Gina Siepel

Gina Siepel (she/they) is an interdisciplinary artist, designer, and woodworker. Their artistic practice reflects an engagement with place, history, queer experience, and ecology, and their work integrates conceptual concerns and craftsmanship with a focus on wood as a natural and a cultural material. Gina’s works have been shown in museums and galleries nationally, including the Museum for Art in Wood, the Colby Museum, the DeCordova Museum, Vox Populi Gallery, the Center for Maine Contemporary Art, the ICA at Maine College of Art, and Amherst College. Gina has been an artist-in-residence at Skowhegan, Hewnoaks, the Winterthur Museum, the Vermont Studio Center, Sculpture Space, Surf Point, and Mildred’s Lane. She was a 2023 recipient of a Teaching Artist Cohort Grant from the Center for Craft, and was awarded grants by the Puffin Foundation, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and the Northampton Arts Council. Gina holds a BFA from the School of Art + Design at SUNY Purchase and an MFA from the Maine College of Art, and has taught at Amherst College, Mount Holyoke College, and the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Gina is currently a MacLeish Field Station Artist-in-Residence and research affiliate in the Department of Environmental Science and Policy at Smith College.

website: https://www.ginasiepel.com/

instagram: @ginasiepel

Artist Statement:

My artistic practice reflects an engagement with place, history, queer experience, and ecology, and my work integrates conceptual concerns and craftsmanship with a focus on wood as a natural and a cultural material. In interdisciplinary place-based projects, I integrate the construction of functional and sculptural objects with video, installation, public engagement, and collaborative research with local communities and scholars from the sciences and humanities. I create utilitarian objects and forms with the understanding that they are more than the remnants and reflectors of society, they are instigators in the social sphere.

As an artist who works with wood, I’m interested in the ancient relationship between humans, trees, and forests, and how this relationship might be deepened and transformed in an era of climate crisis. Through my work, I aim to provide opportunities for reflection for a broad audience, with the goal of fostering contemplation and dialogue on the complexities of nature, culture, and lived human and more-than-human experience in contemporary times.