Artist Robin Edmundson: Inspired by Southern 
Indiana’s Raw Beauty

The artist, Robin Edmundson, on her farm in Solsberry, Indiana. Photo by Martin Boling

BY TRACY ZOLLINGER TURNER

Growing up, Robin Edmundson was focused on the codes and puzzle-solving involved in learning new languages. It wasn’t until she was in graduate school working toward a Ph.D. in linguistics that her attention shifted to the vernacular of art.

“I was one of those people who was encouraged not to be artistic as a child,” Edmundson, 55, says of her early life in northern Indiana. That changed when she moved to a farm in Solsberry, Indiana, in the 1990s. There she began to raise sheep and hand-dye their fleece, spinning yarn and creating wearable shawls and fiber art wall pieces.

In 2014, while Christmas shopping for her two daughters (now in college), Edmundson impulsively bought herself a watercolor set. “That made me happy in ways my brain had never been happy before,” she says. She took classes at the Ivy Tech John Waldron Arts Center and joined the Bloomington Watercolor Society. “And I just kept painting,” she says. “Eventually I had a studio full of paintings and I began showing the work.”

Married to Eric Jenness, a carpenter/contractor, Edmundson taught linguistics and English as a second language at Indiana University from 1986 until 2013. Today, she continues to sell her hand-dyed yarns, but watercolors have become her focus.

Her watercolors are inspired by her Solsberry surroundings. “I have a deep and abiding love for rural America and rural Indiana specifically, that raw beauty,” she says. “It’s unruly, it’s messy out here, and I love trying to capture that wild and crazy and incredibly beautiful aspect of American life.”

To see more of Edmundson’s work, visit robinedmundson.com.