American sculptor and printmaker Joan Winter received her MFA from Southern Methodist University, Meadows School of Arts in 1993. She previously worked in the field of space planning and design for several major architectural firms in Texas and Louisiana. Winter now lives and works in Dallas, Texas.
Winter's work is influenced by contemporary Japanese architecture, especially spaces emphasizing light and transparency as primary elements. Areas of investigation include ideas of light as the inner source of form and concepts of time relative to memory, physical changes and movement in space. Her subtle reductive use of materials, including light natural woods, translucent cast resin, and handmade paper, reveals forms of physical lightness and ethereal presence.
“Art, for me, is still and silent, both physical and emotional, and lives by companionship and contemplation. Uniting all of my work is the desire to reveal the essential and timeless nature of form. I am searching for ethereal qualities concealed between the layers of the visible and invisible, between light and shadow.” ……Joan Winter
STATEMENT: Printmaking
Winter’s recent etchings investigate the relationship of space, time and movement. She says, “The etchings are made with a very direct process. They are about touch and feeling of fragile connections.” Her interest in “time” is both in terms of the changes in nature, variations of light and shadow during the day, one season to the next and also in terms of perception of memory.
Surprise elements and intuitive chances are fascinating to Winter as she develops the initial copper plates. In contrast to the three-dimensional work, she is drawn to the spontaneity and playfulness of the process. She frequently uses wood as surface texture in the etching process.
Winter collaborates with master printer, Katherine Brimberry, at Flatbed Press in Austin, Texas to make her prints. Flatbed Press is a well-known fine art press, printing and publishing editions for many nationally and internationally known artists.
One of Winter’s prints, Silence XI, was included in the International Print Center New York show of New Prints/2005: Etchings. A critical essay by the art critic Alexandra Anderson-Spivy accompanied this exhibition.
Joan W. Winter CV
