The biographies and statements from all 19 artists contributing to the Collective Threads exhibition at The Invisible Dog this January 23 - February 2nd.
Lucy Beizer is a fiber artist who integrates a variety of traditional techniques into her soft sculptures. Her work focuses on nature, memory, nostalgia and conservation. She often incorporates found and reused objects into her fiber pieces, as well as natural dyes, scrap yarns and fabrics, and original illustrations. Lucy has trouble choosing just one style to work in, her pieces range from applique quilts to knitted masks and wearable art. What stays consistent is her love for any type of fiber project, portraying recognizable symbols and being a little silly. Lucy uses art as a form of creative record keeping and as a way to communicate and connect. Lucy lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
Website: lucybeizer.com
Instagram: @luce.threads
Madison Berg would rather be knitting than writing an artist statement.
Instagram: @fancyfrogknits
Kelly Boehmer creates soft sculptures and collaborative performance artworks.She has exhibited and performed her work nationally and internationally in over 175 exhibitions. She received her BFA in Studio Art at the Maryland Institute College of Art and her MFA in Studio Art at the University of South Florida. She is a member of the performance art band, Glitter Chariot. Kelly is a Professor of Foundations Studies at Savannah College of Art and Design, in Savannah, GA.
Statement:
I sew soft sculptures that portray a tragic sense of humor, celebrating the hidden beauty I find in anxieties. My creatures are metaphors for anxiety, weight gain, and aging. I find humor in my struggles with social anxiety, and changes in my body, and all my attempts to be “comfortable in my own skin”.
While the imagery is often grotesque, the flayed and molting creatures symbolize positive change, growth, and transformation. I use glittery sheer fabrics and vivid faux fur to contrast difficult emotions against inviting textures - softening the rawness to make the work more approachable for the viewer. This makes a push/pull between the attraction and repulsion.
Iconic works from art history, like the Unicorn Tapestries, Laocoön Group, Lion Hunt of Ashurbanipal, The Arnolfini Portrait, among others, often serve as a starting point for my work.
My aggressive hand-sewing is a deliberate choice similar to an expressive outline used in a drawing. Central to my process is the concept of repurposing materials from my old sculptures, cutting them up after an exhibition. I merge old parts of sculptures with upcycled taxidermy – giving them both a “second life”. Connecting remnants of past works to make new work creates a layered history within the materials themselves. This is similar to pentimenti, the Italian word for “repentance,” which refers to the subtle evidence of corrections in a painting.
Website: kellyboehmer.com
Instagram: @kelly.boehmer
Facebook: kelly.boehmer1
Capucine Bourcart has lived in New York City since 2006, originally from France. She carries with her a blend of French and Vietnamese heritage. Bourcart's artistic footprint extends across various galleries and art venues, both nationally and internationally. She has ventured into the public sphere with four large-scale art pieces printed on aluminum, engaging audiences in the artistic landscape of New York.
In 2020, Bourcart co-founded the collective Art Forms Us, a forum for open discussions on artistic processes and contemporary art topics and projects. Her commitment to artistic exploration led her to complete a residency at Kino Saito Arts Center, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the Vermont Studio Center in 2023, following her MFA from the School of Visual Arts in 2023.
Statement:
My artistic practice involves collecting materials such as sand, lint, cat fur, and human hair from urban environments, rural travels, or domestic surroundings. I am drawn to materials that carry traces of life—natural, animal, and human—because they resonate with impermanence and transformation. While I don’t always have a specific intention when I gather them, each material carries its own meaning.
My work is inspired by my family history. My paternal ancestors thrived in the textile industry in France, while my maternal grandparents came from more modest backgrounds. My Vietnamese grandfather was a ‘Cong Binh’ (soldier-worker) forcibly recruited by France during WWII. His story, like many others, has remained invisible. Through my practice, I aim to harmonize both sides of my family's disparate background, erasing boundaries between craft and fine art.
Playfully exploring materials that seem to have a voice of their own and influence the process—determining which techniques, such as felting, embroidery, or collage, suit them best—is central to my approach. The practice serves as a kind of diary, a space where questions about humanity’s relationship with nature, the environment, and animals are explored. It invites introspection, offering a canvas for individual perspectives and critique of societal behavior.
