Terri Warpinski

Biography

Terri Warpinski explores the complex relationship between personal, cultural and natural histories through her photographically based mixed media creative practice. Over the last four decades her various projects have taken her throughout the American West and Mexico, Australia, Western and Central Europe, the Middle East and Iceland. Helen A. Harrison of The New York Times once wrote that: “(her work) is especially attuned to the often-subtle evidence of human impact on nature… (and) invite(s) speculation about the secrets that may be revealed by close scrutiny and creative speculation.” Her extensive exhibition record includes the Pingyao International Festival of Photography in China; the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem; Houston International Fotofest; the Center for Photography in Woodstock, New York; the University of the Arts in Philadelphia; and Camerawork in San Francisco. She was awarded a DAAD (Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst) Research Fellowship to Berlin for her project Death|s|trip in 2017.Warpinski was distinguished as a Fulbright Senior Fellow to Israel in 2000-2001 and as Professor Emerita of Art in 2016 after a 32-year teaching & administrative career at the University of Oregon in Eugene. Terri was born in Door County, spent her school years in the Green Bay area, after graduate school in Iowa she lived and worked for most of her career in Oregon, and relocated back to Wisconsin in 2018.

Artist Statement

The Land/Trust series draws Warpinski back to the landscape of her home ground radiating out from her birthplace in Door County into a range of environments that constitute Northeastern Wisconsin.  This project delves into the histories and futures of our fragile ecosystem through an examination of land preserves (such as those of the Door County and the Northeast Wisconsin Land Trust), sanctuaries and other locales that are undergoing a process of re-wilding. In re/Turn: negative state (Heins Creek), a mixed media installation, the piece pivots on the photographic negative image unfurling like wallpaper. As with the history of photographic processes, the ‘negative’ is the primary state, the direct imprint or reflection of light -- in a sense, the purest state of the photographic subject and the template for developing the image into its positive form. The locations that are the subject of Land/Trust are all in a state of recovery, on a course of correction after generations of our collective colonialist attitude of consumption and overuse that threw the natural ecosystems into precarious imbalance.