Leisa Rich said it wasn’t so long ago when her queries to get into galleries were met with 20 rejections for every acceptance.

"It’s funny that, just as I get this award, I’m getting 20 acceptances for every rejection," said Ms. Rich, a North Texas Area Art League member who won the group’s top prize in the juried members show, the Littie Grooms Award, a $250 cash prize. The exhibit is running now in the East Gallery at the Center for the Visual Arts.

"I felt really flattered to get the award," said Ms. Rich, a Coppell resident who has been a league member for the three years she has lived in the area.

"Saving Innocents," Ms. Rich’s mixed-media piece, caught juror Cidnee Patrick’s eye. The piece is a chest of drawers covered in bits of broken eggshell. The five drawers take the viewer through the birth, life, death and spiritual ascension of a soul. Disturbing and precious items, each symbolic of the stage of life the artist depicts, populate the drawers and provoke the viewer. Sitting on top of the chest is what Ms. Rich describes as a "phallic" womb, which contains an infant.

It’s content like this that has kept the artist from breaking into area galleries, she said. Her themes have seemed antagonistic to the lock-step faithful among us, even though the artist both admires and falls short of understanding the more fervent Christians she’s encountered since moving to the state. Ms. Rich said her work might also seem thorny, because she is drawn to both women’s and children’s issues as themes in her work.

Leisa Rich was more interested in dance as a child than art. She attended the Interlochen Arts Academy, one of the nation’s top fine arts boarding schools in Traverse City, Mich., from 1975 to 1978. She came to visual arts almost accidentally. She contracted mononucleosis and had to take a lot of time off from school. She recuperated, only to find out the dance program had "kicked me out until I lost the weight I gained."

On hiatus from her dance studies, Ms. Rich had a space in her schedule. Her classmates urged her to take weaving. She did, and found she liked the textures and the process.

"But I guess it even goes back before that," she said. "I was deaf as a child and spent a lot of time in the hospital. My mother would make Barbie clothes, and I remember always liking the colors and textures. And I did a lot of finger-painting in the hospital art room."

After Interlochen, Ms. Rich attended the University of Michigan and eventually earned an art education degree in Canada. She moved back to the U.S. five years ago, and an Immigration and Naturalization Service glitch kept her from working for eight months.

She turned her attention to art.

"I had a lot of time on my hands, and I used it to explore a lot of the ideas I’m dealing with now," she said. "It turned out to be a good thing for me."

Ms. Rich said she has a hard time putting herself into a category, but said she mixes two- and three-dimensional work and uses a lot of fiber. She’s a trained weaver who now teaches just about all levels at Art & Beyond, a private, extra-curricular school in Coppell that trains students in art, gymnastics, dance and other activities.

But when it’s time for her to create for herself, she uses earthy sorts of matter to tell her stories. In the last several years, Ms. Rich said she’s found her conceptual voice. The galleries — though not so much the galleries in the Bible belt — have been giving her shows. She said her themes might be too frank, or too uncomfortable, for the more conservative people of North Texas.

"I feel a real responsibility to explore the matters of the soul. Especially the woman’s soul. I think I struggle with my role as a woman, and I see and talk to a lot of other women about their roles as women," she said.

That means that the work can sometimes take a turn for the political. Her feelings about women being subjected to male domination, and her larger sense of our colder, technological society, influence her art. However, Ms. Rich said she’s also allowed the fervent religious landscape of North Texas to influence her work. That could account for the yin-and-yang feel of "Saving Innocents." The porcelain infant inside the phallic womb represents the protection and creation of male and female. The warmth of the object unites male and female, too, she said.

"Saving Innocents" chases life and death along all bends of the cycle, and Ms. Rich said some viewers are repelled by her choice of materials: eggshells, pennies on eyes and hair.

"I think people tend to look at the exterior of my work and say: ‘Eww! Look at the eggshells, and the pennies on the eyes and the hair.’ The eggshell brings me back to that ultimate fragility and the ultimate protection. An eggshell protects this whole life, but at the same time, it’s extremely fragile.

"My dad still asks me when I’m going to paint pretty pictures, but I’m not doing this to sit down and paint some pictures that would probably sell," she said. "I have to do this. It’s my obsession, passion and it is absolutely essential to my existence."

LUCINDA BREEDING can be reached at 940-566-6877.