Finding Bouyancy – Imogen Gallery 9.12 to 10.5
From the window of my studio on the Columbia River, I watch the ever-changing movement of water, vessels, birds, and buoys. These floating markers —small, bright points within the vastness of the river—have become a recurring presence in my work and a metaphor for finding balance amid constant change.
Over the past five years, buoyancy has become more than a metaphor for me; it has become a way of moving through life. Beginning with the loss of my father in 2021, followed by my move from Portland to Astoria and into a studio hovering over the river, my life entered a period of profound transition. In the past year, I lost both my mother and my sister. Yet these years have also brought extraordinary joy. I found love, became engaged, and now stand on the threshold of marriage and my 60th birthday. Grief and love, endings and beginnings, have existed alongside one another. Finding Buoyancy grew from these experiences and from the question of how we remain open to life when the currents beneath us continually change.
Sally Hirst Interview
Sally is offering a class soon in the UK utilizing all of Elise’s techniques and also Wagner Collagraph Wax.
In this conversation, Elise Wagner sits down with Sally Hirst, a Norwich-based painter, printmaker, and teacher known for her fearlessly experimental approach to printmaking. Working across collagraphy, drypoint, and monotype, Sally treats each print as a one-of-a-kind piece built in layers, embracing risk, chance, and reinvention over editions and repetition. She's also recently brought Wagner Collagraph Wax into her own studio practice and teaching, which makes this a genuine meeting of kindred spirits. Over the course of their talk, the two artists trade ideas on process, materials, and the restless curiosity that keeps their work evolving, a warm, generous exchange between two printmakers who love to push at the edges of what a print can be.
Video: In Conversation with
Elise Wagner
Elise talks at Maryhill Museum of Art about her Celestial Currents exhibition in July, 2025.
“Rooted in both scientific inquiry and metaphysical wonder, Wagner’s work offers a visual language for contemplating the rhythms of the universe. Each piece serves as a meditation on scale, time, and transformation, inviting viewers to consider their place within a broader, ever-evolving cosmos.
This exhibition invites reflection on the harmony between precision and unpredictability, structure and fluidity – offering a space where scientific knowledge and poetic intuition coalesce.”
"Astral Terrain 1", 22 x 12 in
"Astral Terrain 2", 22 x 12 in
"Astral Terrain 3", 22 x 12 in
"Astral Terrain 4", 22 x 12 in
"Astral Terrain 5", 22 x 12 in