Lena Wolff is a Berkeley-based artist working in drawing and collage on paper. She earned an MFA in Printmaking from San Francisco State University (2003) and a BA in Creative Writing from Mills College (1995). Wolff has exhibited at Traywick Contemporary, The San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery, The Legion of Honor Museum, Southern Exposure, Headlands Center for the Arts, Needles and Pens, and in Philadelphia at Space 1026. In 2006, she was a finalist for the SECA Award from SFMOMA and an artist-in-residence at Blue Mountain Center in Upstate New York. In 2006 Wolff also received an artist grant from the John Anson Kittredge Fund. Her work is available at Traywick Contemporary.

As an artist, my work is informed by an interest in folk art, a veneration for the natural world and fantasy. I aim to create spaces where the otherworldly plays a pervasive role, using methods that combine drawing, sewing, paper-cut and collage. The drawings depict fantastical animals, birds and plants interacting in dark spacious habitats. In these images, I strive for the plants and creatures to communicate a sentient impression and dwell in relationship to one another. In this way, I mean for the figures in the drawings to emulate an emotional presence and qualities of the supernatural, so that there is a sense of blurring between the earthly and spiritual, as with fairy tales or myths.

With the darker images, the paper is coated in graphite, punctured with pinpricks and collage is laid on top. By combining needlework and textile traditions, the drawings are worked on both sides of the paper so that the surface is handled like fabric as much as it is dealt with as paper itself. With this method, I'm interested in relating back to practices that women have engaged in historically as folk art over the centuries. I'm also drawn to making a specific connection to quilt-making, with its lineage of carrying encoded messages and telling symbolic stories.