Artist Statement - Nik Alwerdt

I have been involved with art all my life. My formal education was at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, Illinois from where I graduated with a B.A. of Fine Arts in 1974. My interests were in both sculpture and painting. After graduating, I moved to Tempe, Arizona where I had a studio for four years. After living in Arizona, I moved to Chicago, Illinois, and maintained an art studio for about four years, creating large scale paintings.

In the late 1980s, I moved back to my home country and started growing flowers and botanicals for drying to be used in wreaths and flower arrangements. Alwerdts Gardens was established in 1988 and now has grown into a destination garden center of around eight acres with a three-acre botanical display garden for the public to experience.

During the last 30 years, my creative outlet has been in garden and landscape design, along with flower arrangements. My passion is sculpture in the landscape.

In 2017, I started Alwerdt Artworks Sculpture Park around my one-and-a-half-acre renovated farm pound. It has a half-mile walking path around the lake with, currently, 33 sculptures and it continues to expand. The sculptures here are for your viewing enjoyment, as well as for sale.

The sculpture park is open to the public from sunrise to sunset year-round. A work in progress, anyone wanting to submit an art piece should please contact me through the form below. I am open to all ideas! Presently, I have my own work on display as well as kinetic sculptures by Jim LaPaso from Texas and Aldon Addington, a retired art professor, from Carbondale.

We have plenty of space for the creative expressions of any and all who have an interests!

Thanks,
Nik Alwerdt