Judy Bales
Judy Bales
Judy Bales has exhibited her work in over 75 group and solo exhibitions, both national and international. She has worked in diverse artistic endeavors, including public art, fiber art, installation and avant garde fashion design. During the 2000’s she completed 10 public art projects in the Midwest and southwest and competed as a finalist in 12 major projects nationwide. Since 2010 she has been passionate about art as fashion and has participated in Omaha Fashion Week yearly since 2015 as well as in numerous other fashion events.
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 broad range of art forms. 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.
Bales is an experienced educator and frequently gives artist lectures or workshops at colleges and universities. She is the recipient of numerous grants for individual and group projects.
Watch Judy Bales Artist Talk
My art is a marriage of industrial or utilitarian materials and the sensuous forms of nature. I utilize these materials, many of which are found, recycled, or salvaged, in an ongoing effort to reveal beauty in unlikely places. The surfaces or forms constructed in my studio reflect and emulate the beauty and mystery of nature and natural phenomena, akin to the idea of biomimicry. I love nature’s precise order as well as its captivating dishevelment (think tangled vines or water rushing over jagged rocks). Observations of this energy and freedom contained within structure continually direct my creative process.
I combine precise techniques, such as wrapping wire with narrow fabric strips, with improvisational, seemingly random creation of organic forms. Working intuitively, my process involves decision making at every point. By manipulating materials in ways and for contexts for which they were never intended, such as crumpling wire fencing or mangling neatly rolled wire into organic forms, I embrace creative transformation to form objects and installations that are alluring and nourishing to the imagination.
