Textile artist Aby Mackie works from a former bread factory in Barcelona’s Poblenou district, where domestic life and studio practice share the same uninterrupted space. Here are reflections on the materials, histories, and instincts that drive her work.

In a fading corner of Poblenou, textile artist Aby Mackie lives inside a former bakery where nothing is polished away, not the industrial scars, not the clutter of family life, not even the ghosts held in cloth.

Barcelona has always known how to reinvent itself, Mackie says. Warehouses become galleries, fishermen’s quarters become boutique hotels, factories soften into loft apartments advertised in the language of “authenticity” and “creative living”. But in Poblenou, the city’s old industrial heartland, some buildings still resists the smoothness of redevelopment. For now, at least.

On an unassuming street between construction sites and old workshops stands a former bread factory dating back to the early 1900s. It operated as a working bakery until 2015.  Today it is home to the textile artist Aby Mackie, her husband Laurence and two teenage children, two cats, a dog, and an ever-shifting ecology of cloth, furniture, ceramics, books and salvaged objects. 

“There’s never really a distinction between work and living here,” Mackie says. “The work exists inside the house, and the house exists inside the work.”

The statement feels literal. Folded textiles spill from shelving. Fabrics wait half-stitched across large tables. Antique chairs hold piles of cloth in various states of repair and transformation. Kilim rugs overlap beneath olive-green 1960s leather seating. Mid-century shelving bows gently under the weight of books, vessels and material samples. The walls are layered salon-style with vernacular ceramics, found mirrors, tapestries, paintings and objects gathered from Barcelona’s Encants flea market or rescued from the street.

That accumulation mirrors Mackie’s artistic practice. Working predominantly in textiles, she deconstructs existing fabrics, often domestic linens and once-intimate household cloths, before reassembling them into tactile works that retain visible traces of their earlier lives. Her pieces hover somewhere between fine art, archaeology, and repair.

“There’s a history embedded in textiles that interests me enormously,” she says. “A worn edge, a repair, a stain, those things aren’t imperfections to erase. They’re evidence of life lived.” Throughout the house, evidence is everywhere.

In the bathroom, collections of hand mirrors are hung rhythmically rather than symmetrically, multiplying reflections and fragments of light. In the open-plan living space, the skeletal base of the building’s enormous former oven remains intact, anchoring the room like an industrial ruin incorporated into domestic life. Part of the metal oven pot make an improbable lamp shade. Nearby sits a 19th-century four-poster bed, improbably grand within the old factory volume.

Like much of Poblenou’s remaining industrial architecture, the former bakery is slated for demolition in the coming years as the neighborhood continues its transformation. Mackie understands the precariousness of occupying such a space. “There’s a temporary feeling to it now,” she says. “You know these buildings are disappearing one by one.”

Perhaps that impermanence explains why the house feels less decorated than inhabited, less concerned with permanence than with continual adaptation.

Objects arrive constantly. Barcelona’s weekly ritual of leaving unwanted possessions on the street has become an informal sourcing network for the family. A discarded tapestry. A stack of ceramic plates. An abandoned chair with good bones.

“People leave incredible things outside,” Mackie says. “Things that already contain a life.” The city itself becomes part of the work.

Originally from Leicester, Mackie studied in Nottingham before traveling extensively in her 20s. She arrived in Barcelona 23 years ago intending only to learn Spanish before moving onwards to Mexico. She never left.“Apart from a short time living in Chile, Catalonia became home very quickly,” she says.

That sense of rootedness exists in tension with her practice, which is fundamentally about transformation. Cloth is cut apart, reconstructed, layered, distressed, and repaired. Histories are preserved but altered. Critics increasingly situate her work within conversations around sustainability, material memory and the politics of domestic labour. Yet inside the former bakery, theory feels secondary to touch.

The atmosphere of the house is overwhelmingly tactile. Aged leather. Glazed clay. Raw wood. Woven wool. Fraying linen. Oxidised metal. Every surface invites handling.

Even the architecture participates in this material conversation. The factory was never aggressively renovated after the bakery closed. Rather than erasing its industrial character, Mackie and her family have adapted themselves to the building’s existing logic.

