About
Tricia Waddell is the textile artist behind Studio Blkbird, based in Denver, Colorado at Tank Studios. Inspired by her degree in fashion design from the Fashion Institute of Technology and a variety of surface design workshops, her work combines painting and screen-printing with procion dyes and resists to create visual textures inspired by abstract art, ceramics, and graphic design. Her current body of work focuses on soft sculptures exploring mental health issues, that incorporate mixed-media, fiber elements, and sound.
Recent exhibitions include We Will Be Strange solo show at Understudy, The Moon in Her Mouth residency show at PlatteForum, and InFORMed Space: Perspectives in Sculpture group show at the Arvada Center. For upcoming shows, check out exhibitions, She’s a member of the Tilt West board, Surface Design Association, and an artist member of the Colorado Art Therapy Association. When she’s not in the studio, she works as an editor, writer, and storyteller creating content for artists, makers, and non-profits.
Artist Statement
I create soft sculptures and art works that are self-portraits and expressions of everything I keep hidden.
I am obsessed with a visceral combination of dye, cloth, and texture. I use these elements to make forms that collectively hold memories and tell stories with deep emotional resonance. My work examines raw internalized emotions, from negative self-talk and repressed feelings to loneliness and grief and makes them tangible. My combination of materials and form create conceptual beings that allow me and the viewer to experience radical vulnerability and empathy.
Many cultures intentionally make objects that hold protective, healing, and supernatural powers as talismans. I strive to create intimate works that embody quiet emotional power and compassion. The pieces hold complex and conflicting inner narratives and give us the rare opportunity to look at them from the outside and give ourselves grace.
Utilizing my fashion design training, each piece starts with an iterative drawing and model-making process to create an organic form that conveys a tension between seen and unseen, beauty and strangeness, self-supportiveness and precariousness. Imbued with anthropomorphic qualities, each sculpture has a slight unease and sense of movement as if it is most alive in the dark.
Taking inspiration from abstract art, graphic and fashion design, and ceramics, I paint with procion dyes on natural fabrics using a variety of surface design techniques to create texture and color with emotional resonance. I layer on elements such as embroidery, encaustic wax, nails, wire, rubber, bindings, twigs onto the surfaces of the forms. To create an immersive and psychological relationship with each piece, I often embed sound design inside the sculptures. I am interested in exploring the evocative nature of fabric objects, contrasting familiarity and pristineness with the potential for deconstruction and staining. I love the ability of plush surfaces to absorb, and extrude materials to represent internal struggle, pain, hope and connection.
Working with textiles and dye forces me to let go of control, embrace happy accidents and imperfections, get messy, work organically, and be comfortable with being uncomfortable—aspects that are equally important to me as a human being and an artist.