Cynthia O'Hern

Cynthia O'Hern is a Des Moines-based maker by trade and artist by nature. Pushing the boundaries of traditional applied usage, she found feltmaking an apt medium to integrate her craft skill with artistic expression. Her feltwork depicts the human form with pulsating musculature encased in foreboding, mottled flesh to allude to the body as vehicle for temporal human experience. Her feltwork has been shown at juried exhibits throughout the country, as a solo installation at OL Guild Space and won Best of Show at Women’s Work 2021 (Indianapolis, IN), Octagonal 2020 (Ames, IA) and Iowa Exhibited XXXIV 2019 (Des Moines, IA) with Honorable Mentions at Material: Hard + Soft 2021 (Denton, TX) and Des Moines Exhibited XXVII 2021 (Des Moines, IA) . She travels the Midwest vending hand-made garments, jewelry and toiletries at her pop-up shop, The Compost Pile. She earned a BFA in the History of Art and Design from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY.

Statement:

“I am enthralled with the human body as our vehicle for experiential existence. I seek to honor the flesh, muscle, and bone that provides us with the sensations of life and that is fated to decay. The seemingly mundane poses of life, a body engaged in work or contemplation, are enlivened with a heightened anatomy. I bring a reverence to these quiet moments that compose a being's physical existence. Concurrently through mottling of flesh, I also bring an awareness to the mortality of the figure. It is the anxious beauty of impermanence that permeates my felted figures.

We are fibrous beings; our bodies are covered in hair. Not only do I find this to be an apt reason to use woolen hair as my medium for figuration, I find that it provides an incomparable feeling of intimacy or closeness towards the material. It is of us. This intimate relationship of our bodies to fiber to cloth helps draw the viewer into the warmth of my feltworks despite their macabre appearance.

My work begins and ends with the flesh; the need to find its expression, the production of the expression through the friction of my flesh to the fibers, and the utilization of the expressive woolen cloth to caress the physical flesh. My feltworks are the experience of the flesh materialized..” -Cynthia O’Hern