derived from children’s toys like paper dolls? Yes, that was me once again mashing sublime art references with the everyday.

(You’ll only get to see my fanbinding offline, sorry. It’s another attempt to employ meticulous technique in service of something inherently whimsical. It’s also my attempt to find the extreme end of art as an extremely personal endeavor undertaken for intrinsic reasons only.)

Most recently, I tripped and fell into the fiber arts. It’s too early to say what will be The Quintessential Fiber Arts project by yours truly, but these persistent themes are already cropping up. Tradition and technique are rather important when you want a knitted sock to fit or a loom to function. Knitting patterns, weaving drafts, and loom operation certainly have intriguing connections to the history of computing technology in ways that once again link the contemporary to the historical. I can’t help but notice that I am once again drawn to an artistic process (or subject) that is easy to underestimate in the larger artistic context.

Are those the only themes? No, there’s an unsubtle feminist thread running throughout. As I get older and run low on wall space, the urge to channel my artistic output into forms that are a least somewhat useful grows. My rags become rugs. My weaving will be worn. The plants will dye. The books will be read, or at least fit on a bookshelf.

[updated October 2024]