Artist and designer Woodie Anderson employs printmaking, drawing, sculpture and written language to explore the areas where identity, personal history and society intersect. While studying fine art and graphic design in college, she began experimenting with the tensions between fine art and commercial applications of visual language–areas she continues to explore in much of her work through the use of text, info-graphics and other collected graphic materials. Often starting with well-worn household fabrics, she employs a variety of processes including stitching, dyeing, screen-printing and drawing to build layered, textural pieces that are full of life. Letterforms and texts–including original and appropriated writings–are integral to much of her work.
Her current series, “Tooth and Nail,” is formally inspired by banners and pennants dating from the Middle Ages, while its content centers on identity, self-protection, and self-projection. Found images of unidentified women and the accouterments of battle are also an inspiration for this in-progress series.
Anderson lives and works in North Carolina, where she also teaches printmaking at the Sawtooth School and participates in the Art-o-mat® (Clark Whittington’s vintage cigarette vending machines repurposed to dispense original artworks). Anderson’s work is featured in The Art-o-mat® “Unpacked” Book and in “Art Quilts at Play” by Jane Davila and Elin Waterston. She a member of Artworks Gallery, the longest running cooperative gallery in Winston- Salem, and has exhibited at regional and national venues including the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, SECCA and The Turchin Center for the Visual Arts at ASU.