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Jude Stuecker, artist<\/p><\/div>\n
Jacqueline Maloney has been with Flow Gallery for 13 years, and her paintings are inspired by her recognition of how much a part of the natural world humans are. \u201cThe piece I\u2019m submitting to Inspired by Nature<\/em> shows a meadow overtaking a wooden structure built by human hands,\u201d she says. \u201cI sat in that field for most days of a January a few years ago because I wanted to understand the adaptive, opportunistic way that plants integrate habitat and to observe the slow return of architecture to the soil. I pray that humans re-orient to the way everything that ever passes through our hands or our lives will continue to live and change forms long after us.\u201d<\/p>\n Nature invited Joe Bruneau to become an artist. \u201cIt is because of nature that I fell in love with basket weaving,\u201d he says. \u201cI find much joy in harvesting vines, roots and sticks to create the frames for each basket.\u201d His work has been exhibited by Flow Gallery since 2022.<\/p>\n Lauren Rutten calls her relationship with the natural world one of the most important influences on her creative work for the last 40 years. \u201cAt the heart of my practice is a meditation on impermanence and the deep interconnection between body, spirit and land, and the vulnerability that runs through them all,\u201d she says. \u201cThe work I\u2019ll be exhibiting at Flow comes out of recent experimentation with new mediums and ways of combining digital and hand-drawn processes. I\u2019m primarily known for my photography, but I love having the opportunity to share other directions I\u2019m exploring creatively\u2014something the gallery\u2019s thematic shows really encourage.\u201d<\/p>\n Flow Gallery was begun in 2010 by eight local women, all artists or makers in need of a retail outlet. The gallery now features the work of 70 Western North Carolina artists with roughly two-thirds of them Madison County residents. The founders embrace the concept of the Slow Craft Movement, which seeks to connect the public to the beauty of handmade art and objects and the people who make them.<\/p>\n