Danielle Wedeking was born and raised in the small town of Lakefield, located in rural southwest Minnesota. She received her K-12 Visual Arts Education degree at Minnesota State University Mankato where she graduated magna cum laude in 2010. Danielle returned to southwest Minnesota and has been teaching 7-12 grade visual arts for the past 6 years. She is currently teaching at Heron Lake - Okabena High School where she teaches a variety of visual art subjects including drawing, printmaking, ceramics, painting, sculpture, photography and art history. Most recently Danielle received an individual artist grant from the Southwest Minnesota Arts Council to help cover the cost of framing her drawings.

Danielle shared more on her background, "Becoming a teacher has been such a huge part of the last 7 years. My own artwork took a back seat to grading, classroom management, lesson plans and project examples. I don't think you ever get a full handle on teaching but within the last year I have been finding more time to work on my personal artwork resulting in the collection of drawings displayed in Personal Magic. Growing up in rural southwest Minnesota nature has always been a huge inspiration and I enjoy drawing and juxtaposing hard and soft imagery and textures in my artwork. While having always been interested in all things magical, I chose to use the occult imagery to evoke the "magic" that most people associate with the creation of art. As an art teacher a large part of my job is convincing students that they can in fact draw and its not a "magical' skill that only a lucky few are born with. My show Personal Magic is an ode to my students, hard work, and practice."

"My drawings are an ode to my love for nature, antiquity, and symmetry. I enjoy combining familiar with the unfamiliar. This has allowed me to find inspiration in the area in which I live and combining it with other areas of interest from around the world. Finding reference material or images from my home area allows me to add elements of the familiar and juxtaposing them with elements of the unfamiliar, such as sculpture from antiquity, bones, or plants from different regions. I enjoy the process of discovery and familiarizing myself with these unfamiliar objects through the process of drawing and paying special attention to texture, and detail. While drawing the objects themselves with attention to detail I like to create a sense of fantasy with the way in which I arrange the composition with unrealistic symmetry."