Louisiana LOVE
This collection of hand-embroidered, wearable art brooches is inspired by Louisiana’s vibrant flora, fauna, and folklore. Each brooch is crafted from felt and hand-embroidered, with some embellished with vintage Mardi Gras beads—reclaimed treasures that carry the festive spirit of South Louisiana. These brooches serve as tiny altars—personal talismans that celebrate place, memory, and resilience.
Nigrado Series
This series explores relationships between humans, nature, memory, and the unseen through abstract felted forms that function as contemporary altars. Using wool, flax, ramie, and silk, I create soft sculptures through wet and needle felting, transforming loose fibers into dense vessel-like forms through water, friction, and sustained pressure.
In this body of work, I draw from alchemical and Jungian ideas of transformation, particularly the concept of nigredo, exploring shadow work and the emergence of awareness through material process. Influenced by animism, ecofeminism, and the aesthetics of Catholic ritual I encountered growing up in South Louisiana, I approach fibers as collaborators and allow intuitive processes to guide the emergence of form. Through repetition, compression, and transformation, the series invites viewers to slow down and engage the quiet connections linking personal experience, collective memory, ecology, and inner life.
Portals & Protectors
My Portals and Protectors series explores the interconnected relationships between humans, nature and the unseen. These felted sculptures and embroidered forms function as altars to invite reflection and reconnection with the living world.
Using wool, plant fibers, stones and found materials, I build textured forms through wet felting, needle felting and hand embroidery. My materials are gathered from thrift stores, estate sales, inherited collections, eco-conscious suppliers and the land surrounding my home in Northern New Mexico. Through this process of collecting and transformation, the materials carry traces of place, history, and human touch.
My practice is shaped by animism, ecofeminism, and ecological attunement. I approach materials as collaborators rather than passive supplies, allowing intuitive and responsive processes to guide the emergence of form. Influences include the aesthetics of Catholic iconography I encountered growing up in South Louisiana, as well as natural forms and practices that emphasize attention, care, and relationship.
Through slow, tactile processes and materially grounded forms, the work invites viewers to consider how care, presence, and interconnectedness might shape the ways we relate to each other and the natural world.
Sense of Place
Sense of Place is an ongoing ecological art project exploring relationships between people and environment in Northern New Mexico through re-contextualized found materials, paths and ritual acts. The project site is located in Po-Woh-Geh-Owingeh “Where the water cuts through”; situated on land that was once a homestead ranch, surrounded by and surrounding land of the Pueblo of San Ildefonso, and shadowed by the once secret city of Los Alamos (birthplace of the atomic bomb). These dynamic layers of land use are ever present in my mind as I explore paths to understanding this place. Guided by Ecofeminist principles, I aim to examine site-specific history alongside parallels between colonization, discarded materials, open dumps, invasive plants and patriarchal mindset of gender, race, class and the environment. By referencing spiritual and religious traditions of altars, meditation gardens, processions and prayer cards, Sense of Place seeks to offer opportunities for reflection and reconnection.
See videos of my process for creating and engaging with this project here:
https://www.taasartshows.com/andrea-dupree.html
wool pottery
Formed from wool, plant fibers, water, and pure olive oil soap, these vessels embody a union of softness and strength.
Fibers once loose and delicate are lovingly coaxed into resilient forms; soft to the touch, yet enduring in structure. Each vessel is a symbolic and functional container, expanding the ancient tradition of hand-made objects for holding and offering. Rooted in the textures, color ways and fiber art traditions of Northern New Mexico, they carry both the intimacy of handwork and the quiet power of natural materials shaped through mindful processes.
