Tinkering Tinkerer: Virginia Fleck

Virginia Fleck was born in New York City. She began making artwork in childhood and eventually studied at Portland School of Art in Portland, Maine and at The School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Massachusetts. In 1990, Virginia moved to Austin, Texas where she continues her work as a visual artist. Virginia's Website

Since 2002 Virginia has been working exclusively with recycled plastic bags creating site-specific, ecologically conscious art works called Plastic Mandalas. A mandala is a universal, non-religious tool for meditation typically composed of highly decorative, symmetrical patterns. While a mandala is not sacred per se, they do appear, in some form, in almost every religion or spiritual practice. The carefully chosen symbols and imagery of a traditional mandala imbue it with a meaningfulness that provides guidance on ones path to enlightenment. The imagery on each plastic bag is designed by advertisers to cause instant association with worldly acquisitions. The choice of media, plastic bags, imbues these seemingly irreverent mandalas with a contemporary narrative that allows the artist to analyze the activity of consumerism as a spiritual encounter. Virginia created an inflatable plastic sculpture in the Tinkering Studio as part of the Materiality: Plastic event.