ABOUT THE ARTISTS:

Kat Cole (Columbus, GA)

Bio: Kat Cole is an studio artist working in contemporary jewelry and sculpture in Columbus, GA.  Her work has been exhibited across Europe, Asia, and the United States and featured in numerous magazines and publications including Metalsmith Magazine and American Craft.  Cole’s work is included in a number of permanent collections including the Yale Art Museum, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, and Houston Museum of Fine Art.

 Artist Statement: The Faces Series incorporates steel, layers of vitreous enamel, and found plastic elements derived from children’s toys into complex, chaotic expressions of emotion- the ones we all keep inside. I am making these transient, fickle feelings visible - making them take form in the hard, lasting materials of glass and metal. The rich surfaces of enamel blend and compliment plastic details. What if we wore our complicated inner lives: the rage, disappointment, fear and joy on the outside?

Kyra Connolly (St. Petersburg, FL)

Bio: Kyra Connolly is a ceramic artist with a background in architecture and design based in St. Petersburg, Florida. Her work is a light-hearted exchange between functional art, domestic space, and playful sculpture, manifested in whimsical and tactile ceramic and textile objects for the home.

Nikki Couppee (Oakland, CA)

Bio: Nikki Couppee is originally from Pensacola Beach, Florida and is currently residing in the San Franscisco Bay Area. She received an M.F.A from Kent State University, Jewelry/Metals, Kent, Ohio, 2011 and a B.F.A. from the University of Georgia, Athens Georgia, Jewelry/Metals, 2007. Her work has been featured in publications including American Craft, Allure Australia, Marie Claire Australia, Metalsmith Magazine, Modern Magazine, Vogue Brazil, Dailycandy and Lark Book’s 500 Enameled Objects. She shows he work nationally and internationally through exhibitions, gallery representation, fair and recent collaboration for Paris Fashion Week with the Australian designers, Romance was Born. Her work was selected for SCHMUCK 2018 in Munich, LOOT at the Museum of Art and Design in NYC, Racine Art Museum, and SIERAAD International Jewelry Fair, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. She has taught enameling and jewelry/metals techniques at Kent State University, The Cleveland Institute of Art and The Crucible in West Oakland.

Artist Statement: Jewelry has served and continues today to serve several important functions in society. Objects of personal adornment have the ability to define a person’s social statues, serve as a redeemable investment and perform on a psychological level. The intrinsic value of the materials used in jewelry making has always been a reflection of an individual’s or family’s wealth.

In my work, I seek to create opulent jewelry that is reminiscent of royal jewelry but made using my own version of gemstones from common, non-precious materials instead of precious stones and metals. Through labor-intensive processes, Plexiglas, brass, synthetic materials, resin, and found objects are employed to create industrial counterfeits or stand-ins for gemstones and gold. Holograms and faux silver and gold foil are used underneath the stones to add luster, referencing paste diamonds and rhinestones. I hand fabricate settings to further reference the language of fine jewelry, with the intention of elevating the work. With the use of these everyday materials, I am able to exaggerate the size and abundance of gemstones parody or poke fun at the class issues inherent in fine jewelry.

Occasionally feeling homesick I make works reminiscent of the Florida beaches where I grew up. I choose materials like synthetic fishing ties, holograms, fake plastic flowers, neon glow-in-the-dark bits and plastic sugar sprinkles, all in a color palette that reflects my memories of a time and place. These floral brooches are both unapologetically sentimental and humorous, with a nod to Victoriana and tourist kitsch.

Mikhail Gubin (St. Petersburg, FL & New York, NY)

Bio: Mikhail Gubin was born in the Soviet Union in 1953. He studied at the Art and Technology College of Zagorsk, Moscow region, Russia. In 1989 Mikhail Gubin immigrated to the United State, and settled in New York. His multimedia practice includes Sculpture, Drawing, Painting, Collage, Photography, Video. Mikhail participated in 38 solo shows and over 200 group exhibitions in the United State and internationally, received multiple awards and praises, many reviews (The New York Times among many others). He has being awarded a 2014 NYFA Fellowship in the category of CRAFTS/SCULPTURE. A member of the Audubon Artists inc., the National Collage Society, and Sculpture Guild of New York.  

Artist Statement: My two-dimensional works on paper emanate from myriad geometric drawings that are cut out and carefully reassembled. Part Cubist, part Surrealist, these images are best described as “Similar to the action of our memory– from fragments we reconstruct the past.”

The sculptures are three-dimensional expansions of my two-dimensional canvases. Wooden pieces are glued together to form elaborate constructions that move between recognizable forms and abstract shapes. These sculptures charge the viewer’s imagination with innumerable possibilities. Central to my practice is the fact that the material embodies a kind of mythic power energized through its manipulation and placement. Immobile, wooden configurations take on movement and gesture and beckon viewers to a new world.