During the day, textiles move constantly through the space. Materials are cut on dining tables. Cloth dries near bookshelves. New works lean casually against antique furniture. The boundaries between production and domesticity collapse entirely.

“The house isn’t styled around the practice,” Mackie says. “It’s produced through it. That distinction matters.

Many artists speak about blurring art and life, but here the overlap feels genuinely unresolved. Family existence leaves visible marks. Teenagers move through spaces filled with fragile artworks. Pets sleep beneath unfinished pieces. Daily routines interrupt concentration. Nothing is isolated or protected from the mess of ordinary life.

And perhaps that is what gives both the work and the house their unusual emotional texture. Textiles, after all, are among the most intimate materials humans produce. They absorb bodies, habits, histories, and time. Mackie’s practice depends upon recognizing that emotional residue rather than sanitizing it away.

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In the catalogs we produce for most exhibitions we curate (63 to date) we often include detail shots. In the volume for Transformations, however, we’ve highlighted installations — specifically, groupings of works made of the same materials, executed by different artists in strikingly different ways. We’ll take up the details here instead.

Feathers in art symbolize flight, spirituality and transformation. In Transformations, we’ve combined works that incorporate feathers by Chris Drury, Lewis Knauss, and Dominic Di Mare. Di Mare’s Mourning Station #4 is one of a series of altars, rune, and letter bundles. They remind of ancient ritual objects, of religious mysteries from vanished civilizations. An egg is concealed beneath the feathers. Di Mare suggests a spiritual path and also conjures memory and rebirth.

Another material we have explored in Transformations is metal, which offers unlimited options for expression. Stainless steel filaments are molded and woven by Kyoko Kumai while colored titanium is woven.

Lead becomes cryptic calligraphy in Sue Lawty’s hands and copper wire becomes figures in Mary Giles’ work and three-dimensional sculpture when layered by Tsuroko Tanikawa.

Elemental fibers are often the choice of artists at browngrotta arts. In Transformations, cotton, ramie, linen, jute are among the traditional fibers featured. Flax gets a wall of its own. Susie Gillespie and Irina Kolesnikova create fiber paintings of flax, with images of a cottage and a curious character, who Kolesnikova calls her alter ego. Also paired are a walnut bark box by Masako Yoshida stitched with flax thread and Stéphanie Jacques’ humanoid flax sculpture mounted on a copper plate. 

And there are more — seaweed (Jeannet Leendertse), clay (Toshiko Takaezu, Yasuhisa Kohyama, Valerie Pragnell, Stéphanie Jacques), stones (Christine Joy, Dorothy Gill Barnes, Stéphanie Jacques), and willow (Dail Behennah, Esmé Hofman, John McQueen, Stéphanie Jacques) just to name a few.

Join us at Transformations  through May 17th — many more images on our website: https://browngrotta.com/.

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This is the animating premise of Transformations: dialogues in art and material which opens this Saturday, May 9th at browngrotta arts. The exhibition that asks a deceptively simple question: what happens when artists stop treating materials as additives and start treating them as collaborators? The answer, it turns out, is profound.

Material Is Not Neutral
We tend to think of materials as passive — the stuff through which ideas pass on their way to becoming art. The artists in Transformations challenge that assumption at every turn. In the contemporary art context, materiality isn’t just about physical substance. It encompasses everything a material carries with it: weight, surface, history, cultural memory, expressive charge. A piece of linen isn’t just woven thread. It’s centuries of labor, landscape, and touch.

System and Surprise
Transformations proves that the range of works that a simple material can inspire is nearly endless. Carol Shaw-Sutton, Chiyoko Tanaka, Sara Brennan, Mary Giles, Merja Keskinen, and Jane Sauer all work with Linen. In Shaw-Sutton’s hands the material becomes a molded vessel. Under Chiyoko Tanaka’s ministrations, woven linen fabric is returned to its essential threads, transformed into an artifact. For Sara Brennan, woven linen serves as a canvas. From a distance, her works appear to be abstract paintings. A close up view reveals a textured weaving using dozens of shades. For Jane Sauer and Mary Giles, linen is a sculptural medium.

