Bio

Kimmy Ellinwood is a mixed-media artist, educator, and former creative director whose work explores natural architecture, hidden histories, and material transformation.

After more than twenty years in commercial art and visual communication, Ellinwood shifted into education and now works in a therapeutic special education setting with students often misunderstood by traditional systems. Her background in communication, design, and education informs a studio practice centered on attention, transformation, and the stories held inside overlooked forms.

Ellinwood works with clay, paper, wire, fiber, acrylic, found materials, and botanical elements. Her current sculptural series, The Daubers, is inspired by the chambered nests of mud dauber wasps and explores the complicated beauty of structures built for care, storage, paralysis, preservation, and survival. Her parallel body of work, Nature Studies, offers quieter observations of natural forms, seasonal fragments, and small architectures of the natural world.

Her work is rooted in the belief that making is a form of translation: a way to look again at what is hidden, ordinary, damaged, or misunderstood, and to ask what else it may hold.