Andi Wolfe

BIO

Andi Wolfe is a scientist and an artist. Her academic career is focused on plant evolutionary biology - primarily working on Penstemon, the largest genus endemic to North America, and parasitic plants of southern Africa. Her scientific career inspires her artistic endeavors in wood turning and sculpture with most of her designs based on botanical or biological motifs. Her work with plants also led to her interest in photography, initially because of the need to document her fieldwork, but more recently in exploring nature, landscapes, and people.The natural world offers many inspirations, especially when it is examined at high magnification.

ARTIST STATEMENT

My work has focused on the use of surface enhancements that employ botanical motifs. Some of the botanical inspirations are obvious. For example, I sometimes use a botanical print motif to illustrate various flowering stages of a particular plant, or I'll cover one of my turnings in maple or oak leaves. Other designs are less obviously botanical unless one is used to seeing plants at the microscopic level. I sometimes enhance a turning by carving a textural motif inspired from cellular structures of plants. Most recently, I have been carving botanical designs into my turnings in 3D and combining wood with glass.

Experimentation is part of my design process. I view wood as a medium for exploration and not just a material that has a pretty grain pattern. I tend to use woods that are fine grained with subtle figuring so that my botanical designs become part of the whole vessel, complementary to the wood as opposed to a distraction to the eye. My goal is to enhance the surface so that the vessel becomes a three-dimensional canvas that entices the viewer to explore all aspects of the piece.