GAS Featured Artist: Dawn Nelson Wardrope by Sylvia Van Nooten

Dawn Nelson Wardrope’s art is amazing and original.  She celebrates absurdity with beautiful Dada collages, each one a short story or poem unto itself.  She never ceases to surprise me with her imagination and talent.  Hers are the types of images that hint at a person with one foot in this world and the other in worlds most of us cannot access.  For this reason I am always delighted to see her new work.  She reminds me that life is not a concrete depiction or shared reality, but a process of discovery and invention. 

                                         ~ Sylvia Van Nooten 

The artist in her own words:

Making art makes me happy. I do it for myself but if someone else enjoys it then that is a wonderful thing. I had my two children very young and I focused all of my energies into them. I loved being a young mum and now they are fully grown, loving and kind. 

So for the past five years I have been enjoying experimenting with collage, digital art and concrete poetry. I am interested in looking deeply into myself and finding out who I fully am, what I love and what I find beautiful and why I think such and such is beautiful. I find this exploration of myself fascinating. I feel privileged to see beauty the way I do and to feel things the way I feel them. I can take great pleasure in a small scrap of paper, finding it quite beautiful and that interests me.

I find connecting with the part of myself which is fun loving and playful has helped me deal with some traumatic experiences I have had including with the educational system although I still have regular nightmares relating back to my unhappiness at school. Art, and in particular Dada art, has helped me make peace with my dyslexia and dyscalculia. I have managed to connect with this essential art movement and all it’s ridiculousness and it has opened a door for me and people like me to be a channel of creativity. My brother Stephen Nelson who is a brilliant writer has played a vital role in my life. He introduced me to these alternative art forms and I would be nowhere without him. I am forever grateful to him. My dad also encouraged me greatly and I think he would have been very happy at how things have played out in my life. I am not an intellectual, I am a seer and I feel everything deeply. I believe we all have creative gifts and I love when humans thrive and develop these gifts. Which leads me on to the next question...

When you are an artist it’s basically full disclosure. What you create is who you are on the inside, your secret self so to speak. So you are communicating with the world and you feel vulnerable. The world might not want to communicate back. But as I said I mainly do my art for myself. I enjoy revisiting and exploring my inner child. I had a very lovely childhood with the most attentive parents imaginable. I was a dreamer, a deep thinker, a romantic but going through the educational system was traumatic and a very negative experience for me and did indeed crush my spirit and affected the whole course of my life. I got married and had my children very young and from a place of woundedness but through absolute adoration and devotion to my beautiful children,  Samuel and Suzannah, years do speak and I am happy and content at how life has helped me heal and grow. It’s been a very eventful and interesting journey for me. So I guess art has indeed helped me communicate back to life and with the world. It has softened the blow and enabled me to shine a little, maybe...

I was introduced to Facebook by my brother and my mum. I joined a lot of groups and through time developed many fine friends. I respect and love a lot of them and I must name a few, Maralena Howard from the USA, Kimm Kirriako from Canada, Nicola Winborn from England, Sabine Remy from Germany, Cal Wenby from England and there are many more. I have been inspired and encouraged greatly by these artists and I am thankful for their friendship. My life is richer because of them. There is one woman who I feel a special affinity with in fact I think everyone loves and looks up to her. Her name is Laurence Gillot~Ecrivain. She has given me the confidence to be myself and has shown me that I am not alone in the things I love. She is from France and I would love to meet her. There are some people in the world who are not afraid to be tender and sweet. They are poetic and are willing to dream and to participate in such and such things...

Bio: 

Dawn is a dada/collage artist and a concrete poet. Dawn hopes her work is touching to the beholder, fun loving and cheerful. She is the author of Fisherwoman, The Penman, a Serious Writer, and Remnants of the Red Ribbon Sect. She has been published in many magazines including: Otoliths, Utsanga, Angry Old Man, Marsh Flower Gallery, Experiment ~O, Timeglasset 6, Renagade, Sonic Boom (cover artist also), and Ragged Lion Press. Dawn posts regularly on Instagram and Facebook.