Nicole Banowetz is a Denver sculptor who makes sewn inflatable sculptures and delicate assembled forms. Her artwork addresses vulnerability and struggle. She empowers objects through embellishment, building up protective layers, which with time become destructive. Her forms move freely between growth and decay blurring the distinction between decoration and disease. Nicole’s work is inspired by the natural world. She addresses human qualities while using the imagery she finds in the animal, plant, mineral, and bacterial worlds. She has made made installations inspired by bacteria, parasitic fungus, viruses, radiolaria, rotifers, horses, and rhinos. All these forms she recreates in soft inflatable sculptures, which she designs and sews on her sewing machine, sometimes adding illumination from within so that the forms glow at night, and other times adding delicate sculpted porcelain forms which balance within or on top of the inflatable.
This video and related exhibition, Blow Up II: Contemporary Inflatable Sculpture, are supported by a grant from the Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs.
Blow Up II is curated by Carrie Lederer and organized by the Bedford Gallery at the Lesher Center for the Arts. On view at the Dennos Museum Center through May 16, 2021.
Written instructions are available at www.dennosmuseum.org/art/now-...