Christl Iausly

Flowers are part of Christl Iausly’s personality. She loves to grow them, to find them along roadsides, to rescue them before the mowers come out to cut them, and to work with them to create beautiful images.

Christl Iausly creates vignettes by assembling the flowers, leaves, seed heads, and petals she has collected during the spring and summer from the gardens, hillsides, and roadsides of Southwest Wisconsin. She collects, in hours of backbreaking effort, then dries them in a flower press. After they are totally dry, she sorts them into containers from which she will choose the perfect flower or leaf to complete her images.

When it is time to create the image she has in her mind, she painstakingly glues each flower, petal, leaflet, and seed into her compositions. They are sometimes elaborate imaginary landscapes, finely defined down to the birds in the trees, and sometimes hearts or bouquets of flowers which bring back the warmth of a summer day.

Christl also works with wheat to create wheat weavings, a traditional German craft. She weaves house blessings, ornaments, and wheat straw angels out of entire stalks of wheat. But she also soaks just the wheat stalk stems, opens them, flattens them, sometimes dying them, to create a flat medium which she can then cut into hearts or other solid images for her wildflower assemblages, or use in flat and 3-dimensional Christmas tree ornaments.

After her wildflower images are completed, she mats and frames them into completed pictures ready for grouping on a wall, or placing in a stand.

Over a period of the last few years, Christl has been learning how to make and incorporate handmade paper into her work -- especially the landscapes, where she wants to vary the background of the image with multicolored handmade papers.
She shows her work regionally throughout southern Wisconsin, at galleries and art fairs, including the Madison Civic Center Holiday Art Fair, Germanfest in Milwaukee, the Spring Green Art Fair, Wollersheim Winery’s Octoberfest, and others. Her wildflower images and wheat straw angels have been presented in Midwest Living Magazine.
Christl Iausly’s work has been acquired by such businesses as The Royal Band and The Springs Resort in Spring Green, as well as by private individuals.

131 W. Court St. · P.O. Box 475 · Richland Center, WI 53581

608-604-2838