Buddha and Butterfly Knot by Victoria Fuller

Bio
Chicago artist Victoria Fuller has an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and was awarded a 2019 DCASE Independent Artist Project Grant and an Illinois Arts Council CAAP Grant, in 2009. She was awarded the Dean Alan Olson Purchase Award for the Rockford Art Museum permanent collection in 2020 and was Awarded Best in Show at the 2021 Evanston and Vicinity Exhibition. An exhibition of her work about animal extinction was at The Buffalo Museum of Science and had a solo exhibition of her work her at the Susquehanna Art Museum in Harrisburg, PA, in 2022-2023. Several of her artworks are in the collection of Artemezia Foundation Museum in Bisbee, Arizona. She also received fellowship awards from The Illinois Arts Council and from the Colorado Council on the Arts and Humanities.

Statement
My series of garden hose knot sculptures, called "What Knots," gets its  inspiration from mathematical, molecular, DNA knots, but also sailor and Celtic knots. I use man-made appropriated objects, in this case garden hoses, to create knot configurations, some of which occur in the organic, mathematical, and scientific world. In my overall body of work, I repurpose objects that can be bought at the local hardware store. The bright color of garden hoses attests to their artificial fabrication and unwittingly reveals a facet of our consumer culture. I liberate these objects from their everyday functions by combining them in unexpected configurations.