Irene Imfeld is from a small town in Ohio. She moved to San Francisco in 1970, studied textiles in Berkeley, then showed textile work throughout northern California. She worked as a graphic designer in the publishing industry until the early 2000s when she bought a large-format printer and set up her Oakland studio. She attended numerous workshops and reviews; assisted artist Susannah Hays with exhibits and teaching at UC Berkeley; went on an art-exchange trip to Japan; was an active member of SFMOMA’s Foto Forum; and joined the Bay Area Photographers Collective. At BAPC she met Henry Bowles and together they opened PHOTO, a regional gallery in Oakland, 2010-15. In the 2010s, Irene also received two funded residencies and self-published a monograph. Vacant Nests #21 was chosen by William Wegman as Grand Prize Winner in the 2014 PhotoAlliance competition in San Francisco. The Vacant Nests series was winner of the portfolio competition at Soho Photo Gallery, NY, with a solo exhibit in 2016. Her work was given solo exhibitions at the Peninsula Art Museum, the Bolinas Museum, and the Fresno Art Museum, all in California. She was a board member of PhotoAlliance, 2015-18. Irene Imfeld is interested in the rhythm and flow of natural forces and specializes in images that immerse viewers in the chaos of the natural environment. She finds the bond between humans and other living systems to be simple and instinctive, not requiring labels and measurements. Her nature based imagery draws on aesthetic traditions from realism to rococo. Always grounded in common reality and composed in camera, the subjects are more-or-less recognizable as her work has become more abstract over time.