Babette Herschberger (St. Petersburg, FL)

Bio: Babette Herschberger is a painter and collage artist who has in recent years incorporated ceramics into her studio practice. Intrigued with how structures in the built environment contrast with the natural world, she works intuitively to create minimal, abstract compositions which emphasize color, form and surface. Herschberger’s works often incorporate informal and banal materials, such as found cardboard and product packaging, which she transforms through boldly colored planes and forms generating works that suggest objects, structures and landscapes. Herschberger has exhibited widely across the US and was an artist in residence at ArtCenter South Florida/Oolite Arts in Miami. In 2021 Herschberger’s work was included in Skyway and exhibited at the University of South Florida’s Museum of Contemporary Art. Her work was published in New American Paintings, edition #112, and is in the collection of Miami-Dade College’s Museum of Art + Design as well as a number of corporate collections. Herschberger completed her AS in graphic design with honors at the Art Institute of Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.

Artist Statement: My approach to working is very intuitive; usually there are no sketches to work from and little predetermined choice of color. The result is the physical consequence of a dialog between myself and the materials while I am working.

I’m particularly intrigued by the contrast of manmade objects like signs, billboards and architecture upon the natural world. These unnatural interruptions in the landscape become graphic mirrors of nature itself: street lights mimic trees; dwellings may as well be large boulders; neighborhoods and skyscrapers give rise to the elevation in a cityscape. I move through my daily life preoccupied with viewing and often photographing these juxtapositions.

The foundation of my paintings begin with a deliberate paper collage, which ultimately acts as a drawing within the completed painting. These emerging drawings initiate the conversation I have with the work, which is resolved by purposefully minimizing composition while emphasizing color and surface. My works intend to suggest structures, objects and landscapes; they are a reflection of the visual compositions that I encounter in my daily life.

The recent expansion of my studio practice into ceramics is a reflection of my interest in product design and objects. It is my intention to create mixed media pieces that incorporate all of the materials I use into a cohesive body of work.

Jib Projects (David and Kathleen Bly) (Tampa, FL)

Bio: Kathleen and David met as undergraduates, and often collaborated while pursuing BFA degrees. David went on to receive a Masters in Architecture. After a decade away, working in photography and architecture in NYC and Hawaii, they moved back to Florida and began Jib Projects to develop work that operates in the space between these disciplines. They live with their two young children in Tampa, Florida.

Artist Statement: Our work explores themes of time and place in materiality and the Florida landscape has long been a source of inspiration. We are sensitive to and fascinated by the delicate ecosystem we live in, sourcing locally salvaged woods, extracting use from discards, growing flowers for dyes, and employing living processes. Our sculptures often have a practical element, designed to break down the barrier between the viewer and the art, encouraging physical interaction. This allows our work to occupy space intimately and interactively. 

Cynthia Mason (St. Petersburg, FL)

Bio: Cynthia Mason’s (b.1975) artistic practice is based in St. Petersburg, Florida. She received her BFA from Ringling College of Art and received her MFA from the University of South Florida. In addition to a recent residency with the Jentel Artists Residency Program (2024), she has completed residencies at the Atlantic Center for the Arts (2023) and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (2023). Her work has been featured in over 50 group exhibitions around the world; recent solo exhibitions include Limp Grid at Parallelogram Gallery, Tampa (2018), and Fragile State at 621 Gallery, Tallahassee (2017). In 2019, she was a recipient of the Creative Pinellas Professional Artist Grant.

Artist Statement: Cynthia Mason is a visual artist whose soft paintings and mixed media wall constructions simultaneously evoke the beautiful and the grotesque. Viewers may feel compelled to pinch and poke them to see how they will respond. Are we drawn in because the works are alluring, or is it because they are monstrous? While the works on view vary in scale and material, they speak to the specific interests of the artist, including the use of grids, the recurrence of forms that

allude to the natural world and a fascination with experimental textures and materials. Mason’s training in architecture led to her interest in representing grids in her work. While grids are typically used to define and control space, Mason’s soft, unstructured sculptural grids allow us to question what happens when this rigid control is quite literally loosened. Mason’s wall constructions also allude to forms found in plant life: roots, stems, leaves and thorns, sometimes winkingly inviting comparisons to the human body. For example, are the “pricks” in Limp Pricks and Plants in Rising Water truly referring to thorns, or are they slyly alluding to human anatomy? Mason creates compelling textures in her works through creative combinations of materials, including such unconventional media as shredded documents, recycled bedding and fishing line, as well as more traditional artist materials of canvas, porcelain, gesso, ink, fabric and dyes. She states: “My sculptural paintings expand dimensionally, as my love for materials results in folding, rolling, attaching, and stuffing porcelain, plaster, fabrics, shredded paper, and other mediums in haphazard or makeshift methods. I love to reveal how materials repel or merge, ooze and crack, how they patina and shift to show their existence.”

