Mills Brown ’15 and Kate Timbes ’23 are creating with purpose, and both artists had work showcased this spring by ArtFields, an arts organization in Lake City, South Carolina, that celebrates Southern artists.
Timbes’ art was displayed on the runway. She won first prize in the ArtFields Up-Cycled Runway Show, held April 25, for her wearable art piece, “Shell,” modeled by Tatum Mogck ’26.
Timbes’ artistic practice centers around giving new life to discarded materials.
“I see objects at the end of their life cycle as more than just trash,” says Timbes, an interdisciplinary artist from Columbia, South Carolina. “‘Shell’ is made of recycled paper that I turned back into pulp and remade, plus wire and discarded fishing line that I found in the Congaree River.”
Timbes discovered sustainable art and fashion as a studio art major at Wofford. She learned to make paper during a study abroad experience her junior year in Copenhagen. Later, while interning as a studio assistant at Wofford, she learned how to make molds and deckles for papermaking. She also researched the evolution of sustainability in fashion for her film and digital media minor capstone.
“Learning about these processes launched me into a frenzy of making,” she says. “I used my own paper waste and waste I collected from Wofford’s recycle bins and did not stop until my first wearable piece was in front of me.”
Through projects like “Shell,” Timbes hopes to teach others about a new way of making in a world dominated by large-scale corporations and fast fashion. This year, she received a grant from the South Carolina Arts Commission to purchase a mobile papermaking studio, which she uses to teach papermaking workshops at various art centers in the Carolinas. She also owns a small business, Woven Studios, that sells handmade jewelry and paintings.
“I feel a duty to keep pushing for processes that foster a more symbiotic relationship with our world,” she says. “My goal is to get into the community and make spaces that are dedicated to creating in a fun and educational way.”
Brown is also exploring new ways to create. She completed a residency in May with ArtFields that centered on learning to make art alongside her toddler and inviting other families to engage in creating together, culminating in a community workshop.
“The residency gives artists dedicated time, space and support to focus on experimentation without the pressure of producing a finished exhibition,” says Brown, an interdisciplinary artist from Florence, South Carolina. For the two-week residency, she returned to the U.S. from Oxford, England, where she leads a youth program at an art gallery called Modern Art Oxford. Her own work explores her experiences with living abroad, pregnancy and postpartum through painting, drawing and animation.
Brown turned the residency studio into a sensory space where every surface from wall to ceiling — including canvas, paper and cardboard — could be painted on. Each day, her son and other visitors could let their imagination run wild, drawing or painting anything they wanted. Brown later added her own touches to what the others created.
“This installation focused on themes of new parenthood, domestic spaces and shared wonder between children and adults,” Brown says. “It helped my painting process become more fluid with less time spent on compositional choices or rendering and more energy focused on color, process and collaboration.”
Brown says her education at Wofford, where she double majored in art history and English, built the foundation of her practice. Diving into literature and taking travel opportunities like her study abroad trip to Amsterdam provided creative influences that still inform her work today.
“Wofford helped me grow as an artist by giving me a strong interdisciplinary foundation and expanding my sense of what a creative life could look like,” she says. “My formative experiences within a liberal arts education encouraged me to see art as a human impulse to make meaning, process experience and communicate in ways that go beyond language.”