In The Glow: behind the scenes

In the Glow at the Triton Museum of Art was a year-long effort born of curiosity. When the curator of the museum approached me about a solo exhibition in July 2023 she opened the possibility of a retrospective but also entertained the idea of new work. I was excited to try something large-scale and immersive in the Cowell Gallery with its open floorplan, tall windows, and high ceilings. By September I was ready to present my concept for a monumental stitched sculpture hanging from the ceiling that would feature organic undulating forms— along with freestanding and wall mounted sculptures, all tied together thematically and through their use of reflected light and color. I’m grateful to the museum team for their faith in my ambitious plan, or perhaps in my enthusiasm.

My organic, visceral sculptures rendered in felted wool are a means to express the ideas or sensations that words cannot quite pin down- the feelings that contain contradictions that cannot be resolved, only examined. For the Triton Museum I wanted to lean into my experiences as a contemporary woman in American culture to connect with others who likewise feel challenged, empowered, overlooked, celebrated, victimized, and hopeful… sometimes all at the same time. I wanted to embody those ideas in an abstracted way using fiber media and incorporating intense areas of pink pigment to explore themes of soft power, aesthetic perception, and the intimate contradictions of a woman’s experiences. 

Besides creating fifteen new artworks over the following year, I embarked on a highly experimental project scaling up and adapting techniques and materials to satisfy my urge to push my practice into new territory. I wanted to see if I could manipulate and engineer 1/8-inch-thick industrial felt to make a sixteen-foot-tall ‘wall’ of female-inspired shapes. The twenty-foot-wide structure, pierced by openings and stitched into curves, would read as a solid form from the front and a cavern of reflected pink pigment from the back. Visitors to the gallery would be welcome to move around the structure to explore the convex and concave surfaces assembled from stitched panels of thick felt. The ‘curtain’ of felt would be positioned ten feet away from a brightly pigmented wall, casting a pink glow on the sculpture and audiences alike.

The scale of artworks presented— from intimate to monumental—is intended to echo the real and perceived boundaries of my own physical body, particularly because I present as a cisgender, ‘traditional’ female person.

I documented the process of creating the central immersive stitched sculpture through photos and videos to share the experience of making something that has never existed before. I prefer to learn and problem-solve through tactile activities; I tend to design artworks through hands-on processes rather than digital means. For this project I began by making a 1/16th scale model in clay in order to visualize and work out the whole piece. It went through several redesigns in which I cut off and added parts to arrive at my final plan:

Next I manually enlarged the design into a 1/4 scale Styrofoam model by carving with hot wire tools. The tools send electricity through wires to melt a path through the foam, and I could bend the wire tips to achieve the shapes intended.

Rasping and sanding the surfaces brought them to the contours I envisioned.

I used sheets of craft felt to ‘drape’ the foam contours, creating pieces that would follow the swells and hollows by cutting away parts that folded over to create a flat pattern.

I carefully labeled each pattern piece so I would later be able to put the puzzle back together, then removed and photographed those flat patterns to trace and smooth them digitally in my computer using Adobe Illustrator. I scaled up the patterns to full size, had them printed using Plotter Pro’s large-scale printer, and cut out the pieces in 1/8-inch-thick industrial felt. I stitched together some of the pieces as a proof-of-concept and was satisfied with the way the thick felt held its shape, so I continued stitching all the full-sized pieces.

I used a sewing machine to join the pieces together while still at my studio, lining up several tables to support the masses of felt as I ran them through my machine. The heaviest of the columns weighs 23 pounds, and I had to work strategically to ensure that I could fit the accumulated pieces to the left of the machine and minimize the amount passing through the limited opening of its ‘throat’ to the right of the needle.

Upon finishing each column I used a pulley system to lift it to full height in my studio hallway to see how it draped and tweak areas as needed by hand-stitching, but I had no way to hang all six columns together to check their fit before they were actually onsite at the museum.

I worked with Splady Art Studios in Oakland to create contoured metal brackets to hang at the ceiling in the museum. The three-foot-tall partial wall that hangs down from the ceiling was my actual attachment point; it normally serves to mount and hide a retractable screen on the far side. This functional architectural feature helped steer the concept of the entire sculptural installation. I chose an intensely bright pink paint for the wall behind the stitched piece to reflect a soft glow back on the artwork and viewers.

When I first suspended the six columns from their armature frames they didn’t appear particularly sculptural, but over the course of a week stitching them to each other and adding in metal ribs (almost like you’d find in a corset) the forms were better able to hold their shapes in the face of gravity.

I placed the freestanding sculptures and wall sculptures, and the museum staff lit the space. The work of a year had come to fruition at last. I am incredibly proud of the exhibition as a whole.

View sketches and in-progress photos of some of the smaller works below, and see finished freestanding and wall-mounted sculptures here: In the Glow Artworks

If you’d like to arrange for an artist-led tour of the exhibition, please fill out the inquiry form:

You may also look back in time at videos and photos showing the creation of this new work via Instagram or Tiktok.