Bio

Danielle Nilsen is an artist living and working in St. Louis, Missouri. She is also an elementary art teacher and mother to two little girls. She creates vibrant collages, fiber pieces, and paintings. Danielle works with found materials such as secondhand fabric and magazines to create collage compositions and “sewn paintings” that reference quilt patterns, other textiles, abstract painting, and the landscape (she began her art career painting landscapes, roadscapes, and aerials). She also makes paintings that feature the colorful, playful, memory-laden textiles in her life, especially those associated with new motherhood and childhood. Much of her current work explores the themes of identity, lineage, legacy, femininity, and the domestic while also addressing formal concerns such as color, shape, pattern, and composition.

Statement

In the early days of the pandemic, I found myself teaching from home, caring for a toddler, pregnant, exhausted, and worried about the state of the world. Needing a creative outlet to look forward to and to give some structure to my days, I turned to collage for its accessibility, immediacy, and kid-friendliness. It developed into a highly satisfying daily practice. I found satisfaction in color combinations and solving compositional puzzles, and in the quick, tactile, physicality collage requires--but I also discovered the hope and repair that accompanies creating something new from scraps. What is more grounding than joining one piece to another to another to another, watching a new object grow in front of you? What is more meaningful than working with your hands? Taking disparate parts and forming a new whole? In a life that can feel fragmented, full of competing identities, desires, and responsibilities, it feels so good to create order and cohesion (even if it is illusory). In my collages, I cut out shapes of color and pattern from “women’s” home/fashion magazines and arrange them improvisationally to create compositions that evoke a similarity to textiles, a sense of imaginary place, or at times, a fractured allusion to portraiture. I love the freedom from expectation that this process provides. I am interested first and foremost in the formal possibilities of color, pattern, and composition that are discovered through an active process of making: collecting, cutting, sorting, arranging and rearranging, trimming, overlapping, joining, gluing, and so on. As color and pattern accumulate, I examine the connections between part and whole, past and present, fragmentation and repair, simplicity and complexity, randomness and control. Secondarily, I consider the socio-historical associations of working with textiles and textile- inspired processes, as well as the ecological implications of working with found/reclaimed materials.