Material as More
Metal is a canopied category in Transformations. Artists consider it as thread— from gold filaments, to lead extrusions, to bent wire of copper and brass. Kyoko Kumai’s spun steel threads float. Gyöngy Laky turns nails and wire into an artful assemblage. Sue Lawty weaves with bast fibers — raffia, hemp, nettle, linen — and elemental lead, and assembles carefully ordered stones drawn from beaches and riverbeds. She pursues qualities inherently given by the chosen substance, seeking “an understated restraint, balance, tension, rhythm: an essential stillness.”

Same Input, Different Outcome
Toshiko Takaezu and Yasuhisa Kohyama both devoted their lives to clay, but their practices reveal just how vast the distance can be within a single medium. Takaezu’s closed ceramic forms — rounded, glazed, often containing a small stone or rattle sealed inside — are intimate and quietly mysterious, their surfaces richly colored and their shapes suggesting the human body. There is a sense of the maker’s hand coaxing something from the earth. Kohyama, by contrast, surrenders control to the fire itself. He builds by hand and fires with wood, never applying glaze; color and surface are entirely the product of ash movement and the object’s position within the kiln. Where Takaezu brings clay close — shaping it into vessels that hold secrets — Kohyama sends it into an elemental process and receives back something ancient and unpredictable.

What These Works Carry
What unites the artists in Transformations isn’t a shared aesthetic or a shared geography. It’s a shared conviction: that choosing a material is a serious act, that working with it is as meaningful as the finished object, and that what results carries something more than form.

It carries thought. History. Culture. The trace of a hand that knew exactly what it was doing — and trusted the material to meet it halfway.

Join us at Transformations: dialogues in art and material (May 9-17) at browngrotta arts in Wilton, CT. Or order the 164-page catalog from browngrotta.com.

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First this month was Burning Bush by American Katherine Westphal. Westphal concentrated on surface, pattern, and decoration in textiles, quilts and clothing, as well as vessels. The use of fractured and random images, as featured in Burning Bush, became a signature of her work. In the catalog for the OBJECTS USA exhibition in 1970, Westphal wrote, “I was trained as a painter. I see things from that viewpoint. I build up; I destroy. I let the textile grow, never knowing where it is going or when it will be finished. It is cut up, sewn together, embroidered, quilted, embellished with tapestry or fringes, until my intuitive and visual senses tell me it is finished and the message complete.”

Next up was Aurora, an intriguing piece in titanium by Kyoko Kumai of Japan. In 1975, Kumai began using metallic thread for the warp in her tapestries. She started first with with stainless steel, then added titanium, which comes in many colors. Aurora, which is featured in Transformations: dialogues in art and materials (May 9-17), the upcoming exhibition at browngrotta arts, is made of crystal-finished titanium in artfully blended colors. “I am supremely happy if these works create a rich environment that surrounds the viewer,” she says, “arousing various mental images and liberating the spirit.” 

Jane Balsgaard is a Danish sculptor and painter Initially, working with paper did not interest her, but its potential for flight and refracting light captured her attention. Balsgaard spent time in Japan in the 90s, preparing for exhibits there. Works of paper and twigs, like Paper Sculpture 4, were the result. In her work, white paper often contrasts the dark color of the willow twigs, the skeleton framing the paper. Balsgaard is the recipient of an Artist’s Lifetime Grant from the Government of Denmark.

Between Two Sunsets by Baiba Osite explores the fragile threshold between collapse and regeneration, using materials that carry ecological and emotional weight. Driftwood washed ashore and fragments of plastic collected after the destructive floods in Jūrmala in Latvia become markers of the intertwined vulnerability of humans and nature. These remnants of civilization return as a visual reminder of the layers of pollution that shape our environment. Osite is known for her work with different fiber materials including driftwood, glass beads, wire, metal spirals, wool, and linen. Reconstruction is a means to new possibilities, multiple paths to renewal, she says. Osite’s work incorporating metal springs will be featured in Transformations.

