Denise Whitebread Fanning is an artist and mother living in Central Michigan. She is an observer, explorer, gatherer, and maker. She holds an MFA in Sculpture from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and a BFA in painting and sculpture from Eastern Michigan University. She taught Sculpture at the College for Creative Studies for several years and is also an avid practitioner and teacher of yoga. Her sculptures and site-specific installations were exhibited in galleries from Detroit to Berlin before moving to Central Michigan, where she began to take her artwork out of the gallery and into the woods and by the lakes and rivers. She now traverses her environment, quietly searching for evidence of all that gets left behind by the lives of the rivers, lakes, and forests, and of the human lives that inhabit these spaces. While she always has several long-term installation projects in the works in her studio, she counters the seeming-futility of her inclination toward labor-intensive studio processes by creating one-day projects within nature which speak to our human excess and neglect, the strength and frailty of nature and the places where these things intersect and converge.
Follow her one-day projects and more on instagram @denisewfanning_maker.