Nancy Winship Milliken Studio is a place-based environmental art studio committed to building community through collaborative expressions of reverence for the land, humans, and animals. Winship Milliken creates sculpture, installations, prints and photographic enactments concerning the health of the land and surrounding communities, aiding in the desired change for the (socio)environmental course of our society. 

Get to know the studio and learn how and why we work

 As an environmental artist working in all different mediums with the common theme of a reverence for this earth, I explore methods and techniques to try to find a language of love that might strengthen our relationship or connection to the land. The practice of the studio is as much about process as it is about object. From finding and harvesting bioregional materials, to molding, weaving, burning into form, our hands and senses “know” the material intimately. The different smells, textures, and raw sensation of making the form is all a part of informing the outcome of the work. I trust that the inherent beauty of the materials in their natural state will come through no matter what form I put them in. For the outside work, once the sculptures are installed, there is a letting go, a handing off of the process to the environmental influences the landscape. These kinetic and transitional sculptures I make are, in my mind, described as theater. The performers of a play about and in the environment. About us culturally in the environment. About time. Wind as puppeteer lifts up the strands and locks to reach out beyond their flattened form, activating it in a dance, and opera, a never ending theatre of environment. The sculptures record the sun, rain, heat and cold, even air pollution in their materials creating a living journal of the elements of the environment. A history of wind. A visualization of time.

The studio is committed to using our artistic platform as an expression of  environmental, climate and social change through engagement in community, collaborations, and mentoring creative environmental leaders. We have an open studio inviting artisans, poets, environmentalists, builders, students and farmers, to work together in response to the landscape, people and animals surrounding us. The studio strives to use sustainable and re-claimed materials, often re-using cast off materials from cultural usage or past installations.