Louisa Bufardeci

Key Courses: Drawing

I have always loved drawing and being creative. When I was a kid, my mother used to tease me and would say she thought my drawings weren't all that good, so I'd go away and try harder and harder to be good at drawing. (I don't recommend doing this to your children, by the way!). So anyway, now I'm an artist!

I'm originally from Melbourne, Australia. I have a Bachelor of Art Education from Melbourne University, a Bachelor of Fine Art (Drawing) from the Victorian College of the Arts (also in Melbourne), and a Masters of Fine Art from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. I met my husband while I was studying in Chicago and now we live in Middletown, CT. I miss the Australian life-style, but it's beautiful in Connecticut and I'm excited about living here right now.

Studying drawing made me think about how the way we represent things tells us so much about the things being represented -- faces, vases, books, bodies, everything. So I began wondering how I could represent abstract things and ideas like numbers, time, data and so on, so that I could communicate different ways of understanding them. And that is essentially my art practice today. I draw using a wide variety of media including Photoshop, Illustrator, needlepoint, video, pencil, marker, objects, you-name-it!, and I create color-coded maps, graphs and all sorts of made-up charts. You can check out some of my artwork here: www.louisabufardeci.net.

Aside from making art, I love listening to music (at the moment I'm enjoying Bill Frisell, Nina Simone, Lucinda Williams, Mark Kozelek), reading (JM Coetzee's "Elizabeth Costello"), cooking -- I'm into baking breads right now, and hanging out with my husband, of course!

Why do I enjoy teaching online?

I enjoy teaching online for so many reasons. I think most of all I like the contact with such a diverse range of students from so many places around the country and beyond. Of course I love the flexibility too!

Selected Works

Museum of Contemporary Art (MOT) in Tokyo, Japan
Some Material Flags (2008)
Seersucker fabric, each 400 x 200cm.

The national flag typically represents the ideals, history, political structure,and so on, of a country. The concept behind Some Material Flags is to considerhow a national flag might be designed to represent commonplace information aboutits inhabitants.
Stars, circles, stripes, crescents, diamonds and other shapes will each illustrate – inproportion to the entire population as to the entire flag – such ordinaryinformation as coffee consumption, cell phone usage, alcohol consumption, sugarconsumption, literacy levels, and so on.?The idea is to relocate the idealisticsymbology of flags into the realm of the ordinary.
To this end, the flags are made of seersucker – a fabric whose textureis striped with puckers and designed for the practical effect of wicking sweatoff a person's body with much greater ease than a typical flat fabric. Its patternis generally striped or checked.