The She Project

Lauren Ohlgren, creator of The She Project-

I love living in Oregon. In a community that is not only rich in the arts and sciences, it's also the perfect balance of being in close proximity to the ocean, the mountains, the rivers, and the city. Oregon provides a large palette to draw from

for making art, with every day a new weather pattern, with every mile showing a different landscape view.

I admit that I love the nuance of gray - we have a lot of it - and love all the variations that I can find in that murky middle ground between two pure colors.

Like many artists I create because I can't not create. It's a process that is often ongoing in my head; images manipulating in rapid fire succession through the day, slipping into night, into my dreams. In the morning, I have a new sense of direction, the images playing themselves out before me. I’ll have an answer to some obscure question

that I hadn’t put words to.

I make visual journals. I work in textiles. I work in encaustic. I love the smooth, flat surfaces of silk, the smell of wax, and playing with wood, metal, or found objects, as old bisque doll parts find their way into my work.

I also love to give people access to that world, not through observation of my own work, but through the direct experience of creating themselves. I teach, or rather

, guide others how to create visual travel journals, giving them the tools to capture the images, therefore the memories, of their travels.

For artists and non-artists alike, I remind people how to 'see', and to set aside judgment of what art 'should' look like. These journals, I remind them, should look like they came from your hand.

The She Project was developed to inspire others to create for themselves. Just play, I tell them, and do it before the mind gets in there and ruins the whole experience. With 120 women signing up to play the first year, 2005, the project gained unexpected or unintended momentum. We continue with the annual project and have published a beautiful book of the first year's pieces.

My childhood was in Wisconsin with summer nights of playing ‘kick-the-can’ and ‘capture the flag’, and winters of digging snow forts, and ice-skating on every square foot of

frozen water that we could find.

As an adult, I was restless, transient, discovering diverse communities of all sizes throughout the Northwest from Washington, Montana, Idaho, and Alaska, where my children were born, then to Colorado. I eventually settled in Oregon and love to call Corvallis home where I share my life with my partner, Virginia.

a women’s community creative project