Instagram: @capucinebourcart
Katie Commodore
Katie’s parents could have told you when she was a toddler that she would grow up to be an artist, despite years of her insisting that she was going to be an astronaut and them sending her to Space Camp twice. Never giving up her dreams of painting Martian landscapes and testing low gravity pastels, she went to art school, which surprisingly lacked the rigorous science background NASA required. Katie attended the Maryland Institute College of Art, in Baltimore, graduating with a BFA in Illustration. After time spent abroad, in locales including Florence, Paris, Prague, Greece, plus a short stint in Las Vegas that is better left unspoken about, Katie returned to school, attending the Rhode Island School of Design, and earning her MFA in Printmaking. After 14 years in Brooklyn, she returned to Providence, and is now Adjunct Faculty at her alma mater and Clark University.
Website: katiecommodore.com
Instagram: @katiecommodore
Lara Felsing is an interdisciplinary Métis artist from Northern Alberta, Canada. Her practice explores kinship to the natural world and advocates for the necessity of living in reciprocity with the land and all living beings. Traditional plant harvesting is at the core of her practice, and Lara gathers roots, leaves, berries, petals, and pine needles to create compostable paintings, weavings, and blankets that speak to the necessity of honouring and showing gratitude for Mother Earth's gifts. She has an MFA from the Emily Carr University of Art & Design in Vancouver, British Columbia, and is a recipient of the Renée Van Halm + Pietro Widmer Graduation Award for Visual Arts. Additional awards include the Indigenous Scholars Award, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, Government of Canada, the Peter deMarsh Memorial Bursary, Canadian Federation of Forest Owners, and the Yaxkasei (William Callaghan) Memorial Award, Emily Carr University of Art + Design. Lara has exhibited across Canada, the United Kingdom, Sweden, Australia and the United States. She has attended residencies at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity in Banff, Alberta, and the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha, Nebraska.
Website: larafelsing.com
Instagram: @magpie3studio
Candace Hicks collects coincidences from the books she reads and gathers them in her artists’ books and installations. Her compendiums of coincidence are records that show the world through a particular, specific, sometimes obsessive, point of view. Books from her Common Threads series are in more than 80 collections around the world including, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Boston Athenaeum, Deutsche Nationalbibliothek, Grolier Club, Harvard, Hungarian Multicultural Center, MIT, MoMA, Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna, UCLA Biomedical Library, Stanford, and Yale.
Website: candacehicks.com
Instagram: @candacehicksart
Eleanor Kagan is a fiber artist and audio-maker whose work explores concepts of self, place, history, identity, and power. Her fifteen years spent making audio documentaries, producing radio interviews, and doing deep archival research laid a foundation for her desire to interrogate power and identity through lived experience. With textiles, she expands that practice, and seeks to make the intangible tangible through narrative quiltmaking using found and repurposed materials.
These discoveries often include clothes, through which she tells stories of the presentation and evolution of self. Each piece of fabric holds a memory and a history that is further sustained, complicated or subverted by its inclusion in a quilt. By using techniques such as hand and machine appliqué, machine piecing, improvisational design, hand quilting, embroidery, and more, she invites abstraction, absurdity, and softness into these endeavors.
Instagram: @bloomsdaymakes
Layla Klinger is a holemaker and artist.
Website: laylank.com
Instagram: @violetmenace
Shradha Kochhar (b. Delhi, India) is a textile artist and knitwear designer based in Brooklyn, New York. Best known for her home spun and hand knitted ‘khadi’ sculptures using ‘kala cotton’ - an inherently organic cotton strain indigenous to India, her work is at an intersection of material memory, sustainability and intergenerational healing. Focusing on generating a physical archive of personal and collective south asian narratives linked to women’s work, invisible labor and grief, the work is large scale and exists as sculpture beyond whispers over generations.
Kochhar received her MFA in Textiles from Parsons School of Design, New York. She is a Dorothy Waxman Textile Excellence Prize Finalist and was awarded the John L. Tishman Environment and Design Award for Excellence in 2021. Her work has been shown at the Melbourne Museum, Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, Mana Contemporary and New York Public Library. Her work has been featured in Architectural Digest, Vogue, Crafts Magazine, Harper's Bazaar and others.
Statement:
I think a lot about what binds us all as people from all over the world, time and space - I believe it is the soil that nurtures, the hand that gets passed on each generation and the air we continue to collectively breathe. I also believe that this connection through commonalities is integral in blurring all lines between our differences.
I make textiles as I reflect on the ways in which history and memory, invisibility and the effects of politics, space, symbolism, stereotypes and gazes interact. I look at the body, the environment and objects that surround us everyday, as vessels of self-reliance and change towards an alternate future, a decolonized world through the act of hand spinning indigenous cotton and knitting.
However, matter is key but matter is also emotional, it is tender and it is lingering - The last touch of those who came before me can still be heard, seen and felt and will be so, for those after me.
