LOCAL>> Artists' Exchange

Join us this Wednesday, 10/20, for the Artists’ Exchange at our new time: 6:00 pm

Pamela Blotner’s guests for this event are Renee Owen and Teddy Milder.

Zoom with us after your work day for a discussion about art and process and discover opportunities for artists too. Zoom link will be posted on the GRO website on the day of the event. See you there!

Renée Owen‘s sculptural art combines found objects and organic materials with fabric, paper, natural dye, and thread. The tactile assemblages embody a wabi sabi aesthetic, highlighting the beauty of reuse and the rustic simplicity of imperfection. A nuanced work which communicates a keen awareness of impermanence, her art explores the fragility of the natural world, our daily lives and our connections with one another.

Without room for a home studio, Renée’s studio practice involves frequent travel to cabins in the wild for week-long solo art making retreats and writing. Working in Japanese forms, her poems are featured in or inspire much of her art, and are collected in two award-winning volumes, This One Life and Alone on a Wild Coast, both available in the GRO gift shop. Renée lives and works as a psychotherapist in the North Bay. She is passionate about sustainability and the environment, and performing her poetry live to her husband’s musical accompaniment.

Teddy Milder is a mixed-media artist from Berkeley, CA who currently constructs work that integrates textile, sculptural and digital techniques. The thread of fiber has consistently wound its way along her artist journey: leaning to sew at an early age; weaving as a young woman; stitching digital composited prints into metal quilts; using surface design on paper and fabric; and creating fiber sculpture and making paper in recent years.  Her curiosity and drive to tackle challenges frees her to employ disparate hard and soft materials. Using their fragility and strength along with stitch, she explores our world’s paradoxes, social injustices, shifting boundaries and spaces in between.

This past year she has made work that reflects what living in California in the time of covid along with the threat and reality of fire in an area devastated by drought. It has brought home the reality of our threatened environment, and that global natural disaster is already underway.

Teddy has had an art practice and has been a dancer throughout her adult life. She retired early from a career as a nurse practitioner and public health policy researcher to be able to focus on her art full time. She has studied art at various bay area colleges, taken workshops and served as an assistant instructor in fiber sculpture at the College of Marin. Teddy serves on the Executive Board of the Surface Design Association (SDA) and is the digital production manager for the SDA quarterly publication. She has exhibited extensively at SF bay area, national, and international venues and her work has won awards and is in private collections. She occasionally offers workshops on “Printing on Alternative Surfaces”, “Photoshop for Artists” and “Hand Paper-Making.” Prior to covid, Teddy studied flamenco dance for 10 years.