Washington Artist Nancy Mintz: Wire and Paper Sculptures Inspired by Nature | Seattle Art Source

Life, Death, and the Beauty In Between: Washington Artist Nancy Mintz’s Extraordinary Paper Sculptures

Seattle Art Source Artist Nancy Mintz Featured in Luxe Interiors + Design

Nancy Mintz makes art about endings — and somehow, it glows.

Working out of a two-story studio in Ferndale, Washington, Mintz creates freestanding and wall-mounted sculptures that begin with the subject of death and arrive somewhere luminous. Her work is rooted in the natural world — not in its lush, living state, but in what remains after. The husks. The forms that persist when growth has stopped. “It’s about the husks, when they are no longer green, no longer growing,” she explains. And yet the finished pieces are anything but somber — light filters gently through their off-white, membranous surfaces. As a result, they gain an ethereal, almost living quality that feels quietly miraculous.

The process is as meticulous as the work is poetic. On the lower level of her studio, Mintz and her assistants hand-solder brass wire into carefully engineered skeletal forms — the structural foundation for everything that follows.

Upstairs in the clean room, she applies layer after layer of Japanese gampi paper, prized for its subtle translucence, along with glue, to build the sculptural surfaces that give each piece its shape. The resulting biomorphic and geometric forms pulse and undulate. They are arranged in site-specific installations that cascade down walls, drip from ceilings, and sprout from floors.

Her fan-like Ganoderma series draws its shape directly from the mushroom of the same name. Ancestor 1 towers dramatically in her studio. Additionally, Syncopation was exhibited at the Bainbridge Island Museum of Art.

“I wish for my work not just to be a piece on the wall but to be in conversation with the architecture around it,” she says.

Ultimately, Mintz’s practice is a meditation on time — on what it means to show up every day and build something that accumulates its own life and meaning. Ideas develop slowly, from the corner of her eye, as she walks past works in progress rather than staring them down. Pieces sit untouched for weeks before something clicks. “When you put time into a thing, it creates its own life.” It’s a philosophy as true of her sculptures as it is of any creative practice worth investing in. That is exactly why we’re proud to represent her work at Seattle Art Source.

Read the full feature on Luxe Interiors + Design here.