Website:shradhakochhar.com
Instagram:@shradhakochhar
Steven and William Ladd
Growing up in St. Louis, Missouri, William discovered a passion for beading at age 15. Steven began making clothes while studying at Rockhurst University in Kansas City. After moving to Brooklyn, NY to collaborate, their formal artistic partnership began in 2000, creating accessories that attracted interest from the Louvre’s Musée des Arts Décoratifs, which acquired a handbag for the permanent collection. Selected for the Smithsonian Cooper Hewitt’s Design Triennial in 2006, the Ladds’ artworks began representing the people, places, and memories of their shared childhood, an evolving theme throughout their practice.
Lucien Zayan, Director of The Invisible Dog Art Center in Brooklyn, sparked a career turning point in 2009 by commissioning a chandelier fashioned from buckles and trimmings discarded in the basement of his space. Lucien’s donation of a treasure trove of cast-off materials fueled four solo exhibitions at the Center plus the growth of their public engagement program “Scrollathon,” now a core component of the Ladds’ artistic practice.
Website:stevenandwilliam.com
Spandita Malik is an Indian visual artist whose work delves into global socio-political issues, centering on women’s rights and gendered violence. Combining photography and surface embroidery, Malik’s practice emphasizes collaboration with women in India to create expanded documentary and socially engaged projects. Her work challenges colonial perspectives and redefines traditional representations within documentary photography.
In her ongoing project Jāḷī, Malik collaborates with survivors of domestic abuse in India. She photographs these women in settings of their choice, transferring the images onto homespun muslin—a material that in this context carries echoes of Gandhi's khadi, the cloth imbued with historical and political significance. These portraits are sent back to the women, who then embroider their likenesses according to their vision, reclaiming their narratives and asserting agency in their representation. By empowering her collaborators to shape their representations, Malik subverts the notion of the artist as sole creator, fostering networks of solidarity and extending the women’s voices beyond their confined worlds. This collaborative effort weaves a tapestry of collective resistance.
Website: spandita-malik.com
Instagram: @spanditamalik
Erin McQuarrie (b. Glasgow, Scotland) is an artist, researcher and educator based in the Scottish Highlands. She believes ancient methods of making provide an innovative means of interpreting and responding to contemporary life. Through textiles, McQuarrie reacts to the everyday – the language of warp and weft is her vocabulary, providing an antithesis to our fast-paced consumerist society, an outlet to explore community building, wellbeing, and a platform for historical recovery. She completed her MFA in Textiles at Parsons School of Design, NYC (2021) and her BFA in Textiles at The Glasgow School of Art (2018). Her work has been exhibited internationally, including Jane Lombard Gallery, Mana Contemporary, The Royal Scottish Academy, L’Space Gallery, NYPL, and New York Textile Month. McQuarrie has delivered guest lectures at Central Saint Martins, Parsons School of Design and is currently a full time faculty member at The Glasgow School of Art.
Website: erinmcquarrie.com
Jonathan Michaud is a resident artist at the Invisible Dog Art Center. He holds a BFA in textiles from RISD and an MA in constructed textiles from The Royal College of Art.
Michaud’s process often includes unweaving and re-weaving his own textiles, thinking about construction, deconstruction, and transformation. The repetitive act of weaving and layering mirror the passage of time - patterns emerge, fade, and transform, yet remain interconnected.
Rooted in a familial history with dementia, as a caretaker and keeper of otherwise lost memories, his recent works explore the cyclical nature of loss and renewal. His increasingly reductive approach to color, texture, and pattern emphasizes subtle variations, highlighting fragmentation and connectedness, and revealing the delicate balance between continuity, change, and the fragile yet enduring bonds that persist.
Michaud’s work builds on the lineage of abstract weaving, pioneered by artists like Lenore Tawney, Sheila Hicks, and Anni Albers, who redefined textiles beyond the functional, expanding its expressive potential.
Instagram: @jonathanmichaudtextiles
Kate Phillips is a multidisciplinary artist whose work explores the intersection of space, form, and the human experience through an engaging combination of texture, color, text, and materials. While her primary medium is textiles, her creative process often calls for diverse materials and approaches to fully realize each concept. A graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design with a BFA, she has crafted a career that spans both academia and the industry, seamlessly blending artistic innovation with professional expertise.
