Building on 30 years of experience as a fiber artist, fashion artist, and public art design team member, Judy Bales creates art that is an improbable marriage of cold industrial materials and the sensuous qualities of nature.  She collects myriad materials–often found, recycled, or salvaged–in an ongoing effort to reveal beauty in unlikely places.

The broad range of Bales’ work is unified by a sensibility that asserts the power of an artist to create beauty from anything and convey that simple but vital truth to an audience.  She takes seemingly intractable disparities between the visual and the tactile, between the industrial and the aesthetic, and reconciles them in favor of beauty.  By manipulating materials in ways for which they were not intended, such as mangling and crumpling wire mesh into a punk prom dress, she subverts and transforms her materials into art objects that are intriguing and nourishing to the imagination.

Bales, who received both her BFA and MFA degrees from the University of Georgia, majored in painting as an undergraduate and completed her post-graduate work in fiber art. This combination of very distinct disciplines has served her well and helps to explain her unique work.  While closer to a fiber artist in her choice of materials, she approaches her art more like an abstract painter, relying on improvisation and intuitive choices, rather than the more precise, controlled approach traditionally favored by fiber artists.