Staci Swider

Swider has been making art forever it seems and her career has gone thru many changes over the years. She distinctly remembers making furniture for her dollhouse out of recycled materials and clothing for her dolls. This love for design led Swider to study textile design in college and later a career as a fabric designer/stylist in the home furnishings industry. Eventually the corporate world gave way to motherhood and freelance design replaced boardroom presentations. It was during those years that she discovered a love for paining, initially with watercolors. Currently, Swider is painting with acrylics and layering those with oil pastels and grease pencil, throwing a little collage at it on occasion, and building small sculpture just to shake up the routine. Stay tuned, you never know where dancing along this red road is going to take her…

Artist Statement

Much of my work exists where tradition meets the personal. Painting and stitching afford me the opportunity to converse with a culture lost to me through time and distance. As I create, I’m reminded that there is a long familial tradition of women who came before me. Stitching out of necessity, warmth, and sustenance, these Slavic women were not thinking of art or galleries or showings but of practical pride in a solid fund of craft. From the whispers of my foremothers, I find the very foundations of my art.
After years of painting still lifes and non-objective subjects based on pattern, color, and texture, I began making narrative pieces with more personal meaning. I like that each individual artwork is only a brief moment that has a before, during and after.
Whether I’m working with fabric, paint, or mixed media, I tend to follow a routine: adding materials and color, subtracting, reworking, taking away, back and forth until the overall effect looks effortless, not contrived or forced. I like my pieces to feel casual and immediate, regardless of how many hours I may labor over them. I like the colors to melt together overall with dancing bits of contrasting color and texture—a raw edge meets smooth silk, soft neutrals offset with shots of cobalt or orange.