Expanding upon her undergraduate textiles education from Savannah College of Art and Design, Kimberly English (b. 1994) earned her MFA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in Studio Art as a Carolina Digital Humanities Fellow in 2018. Kimberly has been awarded residencies at Woodstock Byrdcliffe Artist Colony, University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, The Bascom Center for the Visual Arts, Penland School of Craft, and Praxis Digital Weaving Lab.
English’s work has been exhibited widely and internationally, recently at the Spartanburg Art Museum, New Bedford Art Museum, the Delaware Contemporary, the Ackland Museum, Vox Populi, CICA Museum, and the Museum of Craft and Design.
Kimberly is currently the Emerging Artist Fellow in Fiber at Virginia Commonwealth University and runs a weaving residency, Tabby Studio, out of the shared studio space on her property in Canton, North Carolina.
"My fiber-based practice explores the connection between the individual and the collective through historical, personal, and perceptual interrogations of textile structure. Through woven and quilted textile forms that emphasize and obfuscate found material, my work emphasizes tension, typically through the use of negative space. Synthesizing narratives informed by the American South and globalized labor, my practice seeks to explore the nuance of interdependence - real and imagined - between land, machines, people, and the objects they create."
Tell us a little about yourself (where you are from) and your background in the arts.
I was raised in rural middle Georgia and my parents were both craft hobbyists. My dad was a woodworker, and he, especially, catalyzed my relationship to making and material-based exploration. I'm so grateful that my parents helped me prioritize my creativity, being involved in music and art classes growing up.
In college, my professors urged me to enroll in a fiber course and that was really turning the corner towards thinking through thread. I remember the first time I wove on a loom - that euphoric feeling of being a sponge, soaking up every little bit of information that I could.
I got my MFA in 2018 from UNC Chapel Hill and have been in North Carolina pretty much ever since (except for the one year I ran away to teach English in Korea).
What kind of work are you currently making?
Right now, I’m mostly in the research phase for a body of work that’s expanding southern Appalachian weaving patterns. I’m working through cataloging a personal encyclopedia of sorts to have a reference for the patterns that I want to weave, or riff off of, in my upcoming series of weavings.
As I mentioned in my Studio Tour, this work will be shown at the Appalachian Center for Craft in Fall of 2025. One thing that makes this part of this particular body of work so fun (?) is how little information there is on these patterns. It’s interesting for me to try to fill in the gaps of the origins of them. I’m excited about the existing narrative and space for speculation in this mode of working and I'm eager to get back on the loom.
What is a day like in the studio for you?
Spin yarn until I have a clear starting point for the day, weave and listen to an audiobook, unweave because I was paying too much attention to my audiobook, walk through the garden, come back and weave some more, start a sewing project, convince myself to come back to the loom, feel moments of boredom, feel moments of bliss, try to respond to neither, work the last hour with reality TV in the background.
What are you looking at right now and/or reading?
Too many things to keep track of! I’m revisiting Fray by Julia Bryan-Wilson. I’m also rereading Etel Adnan’s Shifting the Silence - one of my favorites to return to. I’ve been frequenting the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts’s bedcoverings that they have online quite a bit recently. I’m also watching a LOT of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives.
Where can we find more of your work? (ex. website/insta/gallery/upcoming shows)
Website: www.kimberly-english.com
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kimberly__english/
Stay tuned for my solo exhibition at the Appalachian Center for Craft next Fall.
Comments