©2025 Kiu Burns
Body of Water
3’x4’
Acrylic on Canvas
In Collaboration with James Wasley, AIA, LEED-AP, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
I’m not a landscape painter. Never have I ever seen a beautiful scene and thought, “I want to recreate that!” No disrespect to people who do, it’s just never been my cup of tea. My passion has always lied in portraiture and the human form. The curves and contours of the human body are both familiar to my own and unique to my subject. When the time came to make this piece, I struggled. My collaborator, Jim, is an architect who has designed environmentally friendly water features for various buildings on the UW-Milwaukee campus. While I admire Jim’s lovely work, there were no people in sight! Because even though I find water beautiful, it wasn’t enough to just paint water. That’s when I decided I could form the water into whatever I wanted, ergo, pond lady.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Kiu Burns is a Milwaukee based queer artist who loves to create all things whimsical. Kiu currently attends UW-Milwaukee where they are earning their BFA with an emphasis in painting and drawing.
Instagram: @kiubertcreates
Threadless: kiubertcreates.threadless.com
ABOUT THE WATER PARTNER
Professor James Wasley is a director of the Institute for Ecological Design at the School of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Wisconsin- Milwaukee. He is a Past-President of the Society of Building Science Educators and a Past-President of the Wisconsin Green Building Alliance (now the Wisconsin Chapter of the USGBC).
His current research interests are broadly in ‘transition design’- the multi-faceted problem of evolving our physical environment towards forms and structures that allow us to thrive while maintaining the integrity of the world’s ecological and geophysical systems. This includes the design of resilient and regenerative buildings, the adaptive reuse of existing buildings, the redevelopment of brownfield sites, the linking of individual buildings through district scale energy and water systems, and the use of green/ blue infrastructure to reintroduce ecosystem services into urban environments through the medium of water.
MADE POSSIBLE THROUGH SUPPORT FROM
