DALLAS, TX — Cris Worley Fine Arts is proud to present ensouled, an exhibition by Sherry Owens, whose nearly forty-year career has established her as one of the most distinctive and influential sculptural voices to emerge from Texas. Recent work in wood, bronze, bamboo, and printmaking, ensouled reveals a practice rooted in nature, observation, labor, and a deeply personal sense of spirituality.
For decades, Owens has returned to the sinewy crepe myrtle as both material and metaphor. Gathered from fallen trees, often found along roadsides and within the Texas landscape, its branches are carved, cut, bundled, pegged, woven, and assembled into intricate structures that move between drawing and sculpture. What begins as a fragment of the natural world becomes, through Owens's sustained attention, something transformed.
The title ensouled speaks to this transformation—the possibility that matter may carry memory, feeling, and spirit.
“Remnants of personal stories, visions, and observations in nature are the driving forces in my work,” Owens says. “For almost 40 years the sinewy crepe myrtle tree has become my primary material and metaphor—a way to speak about the Texas landscape, cycles of death and renewal, beauty, and our growing environmental concerns.”
The work is both highly disciplined and intuitive. Owens may spend countless hours carving, whittling, pegging, and assembling individual sticks into a single sculpture, yet the labor ultimately disappears. What remains is an illusion of simplicity—work in which repetition becomes meditation and physical process gives way to poetry.
Drawing, sculpture, and printmaking are, for Owens, threads of the same gesture. A mark on paper becomes a line in space; a carved branch becomes a drawn form. Across media, her work is unified by an exploration of line and by an enduring engagement with nature's cycles.
The exhibition includes new works developed through Owens's collaboration with Flatbed Center for Contemporary Printmaking, following her selection as the recipient of the 2024 Käthe Kollwitz Residency. Printmaking expands Owens's longstanding exploration of line, gesture, and repetition while revealing the continuity between her works on paper and her sculptural practice.
For the first time, Owens has incorporated bamboo alongside crepe myrtle. The distinctive growth and linear structure of the grass informs both sculpture and printmaking, opening a new vocabulary within her ongoing study of the natural world.
Bronze offers another kind of transformation. Owens sometimes creates sculptures in wood with the sole purpose of burning them out to cast in metal, preserving fragile extensions and delicate structures that might otherwise fracture. Through fire, impermanence becomes permanence.
The work is also infused with the influence of poetry, literature, and song. D. H. Lawrence's Creed, which has long resonated with Owens, offers a particularly evocative parallel. “My soul is a dark forest,” Lawrence writes, imagining the known self as only “a little clearing in the forest.” Owens's studio—filled with gathered trees and fragments of the landscape—becomes a similar place of mystery, observation, and possibility.
Across nearly four decades, Owens has developed a practice grounded in the Texas landscape but expansive in its reach and concerns. Her work speaks to growth and decay, destruction and renewal, fragility and endurance. These are the cycles of the natural world, but also profoundly human ones.
ensouled is an invitation into Owens's way of seeing: a world in which a fallen branch can become a line, a sculpture, a memory, or a meditation.
Sherry Owens lives and works in Dallas, TX and received a BFA from Southern Methodist University. Her work has been shown throughout Texas and the southwest; in 2018, she completed a two-person site specific installation at the UMLAUF Sculpture Garden & Museum in Austin, Texas, and was included in Commanding Space: Women Sculptors of Texas, at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, Texas. In 2017, Owens mounted a solo exhibition at the Art Museum of Southeast Texas, and the Martin Museum of Art at Baylor University. Owens has exhibited internationally in Austria, Denmark, Germany, Greece, India, Peru, Turkey, and was recently included in The First Crosscurrent Yokohama-Texas International Artists Exchange Show 2019 at Kanagawa Prefectural Gallery in Yokohama, Japan.
She has completed several large public art projects, including a large-scale bronze through the Love Field Modernization Program at Love Field Airport in Dallas, TX and a monumental commission for the Ben E. Keith Company, also in Dallas. Owens is a former president of the Texas Sculpture Association, has served on various art boards and was a co-founder of the Emergency Artists’ Support League. She was the recipient of the Moss/Chumley North Texas Artist Award in 1999, was the West Texas Triangle artist in 2010 with a comprehensive survey at five west Texas museums, and received the Artist/Craftsman Award from the AIA Dallas in 2014.
Cris Worley Fine Arts is a Dallas, Texas based contemporary art gallery located in the Dallas Design District. With over 20 years of experience, Cris Worley is dedicated to promoting innovative work by contemporary artists at various stages of their careers.
