Artist and textile sculptor currently living in Berkley.
Shelter to me means a place to exist allowing for protection and/or a safe space to come home to or launch from. Within my work I explore the concept of shelter through the notion or sense of walls or structures that create barriers of protection or enclosures but at the same time is transparent or an open vessel. They can act as a shelter for experience, remembrance and the passage of senses.
Dena Haden is an installation and fiber artist from New Bedford, MA. She uses found wood, metal, fiber, wax, plant materials and kombucha culture to explore the natural cycle of something coming into form, living, ever-changing and malleable, and the residue it leaves in passing.
She views making art as a practice to connect; surfacing rhythmic energies and searching through sound, movement, material and her own state of awareness. Haden received her BFA from UMass Dartmouth and her MFA from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia. She has an extensive exhibition record with numerous solo and group exhibitions in Boston, Philadelphia, and around the Northeast of the United States. Haden has also exhibited internationally in Europe; Italy, Turkey and Japan. She was recently enrolled in a residency at the Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts in Tennessee, Baroque Blue Residency in Nardo, Italy and is currently working in collaboration with Oika and the Maria Mitchell Association on Nantucket, MA as well as the Primo Piano Projects in Lecce, Italy. In addition to her own art practice, Haden is the founder and Director of the Co-Creative Center, a collaborative workspace for artists and is the co-founder for SuperflatNB, a Mural Arts organization in New Bedford, Massachusetts.
More from the artist:
I create my artwork currently in a studio in New Bedford as well as outdoors (sometimes at my kitchen table and anywhere I am traveling around).
The South Coast influences my art practice by allowing a perfect balance between community of creatives, a rich dynamic culture and vast numerous places to explore in nature offering endless amounts of inspiration and experiences to fuel my work, happiness and sense of belonging.
Music is both a doorway and a shelter. Musicians of the New Bedford Symphony Orchestra will perform a concert at our Custom House Square installation with a program of music that embodies the spirit of both these enduring values.