Douglas Molinas-Lawrence (Knoxville, TN)

Bio: Douglas Molinas-Lawrence (b. 1988, lives and works in Knoxville, TN) is an American artist primarily focused in wood sculpture. His work draws from dual studies in both Architectural Design and Environmental Sciences, and is a continued exploration of the points of intersection between the human-made and natural worlds.  For the past few years, Douglas has been engaged in a series of sculptural bud vases, conceived as a design challenge: create wildly unique works, each within the constraint of a 6" x 6" x 2" dimension of wood.  Initially a 50-day daily challenge in only ash, the project has continued and expanded to include a great diversity of wood species.  Each piece is an exploration of lines, forms, and textures, created in dialogue with the inherent characteristics of the material.

Heidi Parkes (Milwaukee, WI)

Bio: Before Heidi Parkes was born in Chicago, IL in 1982, her grandmother organized a collaborative family quilt to commemorate her birth. This set the tone for a life centered on the handmade- raised in a home where sewing, mending, cooking, canning, woodworking, photography, ceramics, painting, and plasterwork were the norm.

Now based in Milwaukee, her quilting and mending celebrate the hand, and her works tug at memories and shared experience. Often using specific textiles, like an heirloom tablecloth, bed sheet, or cloth teabag, Heidi adds subtle meaning and material memory from the start. Ever curious, she works with a variety of quilting techniques including visible hand piecing and knots, improvisation, patchwork, and applique. Heidi pursues her passion for teaching by lecturing and leading workshops, and shares her creative process with thousands on Instagram. Heidi has exhibited in art and textile museums across the country and was an Artist in Residence at Milwaukee’s Lake Park through the ARTservancy with Gallery 224 in fall 2020-21. She is the 2024 Pfister Hotel Artist in Residence. Additionally, Heidi lives a handmade lifestyle, sewing her own clothes, fermenting, eating from pottery she made a decade ago, and practicing hand yoga, which she shares with other creatives on her YouTube channel.

Artist Statement: I make quilts that function as abstract paintings, prioritizing hand-sewing techniques to explore the themes of diary, manifesting, everyday life, and cognitive reframing. My process begins with a question, and through the act of making, insights emerge. Improvisation and staying curious drive my work.

While I maintain a home studio, I also actively engage in a mobile studio. Lightheartedly tossing a bit of cloth, thimble, needle, thread, and scissors into my purse, I can nimbly find time to sew nearly anywhere, trusting that a future version of myself will incorporate the handwork meaningfully into my next quilt.

Intermingling intuition and strategy, my Diary Quilts don’t tell a linear story, but instead are a tool for reframing the past, envisioning the future, and documenting daily minutiae. They are inner dialogue made visible. Quilting is the microcosm in which I practice new ways of being—slowing down, cultivating new habits, reducing wastefulness—goals are set, and I stitch the things that I long for, want to be, and reminisce about. This strengthens my neural pathways for caring, noticing, and loving the hard-to-love. Owning up to the truth of what I want, I study and explore concepts like the Law of Attraction, sympathetic magic, and magical thinking to cast spells into the future. Artifacts, silhouettes, text, calendars, and coded objects add potency to this magic.

I believe that a window into the hyper personal and daring to dream big within a medium designed to express comfort and love offers the viewer a space to similarly contemplate and imagine. I create beauty with a portable process that mirrors and reveals the complexities of daily life. I remain curious about what a quilt can look like, what rules the maker must follow, and what power lays waiting in this soft medium.

Janelle Young (Tampa, FL)

Bio: Janelle Young is an artist and educator currently living in Tampa, Florida. She completed her bachelor of fine art degree iphotography with minors in film studies and art history at the University of Dayton and received a master of fine art degree from the University of Georgia. She has exhibited nationally and internationally, with shows at the Georgia Museum of Art in Athens, Georgia, Rogue Space Chelsea in New York, New York, Henco Gallery in Asheville, North Carolina and the Jacksonville University Gallery in Jacksonville, Florida. She received the Society for Photographic Education Award for Innovations in Imaging in 2015, a 2013 Wilson Center Graduate Research Grant at the University of Georgia, and a 2013 Individual Art Excellence Grant from the Ohio Arts Council.

Artist Statement: My research practice engages the material and the ephemeral. Examining the natural world around me, I create experiments, running my observations through specific controls as a way to synthesize a vast and overwhelming universe. The result is a poetic engagement that affords the viewer a new sense of reflection. For this body of work, natural wool fiber is combined with stone. Through the traditional wet-felting process, fibers are organized and worked in a way that encases hand-selected rocks. Specific qualities of surface, density, color, and texture inspire dynamic conversations of material and substance. The Soft Rocks series is a study of objects that intersect the boundaries between found and fabricated, crafted and discovered.

Rebecca Zweibel (St. Petersburg, FL)

Bio: Rebecca is a creator of contemporary ceramic sculptures using her original slab built forms. Each unique piece is decorated with slip, underglaze and terra sigillata, and then fired multiple times to achieve her desired outcome. Neither form nor decoration is planned; she works instinctively and without preconception. Her work evolves organically, informed by the interplay of form and surface.