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Biography
Eden Collins is an artist living and working in San Antonio, Texas and received her Master of Fine Arts at the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA), where she is now an instructor. Born in West Branch, Michigan, Collins completed her Bachelor of Arts in Studio Art at Hope College in Holland, Michigan.
She has received a number of awards including the Wai Ching Lam Best in Show Award in 2018, and Graduate First Place Award in 2017 for the College of Liberal and Fine Arts (COLFA) Juried Student Exhibitions, Art Presidential Fellowship, Art Guys Endowment, and Sue Jockusch Endowed Scholarship at UTSA, the Presidential Scholarship at Hope College and Hope College Senior Art Award. Her work is part of the Hope College Permanent Collection.
While completing her graduate degree, Collins worked with arts organizations in San Antonio. She worked for Artpace as their graduate intern in Archives and Communications and is working with Luminaria as a volunteer manager. Collins has exhibited and performed in Texas and nationally.
Artist Statement
When I was a child I created houses for frogs and toads out of mud. I would search all around the lawn for four-legged friends that I could put into the houses. They never wanted to stay, and yet I kept making them homes.
I think of society and social identity as a metaphor for mud house construction. We devise rules, trends, norms, mores. We place ourselves within them, then when one of us leaps out, we build new houses to maintain the rest of the toads and frogs. Slowly the shape and forms of the houses change.
My artwork acts to deform the mud house into a new shape. Using playful exploration in photography, sculpture, video, and performance, it challenges notions and modes of socialization as well as the construction of identity.
