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.