Exploring the beauty found in vulnerability and impermanence, I encourage viewers to rethink how they perceive strength and weakness. Living with chronic conditions has taught me to question reality and examine how perception creates our world. I am attracted to transformative moments where boundaries blur, bringing the hidden into focus and revealing resplendent, mysterious undertones.I create spaces that shift perception. This prompts viewers to reconsider with bold colors, light, and tactile materials like embroidery, neon vinyl, and reflective surfaces. My work balances fragility and resilience by transforming overlooked, everyday materials into powerful expressions.

About the Artist:

Lydia Wickham is a BFA candidate at the Columbus College of Art & Design, graduating in 2025. She lives in Circleville and works in Columbus, OH. Wickham has exhibited nationally, including VIVID at d’Art Center in Norfolk, VA, where she was awarded a one-year membership to the Surface Design Association; Transparency at Union Street Gallery in Chicago Heights, IL; Carla: The Essence of Love and Joy at All People Arts in Columbus, OH; and Young Hearts 2025 at Sean Christopher Gallery in Columbus, OH. In 2024, Wickham received third place, Best of Show at the Ohio State Fair Fine Arts Competition (Amateur Division). Her public art projects include performing a live wedding painting at the Bryn Du Mansion in Granville, OH, and creating holiday window paintings for White Castle in 2021 and 2022. In 2025, Lydia will exhibit at 934 Gallery in Columbus, OH, and will have a piece traveling with Art Possible Ohio’s Accessible Expressions 2025 exhibition.

DOLLHOUSE is a series of works that examines possible forms for the inarticulate facets of the self. The surface of each piece is worked repetitively with crochet, knit, or hand quilting. Making this work is a meditative – and a paradoxically anxious – practice of understanding the self in relation to family. This needlework is a series of units: stitches that make up rows, rows that make up shapes, and shapes that make up image, object, and gure. It echoes the way memories, relationships, and experiences seem to make up a person; the way rooms make up a house; and the way individuals make up a family. Familial relationships – and the spaces that house them – are dynamic and structural. They form the architecture of the mind as a communal, and often crowded, space. DOLLHOUSE attempts to bring form to the base emotional components of a slightly neurotic Midwestern family.

About the Artist:

Baylee Schmitt (MFA from Miami University) is currently the printmaking lab manager at University of Cincinnati DAAP. Memory, place, and the indistinguishable difference between childhood fact and fantasy are central to Baylee’s practice as a ber artist and printmaker. Baylee has exhibited work with solo exhibitions at Laisun Keane Gallery, River East Gallery, and the Fitton Center for Creative Arts. Baylee has also participated in group exhibitions with BravinLee Projects, at TW Fine Art, DesignTO, Ohio Craft Museum, Sanitary Tortilla Factory, and more.

As a Deaf/HoH, autistic, and physically disabled artist, my work explores the dissonance and dialogue between mind and body, navigating the persistent drive to create within a body defined by limitation.

Disability shapes both my lived experience and my artistic practice, offering a framework to interrogate
fragility, resilience, and adaptation. My art reclaims disability not as a deficit but as a generative force, revealing the dynamic interplay between vulnerability and strength.

Materiality anchors my process. I work with substances that embody the contradictions of the human condition—strength and fragility, permanence and impermanence. Using plastics, glass, inorganic fibers, and metals, I examine how disabled people are often viewed as alien or other. Their industrial and
synthetic qualities evoke the pressure placed on disabled bodies to augment themselves to fit societal norms, rather than for society to adapt to us.

By casting, carving, layering, and sewing, I transform these materials into forms that capture the tension between my mind’s creative drive and my body’s physical limits. Each piece reflects a negotiation of time, energy, and form, deeply tied to my body’s rhythms. Far from hindering me, this exchange enriches my work, revealing the stubborn insistence of my mind to connect, communicate, and innovate.

