The daughter of a toy designer, Candace Knapp was encouraged to indulge her imagination. She earned a BFA in sculpture from the Cleveland Institute of Art and an MFA from the University of Illinois. She learned about clarity from the Buddhists, fierce joy from the Sufis, magical holiness from Christian Mystics and life energy from Taoist TaiChi. She credits her ongoing relationship with nature, however, as the main influence in her life and work: birds, animals, insects, clouds, stars, microbes and especially trees. After spending most of her life carving wood she feels a strong kinship with the trees from which it came.Travels have taken her through Europe, Africa and Asia, and she lived in Sweden for a year with her husband, Bjorn. In Florida the couple had a company called Andren & Knapp in which they designed and produced furniture and statues for churches. They also worked together on Public Art commissions. I have done installations at the Brevard Art Museum (later named Foosner Art Museum), Florida Museum for Women Artists, Florida Craftsmen Gallery in St Petersburg, the Morean Art Center and Mt Dora Center for the Arts and sometimes included composed background sounds as part of the work. My work is in the permanent collection of the Miaoli Wood Sculpture Museum in Sanyi, Taiwan (where I was invited to have a show in 2007) and also in the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art in Memphis TN. Lately I have been painting .