Bio


Jenny Welden is an artist exploring the passage of time through free-motion stitchwork. She works at a fourteen-foot longarm sewing machine, drawing, painting, writing, embroidering, and collaging to form multimedia networks. 

Artist Jenny Welden with FEAR NOT, 2024, 7’ x 39’ modular altarpiece in nine components of varying sizes. Free-motion stitchwork, torn silk, fragments from the artist’s wedding dress, fragments from the artist’s childhood blanket, wool, rayon, polyester, acetate, and 23-karat gold leaf on hand-dyed and hand-painted cotton.

Her work has appeared in galleries, museums, city streets, event venues, and private collections across the world, including the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, Gallery 4 in Suzhou, China, and Main Market Square in Nuremberg, Germany. She has taught a variety of art forms at the professional and collegiate levels, including painting, figure drawing, chemical dyework, weaving, printing, embroidery, quilting, and over twenty styles of ballroom dance.

She attended Cornell College from 2012-2014, where she studied costume design, painting, and art history. In 2017 she earned her Bachelors of Fine Arts with emphasis in textiles and painting from Colorado College.

She earned her Masters of Fine Arts in Visual Arts with emphasis in textiles and expanded media from the University of Kansas in 2022, where she taught a variety of textiles courses, including one of her own design called Quiltmaking: Contemporary Improvisation

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Her 2022 solo show, TerMinAL mA, explored female ancestral memory through heirloom objects, and featured reliquary boxes, circles of salt, handmade furniture, a community stitch project, apparitional appearances, and an original film–all in a hand-built architectural environment. 

Her 2022 solo show, Lifeline, featured her Lifeline Quilt Series in a collection of over 45 original artworks, including quilts, paintings, banners, and small sculptures. The show culminated her onsite residency, in which she was commissioned to create a set of mural banners for Colby’s annual downtown ArtWalk.

Her ongoing land project/community housing residency, House of Clay (2021- present), uses principles of permaculture and biophilic design to heal generational trauma through the bones of my mother’s once-vacant property in Glenwood Springs, Colorado.

Her 2024 solo show, Everyday Saints, featured twelve interconnected artworks in twenty-two components exploring the theme of personal sacrifice toward higher good.

She is interested in folk arts, permaculture, natural building, gardening, getting dressed, and the ways of life our ancestors lived prior to the industrial revolution. She enjoys dancing, sauna bathing, and traveling with her writer-professor husband, Sheldon Gaskell. They welcomed a child together in 2023.