Flora & Fauna Gallery Reception

The reception will be held from 5:00pm – 7:00pm in the Stuart’s Opera House lobby. The exhibition will be on display in the Stuart’s Opera House lobby March 3rd – June 1st. Attendance is free and open to the public. Drinks will be available for purchase at the bar and light refreshments are provided. About the Artists Hannah Sickles is an artist who resides in Athens, Ohio. She gets much of her inspiration from the beautiful forests and landscapes of the Southeast Ohio area. The rest of her inspiration comes from her 3 cats, who are always “helping” in one way or another. She creates copper enamel jewelry, watercolors, and limit edition prints You can find her at many of the local arts and music festivals and often set up on Saturdays at the Athens Art Market. Selena [Len] Loomis [they/them] is an artist, educator, and curator who lives and works in Chauncey, Ohio. They make work about [dis]comfort, cycles, and the time the body keeps. Often this takes the form of nontraditional fibercraft, interrogating the responsibilities we have to one another and to the more-than-human world. Curatorially, they are interested in enacting the latin root of the word ‘curare’ – meaning to care for communities, artists, audiences, and one another. Loomis holds an MA in Arts Administration and an MFA in Sculpture + Expanded Practices from OHIO University, where they currently teach and serve as Curator of Exhibitions and Galleries with the School of Art + Design. Loomis further holds a BA in Performance Art from Antioch College, has been faculty at The School of the Alternative, a Deep Ecology Artist Fellow at United Plant Savers, and was awarded a scholarship to attend Penland School of Craft in 2024. Recently, they founded and run tend space art center, a DIY third-space focused on creative connection and collaboration in rural southeast Ohio. Loomis is interested in cultivating spaces to be meaningfully alone, together. Follow their work at selenaloomis.space or on instagram @selenaloo. About the Exhibition From Selena [Len] Loomis: Seedlings is an exploration of domestic comfort objects and rooting in place. Pulling from the sensory experience of a childhood blankie, the wall quilts featured in this collection mix silk, velvet, cotton, and wool to create improvisational compositions that invite slow-looking. Entirely compostable, each work is an individual color study focused on reverence and relationship with one to two distinct plant species, with two representations of the entire garden/ecosystem together. All of the colors were coaxed from plants grown or gently foraged by the artist within Athens County. The quilts are presented alongside samples of each dye-giving plant enclosed in small silk pouches. These samples are a nod to archival specimen collections, and encourage viewers to build recognition and relationship with the plants growing around us in southeast Ohio – one of the most biodiverse regions in the nation. Each piece is hand-quilted with cotton batting and thread.