Lucien Dante is an artist who pushes boundaries to connect seemingly disparate elements, while striving to provide a renewed and inspired vision of what art is and can be.

“I am a forager artist. I source the natural world for its perfect materials, which serve as my primary inspirations and are intrinsic to my creative process. In my art, I utilize wool, hair and other cruelty-free animal products, as well as plant products, clay and metals. Natural materials have an abundance of wisdom and a rich capacity for expression. In harnessing their nuanced textures, colors, forms and natural histories, I recognize nature as my active creative partner and strive to forge a conscious, sensory-rich relationship between my art and the natural world. Utilizing traditional processing techniques like felting, spinning, knitting, weaving, sewing, sculpting, painting, welding and texturizing, I invest in creative practices that unite the ancient past with the present.

I also have a background in the healing arts through hands-on energetic healing modalities.  The history of art as a tool for healing is as diverse and extensive as the history of art itself.  In an effort to innovate that history, I incorporate healing impulses into my creative practice via both process and product. The result of intertwining traditional artistic practices and purposes with healing arts and my contemporary consciousness, context and cultural perspective is a bold, original, modern aesthetic.

As a child, I was inspired by arts and crafts made from natural materials, which I discovered at multi-cultural festivals. I soon began making my own products, working on farms and harvesting fiber from animals. I planted flowers and processed them to make dyes for the yarn I had spun from raw fleeces I had shorn and carded. As I got older, I bought shares in fiber animals from organic farms so I could both support the animals and farmers and acquire the fleeces. Over the years, my three-dimensional work transformed from functional arts, like fashion and household appliances, to fine arts with healing functions.

As an artist striving to create cohesion between my art and my art practice, it is vital to discover a context in which my life is philosophically and practically aligned with my work. One of my future trajectories will be to cultivate a farm-to-gallery praxis that acknowledges the animals and nature-based materials I use as the initial producers of my art. My farm-to-gallery concept is the ideal platform for this goal as it provides a framework for farming, life cycle of materials, functional art, fiber art, fine art and healing art to unite via one conscious continuum.”