Joyce Audy Zarins was born in 1949 and grew up in Lawrence, MA, a former mill town. Her interests in art and the phenomena of nature developed consistently, leading her to Massachusetts College of Art, then later to the University of New Hampshire and eventually the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, where she used natural materials and forms in her work and experimented with new media. She has received grants for sculpture performances and outdoor installations relating to natural forces.
Between 1980 and 1996 Joyce Audy Zarins wrote five and illustrated twenty children's books (some under the name dos Santos) related to the natural world, mythology and human experience. She also writes occasional articles for Art New England, PortFolio magazine and other periodicals. She exhibited paintings for years that relied on visual metaphors and has also explored printmaking. Over the past fifteen years years she has given workshops in the writing and illustration of children's books at the University of New Hampshire and teaches drawing classes in the Art Department at a college in Lowell where the worldly mix of students assures vibrant creative energy.
Her commitment to arts advocacy is evidenced by her two six-year terms on the Merrimac Cultural Council, involvement with the Visual Arts Committee at the Firehouse Center for the Arts in Newburyport, and she is a founding member of the Amesbury Artists' Network. For five years she helped organize the Maudslay Outdoor Sculpture exhibit, and has curated sculpture and photography shows. She is the sculpture co-ordinator for the new Somerby's Landing Sculpture Park.
In 1996, at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, she discovered welding for sculpture and became absorbed with working in three dimensions. She secured a small studio, built worktables, a vent system and installed equipment. She has had shows in Boston, curated by the former Creiger-Dane Gallery and been in Navy Pier Walk 2003, Moses-Kent House Contemporary Outdoor exhibit, the Attleboro and New Bedford art museums, and many other exhibits.
Her Global Forces Spiral, a three day grant-funded project, bonded art and science while using innovative materials including thirty sea kayakers to convey a symbolic representation of the way world-wide currents flow. She has taken small, common natural forms like seeds and greatly enlarged them in response to the large scale human artifacts often used by other artists. Her experiments with tree footprints mark a way to record a conceptual element of nature that is simultaneously realistic and abstract; during the summer of 2003 she made footprint patterns of an old growth hemlock in Tennessee, a red fir in California and a yellow birch in Maine, creating a huge conceptual triangle across the United States. Her work has also begun to involve shadows and driplines.
As a sea kayaker, hiker, skier and beach stroller, she surrounds herself with natural stimuli. She is married, has three adult children and three grandchildren. Her studio and welding shop are in Amesbury, Massachusetts.
You can learn more about Joyce Audy Zarins on her website at http://www.joyceaudyzarins.com/about/cv.htm