August was another month for us to highlight great works of art. This month, the artists spotlighted run the gamut, creating sculptures, tapestries, vessels, and working in five countries — Belgium, Japan, Latvia, the US, and Poland.
Holding a degree in art history from the Université Libre de Bruxelles, Stéphanie Jacques has specialized training in basketry. She uses flexible materials—willow, yarn, recycled materials—to create sculptures that can often be set in motion. Her work has been exhibited in several European countries as well as in the United States. Jacques knots the perforated walls of sculptures like Ce qu’il en reste XVI / What remains XVI in order to make the interval between inside and outside visible. Her open volumes are built out of a void. The Ce qu’il en reste series shows standing human figures merging with spaces generated by experiences. These are all attempts to question the spatial dimension of the psyche.
“This work also has its roots in my personal history,” Jacques has said. “My adolescence was poisoned by severe scoliosis (deformation of the vertebral column). I spent a lot of time with orthopaedists. I wore plasters and corsets up until the operation on my spine, which was straightened with the help of pins. I had to give up dancing. My driving forces are the emotions, the wants. and the impossibilities that are particular to me. Once all this comes out, I seek to make it resonate in others. My work is not a lament, but a place where I can transform things to go on.”
Yasuhisa Kohyama was born in 1936 in Shigaraki, Japan — a town whose name is synonymous with clay. Kohyama has devoted more than five decades to two ancient traditions: wood-firing and hand-building. He has played a significant role in reviving the traditional Japanese anagama kiln, and it is inside that kiln that the essential drama of his work unfolds. The color of his pieces, like that in Hanifu (Birth of Clay), is created without glaze, shaped solely by the movement of ash and the position of the object within the fire. The result is surfaces of surfaces that are textured and tactile in a way rarely found in contemporary ceramics — rough, ancient-feeling, and unmistakably alive — in which the artist’s intention and the kiln’s unpredictable heat are equal collaborators. “Every time I fire,” Kohyama has said, “I’ve come to recognize that I am in Nature; I am a small part of Nature. Intently I watch Nature over and over again; working with clay, inspired by Nature, I am free to allow creation to happen, approaching the experience as the ancients did.”
Interested in the concept, the execution, and the materials that are essential in order to express her ideas, Baiba Osite merges a wide range materials in her works, including driftwood and plastic washed up on the beach. In Beach (Liedags), she has combined cotton, linen, wool, broken flax, hemp, and jute, and tiny spirals of metal. Manipulating this variety of materials has allowed Osite to introduce new directions in Latvian textile art. Osite explores and dissects patterns that she sees and reassembles them to recreate a world from her materials Her work has been recognized worldwide in the International Triennial of Mini-Textiles at the Musée Jean Lurçat, Angers, France, the Biennal Textile Art of Today, in Bratislava, Slovakia, CONTEXTILE – Contemporary Textile Art Biennial in Guimarães, Portugal (where Osite was awarded the Acquisition Prize) and From Lausanne to Beijing, the International Fiber Art Biennale in Beijing, China.
A pioneer in the fiber arts since the 60s, Ferne Jacobs creates unique three-dimensional sculptural forms using ancient basketmaking techniques, building solid structures with coiled, twined, and knotted thread. Jacobs’ is recognized as an innovator, and acclaimed for the role she played in the advancing fiber as a field for artistic exploration.Technically, Jacobs is renown her mastery of material and process. Reinventing and advancing traditional techniques used for basketry, Jacobs has generated an entirely new language of sculptural art. Her refined sense of color melded with her poetic and intuitive approach set her work apart. Jacobs’s work will be included in browngrotta arts’s upcoming exhibition, Continental Drift: Encounters, North and South (October 17 to 25, 2026).
Anna Urbanowicz-Krowacka studied fiber art at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts, graduating in 1963. Her weavings involve subtle gradations of color and, as evident in Palisades, woven slits that reveal and conceal, illustrating the artist’s fascination with light. Known for her color sense, Urbanowicz’s tapestries became a mirror of her inner life, her emotions, her view of humanity and nature.
Happy fall! More to see in September.