Recently, I have expanded my practice to address the heightened risk of sexual violence faced by disabled individuals. Working with fiber and latex, I explore vulnerability, intimacy, and reclamation. The tactile processes of sewing, binding, and layering allow me to stitch fractured narratives into forms of endurance, while latex, with its fragility and resilience, embodies the tension between protection and exposure. These works are informed by the concept of theophanies—manifestations of the divine through bodily experience—as seen in the Pentecostal-Holiness tradition, where transcendental experience signals
closeness to God. In treating the wounded and disabled body as a site of both violence and revelation, I seek to transform pain into testimony, fragility into sacred presence.

About the Artist:

Jess Schwarz is a multidisciplinary artist and educator currently based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Working primarily in glass, sculpture, and mixed media, Schwarz’s practice explores material transformation, embodiment, and systems of communication. Their work frequently addresses the complexities of identity, disability, and memory through experimental processes and craft-based
techniques.

Schwarz has exhibited nationally, with recent exhibitions including Garden Party MAKE/BELIEVE at the Mattress Factory (Pittsburgh, PA), Softer. at Sean Christopher Gallery (Columbus, OH), and the Kennedy Center’s Interchange” touring exhibition, where they were recognized with the VSA Emerging Young Artist Award. They have also completed a period of study at Anderson Ranch Arts Center and is scheduled to teach at Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts in 2025.

Alongside their studio practice, Schwarz works as an instructor at Pittsburgh Glass Center, where she teaches courses in glassblowing, kilnforming, coldworking, and flameworking. They hold a BFA from Columbus College of Art & Design.

These works encapsulate memory, healing, and an evolution of the self within craft mediums. They explore parallels within oppositions through a trans lense; natural and unnatural within material, rotting and healing, forgotten memories. A stark before and after. Pairing wool, clay and other natural materials with plastic bags, gaudy beads and unnatural color palettes play within these dichotomies. The progression of a body, natural and divine in its own right but viewed as unnatural. Loving and rotting, remembering and forgetting, caring for what is hated. This collection of work seeks to give voice to the experience of living in a trans body, making space for divinity in trans experiences.

About the Artist:

Leland Waters is a multidisciplinary artist based in Columbus, Ohio. Their work merges ceramics and fiber to discuss gender, queer experiences, and nostalgia, often including reclaimed materials. Recently, Waters has begun incorporating their literary works within these pieces as well. After graduating with a BFA in Ceramics in 2023, Waters began work as the Technician and Coordinator of Columbus College of Art and Design’s Ceramics Facilities. They have exhibited at Wild Goose Creative, Sean Christopher Gallery, and curated a pride month exhibition at Adamah Ceramics this past June.

My work explores the intersection of quilting, memory, and lived experience through craft, autoethnography, performance, and site-specific installation. By reimagining quilting as a form of
autoethnography, I use it to reflect on and analyze personal history, elevating it beyond its traditional role as functional craft. Quilts become vessels for memory, carrying personal and collective histories through each stitch and fabric choice. My practice investigates how memory and tradition are passed down through objects and how quilting can serve as both a metaphor and a vehicle for these ideas.

Two key questions guide my work: What do quilts pass down, and how can art highlight the transmission of memory and tradition? How do performance and site-specific installation, combined with quilting, challenge notions of craft, memory, and tradition? I view quilts as symbolic objects, deeply connected to labor, time, and emotional history. Through performance and installation, I explore how quilting can move beyond craft into a more nuanced dialogue with contemporary art.

In recent projects, I’ve delved into nostalgia, examining the complex relationship between comfort and discomfort in memory. Performance activates the work. Draping the quilt over myself symbolizes a retreat into memory, reflecting the physical and emotional labor of quilting. This gesture also represents the labor of accessing and confronting memory, emphasizing the weight of time and lived experience.

About the Artist:

River Forest Berry is an artist, curator, and educator. She works at the intersections of craft processes, print, and performance. Berry’s works are based in quilting primarily, examining issues of memory, tradition, and what we pass down through family and relationships. She graduated from the Columbus College of Art & Design with her BFA in the History of Art. Her work has been exhibited nationally in spaces such as ROY G BIV Gallery, Albrecht-Kemper
Museum, and West Virginia University, and is currently supported by the Greater Columbus Arts Council. Berry is pursuing her MFA at the University of Michigan.