Artist Statement

My works reflect my love of exploring materials, the rapture I experience in nature, and my disdain for rigorous structure in the techniques I employ.  I construct surfaces or forms that reflect and emulate the beauty and mystery of nature and natural phenomena, akin to the idea of biomimicry. I love nature’s precise order which combines with its captivating dishevelment (think tangled vines or water rushing over jagged rocks). Observations of this energy and freedom direct my creative process. The surfaces of my works become an expanse of texture that can suggest any number of patterns and formations on the land.  In my process, I combine repetitive and regular techniques such as wrapping or tying knots with the serendipity of folding, crumpling and compressing materials, improvising the process until I find a form I like.

Artist Bio

Building on over 30 years of experience in diverse artistic endeavors, including fiber artist, fashion artist and public art design team member, Judy Bales creates art that is the exciting and improbable marriage of cold industrial materials and the sensuous qualities of nature.  She utilizes industrial materials, many of which are found, recycled, or salvaged, in an ongoing effort to reveal beauty in unlikely places.

The broad range of 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. 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. By manipulating materials in ways and for contexts for which they were never intended, she embraces creative transformation and a form of subversion that’s alluring and nourishing to the imagination.

Bales, who 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.