Spotlight on ~ Bobbi Clackson-Walker

“I feel it a personal challenge as an artist to see and express things in an original way.”

I have been a full-time art-maker for the past 15 years and an art educator for the past 7 years. In reality, art-making and a desire to share those experiences with others has been a constant for most of my life. My art-making history has involved expressing visual ideas in a variety of mediums and processes, most notably: drawing, quilt-making, painting, collage, mono-printing, and paper sculpture. I consider myself a life-long learner and thrill at discovering new processes that I can incorporate into my art-making,

Fence line exploration: Ink on repurposed paper

Like all artists, my work has evolved through time. Where I once was concerned with replicating what I saw in painterly perfection, I am now engrossed with mixed media applications to plexi-glass assemblages, and in utilizing visual elements of line, shape, form and colour in 2-dimensional explorations of the prairie landscape.

My drive to create is sparked in imagining visual outcomes born through observation, word play, and physical objects. I self-describe as a mixed media artist as that descriptor allows me to move the process and the media to suit the material exploration of an idea. As I like to work through ideas in a series of pieces, the mixed media label seemed an appropriate way to let followers of my work know that today you may see an idea expressed in paint, and tomorrow you may see that same idea expressed in paper sculpture. I think at times the mixed media moniker is simply a polite way of stating that I tend toward the behavioural instincts of a pack rat. I am hesitant to discard anything, particularly paper, as I am constantly imagining ways of repurposing objects for an artistic purpose.

I am a prairie girl, born and raised, and there is much of the resilience and resourcefulness of the prairie sensibility that informs my work. I believe that stated “prairieness” is at the root of why I create in the first place, and I feel it a personal challenge as an artist to see and express things in an original way.