Board Member of IAF,
craftswoman, artist, storyteller.
Boston, MA

Wendy Ellertson grew up in San Francisco, Chicago, and Cleveland. She has been an active member of the fine craft community for over thirty years dancing around and through many media categories always accompanied by her figures which incorporate leather, clay, wood and a deliciously eclectic array of contemporary and ancient materials, techniques and dreams.

After a couple academic degrees, irrelevant for her art work, but perhaps adding to its interstitial nature (B.A. in International relations; MA thesis on African Theater in French!), she realized art could save the world as well as politics and perhaps even better. She settled into the artist she had "always been". She was a potter and doll maker in the 60-70's, moved into soft sculpture, then leather sculpture -dragons, griffins, etc. exhibiting at major craft shows, galleries, museums, a Sci Fi con, even one Star Trek Convention. In the 80's, a friend suggested she look at a 1400 B.C. Egyptian loin cloth in the MFA in Boston. That museum visit gave birth to a line of delicately hand pierced leather garments and accessories - rather like wearing feathers. After 10 years of the fashion world, she decided it was time to move on - knowing wings and flight were really her world rather than clothing and, at 50, it was time to get a little more contemplative. She began a line of leather journals which gradually morphed becoming more sculptural with faces emerging... then broke with standard form and entered the borderland world of artist books. Some of her books fly.

When she discovered the quote by Joseph Campbell stating that "one of the roles of the artist is the mythologization of the world and the environment", she realized why she had continued to make her figures and still displays them and their stories in all her booths at shows. It might also explain why she is working on a 4' x 5' nest in her studio, a participatory art piece which is emerging from a mythic/folk tale she is writing.

Her studio and home are in Roxbury, MA - where in 1967 she and her husband, Jon, both Westerners at heart, bought two c.1840 houses needing major work (sort of a 1 cent sale in a Boston neighborhood where houses were being abandoned) intending to stay just a few years. They raised four children and occasionally some chickens and rabbits. To their surprise, they now find themselves becoming community elders with history, memory and spring tomato plants to share. They are still re-habing their houses in their "spare" time.

When she found the Interstitial Arts Foundation, she knew she had found "home."

Her website is: http://www.ellertson.com.