Statement:
Asking, “What is life?” opens up an endless, vast landscape—at once profound and perplexing. It’s a question that can be explored scientifically, spiritually, or existentially, yet it’s also a statement. Here, “What” is life itself; the notion that “this,” “that,” and “what” all embody the life we experience. Rather than a question, it’s an ongoing discovery. Our lives are the “what,” and the “what” is everything. In its minimalism and almost timeless quality, this work is both darkly humorous and oddly serious, balancing life’s gravity and levity. This same balance is mirrored in the physical form of the artwork, with no distinct top or bottom, evenly spaced elements, and abundant repetition. Through repetition and material, I delve into these ideas. Textiles, with their repetitive loops, wefts, patterns, and textures, embody connection and rhythm, allowing me to meditate on craft and time. The slowness of the process lets me think and create simultaneously, like a long-distance run that combines miles with mindfulness.
Leslie Pontz creates unique sculpture by crocheting wire and monofilament forms and combining them with iron and fiber elements. The result is non-traditional fiber sculpture that challenges the senses and the mind. Leslie holds a masters degree in printmaking from Syracuse University and was the recipient of two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts through the Pennsylvania Council of the Arts as an Artist-in-residence. She is the former owner/designer of Leslie Pontz Design, an international manufacturing company that produced an artist designed and hand printed line of table linens and related tabletop products.
Website: lesliepontz.com
Instagram: @lesliepontz
Henry Rolnick is a textile artist living and working in New York City. He explores the nature of communication through abstract form, searching for and uncovering the building blocks of visual language that are at the root of the archetypal meanings we seek to express. His works are primarily in textiles, a medium that tells a rich history of human relationship to the world and contains infinite patterns born out of its structural means of creation. Through these patterns, Henry seeks to invite the viewer to deconstruct our subconscious distillation of messaging, allowing us to slow down and exercise our agency of interpretation.
Website henryrolnick.com
Instagram: @henaarol
Rachel Snack is a weaver, educator and textile artist. She received her Bachelor of Fine Art in Fiber & Material Studies from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and her Master of Science in Textile Design from Philadelphia University.
Rachel is the founder of Weaver House, a textile studio, yarn shop and weaving school dedicated to preserving craft tradition through hand-making and weaving education. She has exhibited her work internationally, and taught courses on weaving to thousands of students. She has been an artist-in-residence at T.E.X.E.R.E in Mexico, The Burren College of Art in Ireland, and Awamaki in Peru.
Statement:
It is here at the loom that I construct my rite of passage. I weave objects of memory through touch, forming a tangible language between body and place. Textiles remember, unintentionally and by design, due to their fragility and naturally transient existence. Not dissimilar to people, cloth embraces a similar cycle of time, making it almost impossible to disengage human routine from a tactile influence.
My woven body of work is a vessel of my remembrances, as well as material evidence of the human hand, bearing witness. I am a weaver – imprinted in cloth and forever connected.
Website: rachelsnack.com
Instagram: @rachelsnack
Christl Stringer is a surrealist figurative painter, writer, and filmmaker whose work has shown at SPRING/BREAK Art Show, Rivalry Projects, All Street Gallery, and more. Through her art and writing she explores how labor functions as a debilitating distraction in our society.. Her films and scripts have been accepted into NFFTY, Nashville Film Festival, New Haven International Film Festival, and more. She is a graduate of Montclair State University’s Theatre Studies program.
Instagram: @christlstringer
Ana Watterson is a fiber and multimedia artist based in Brooklyn. She rediscovered her passion for crochet work and knitting during the pandemic–these crafts were originally taught to her by her respective grandmothers–and has since been exploring the extent to which she can push the bounds of their practices within the notions of time and labor. Using crocheting and knitting to be both meditative and invigorating, she incorporates and holds both traditions as precious mediums within her artistic contemplations. She is also the gallery manager of The Invisible Dog Art Center and curator of Collective Threads.
Instagram: @aching.fiber
Jessie Mordine Young (b. England, 1993) is a Brooklyn-based artist who researches, writes about, curates, makes and teaches textile art. She believes that textiles can be carriers of empathy, memory, and lived experience and that they are evidence of humanity. This sentiment is at the root of her art practice. In one of her more recent bodies of work, she embarked on a project of creating daily artworks, which she calls “woven drawings” or “thread sketches.” These pieces directly connect to her experiences in nature, where color and texture become tangible references to sites, sounds, and forms she finds when immersed in the landscape. Jessie is also enamored by the alchemy of the dye vat; she often paints her yarn and woven fabrics through a natural dye process and by thoughtfully sourcing plant matter.
She earned her BFA in Fiber and Material Studies and Art History from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) and an MA in Material Culture, Design History and Object Study from the Bard Graduate Center in NYC. She is a part-time faculty at Parsons School of Design. Through extensively researching various craft histories in her academic and former curatorial practice, she has developed an appreciation for slow, thoughtful acts of making as an act of autonomy.
Website: jessiemordineyoung.com
Instagram: @jessiemordine