See more at Transformations at browngrotta arts this May 9 -17: https://browngrotta.com/exhibitions/transformations-dialogues-in-art-and-material

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Rina Banerjee: Take me, take me, take me … to the Palace of love
Through September 13th
Yale Center for British Art
1080 Chapel Street
New Haven, CT
https://britishart.yale.edu/exhibitions-programs/rina-banerjee-take-me-take-me-take-me-palace-love

In an art journey that include Transformations’ exploration of materials at browngrotta arts, in Wilton, CT, Rina Banerjee’s Take me, take me, take me … to the Palace of love at the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, CT would be an appropriate add on. It’s an amalgam of materials. Banerjee’s structure reimagines the Taj Mahal, a grand 17th century Mughal mausoleum, in ephemeral industrial materials: a frame of copper and steel is encased in vibrant pink plastic, creating a translucent ghost of the opulent marble façade of the original. The interior of the sculpture reveals an antique Anglo-Indian Bombay chair hovering above a globe, and a chandelier composed of expendable goods—pink foam balls, plastic beads, and artificial birds. As the gallery notes: “These objects challenge our ideas of value, pointing to a global system that produces things to be alternately fetishized or quickly thrown away.” The piece tells two stories, like the Taj does, as a somber tomb and a monument to love. 

WRIT and WEFTED:
Sally Van Doren, paintings and drawings; Nancy Koenigsberg, woven wire sculptures 
Through June 21st. 
Daphne:art Gallery and Advisory
55 West Morris Road
Bantam, Connecticut 

By appointment: daphneadeeds@gmail.com

In reviewer Julie Durkin’s words, the exhibition pairs, “two artists who both work at the boundary between language and material.” Sally Van Doren is a poet who works with illegible handwriting. Nancy Koenigsberg “draws” with wire — nets and mats, cubes and chains — that suggest fascinating interior and shadow lives.

extraORDINARY things
through June 17th
Flinn Gallery 
Greenwich Library
101 West Putnam Avenue
Second Floor
Greenwich, CT https://flinngallery.org/events/extraordinary-things/

Four artists — Qingjun Huang, Carole Kunstadt, Cheryl R. Riley, and Rob Strati —reimagine domestic items into vessels of memory, metaphor, and identity through photo essays, altered appliances, heirlooms, and keepsakes.

Art, Jazz + The Blues
through June 7th
Museum of Contemporary Art
19 Newtown Turnpike
Westport, CT

Art, Jazz + The Blues,  at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Westport, CT explores the intersections between visual art, jazz, and the blues, musical forms deeply rooted in African American traditions,  drawing from the rich holdings of the Westport Public Art Collections (WestPAC). The exhibition centers on Giants of the Blues, a sweeping series of seven group portraits by Westport native Eric von Schmidt (1931–2007) honoring blues, jazz, and folk musicians from the 1920s to the 1960s. Complementing von Schmidt’s paintings are over fifty artworks from the WestPAC collection depicting musicians, inspired by musical themes, or exploring the resonances between musical and visual forms. A selection of important loans from ACA Galleries, The Brubeck Collection at Wilton Library, Eric Chiang, Michael Cummings, Fairfield University Art Museum, Housatonic Museum of Art, Tudor Maier, Mark & Ellen Naftalin, Larry Silver, the Westport Library Collection, and private collections deepen the conversation. As the jazz great Charlie Parker once said, the show invites visitors to “hear with your eyes and see with your ears.”

Last but certainly, not least: Transformations: dialogues in art and materials (May 9 – 17). Schedule your visit here: https://browngrotta.com/exhibitions/transformations-dialogues-in-art-and-material

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It could also be her ever changing nature that captures our attention. Her light illuminates our quietest and most contemplative hours. “In a dark sea of instability, the full moon in a richly deep blue sky is both reassuring and evocative,” says Laura Foster Nicholson. “Hints of reflective threads in Dark Moon aim to bring split seconds of insight and imagination, as do the stars.”

Or perhaps it’s simply the spectacle of moonlight. Paul Furneaux’s visit to the Norwegian fjords led to Fractured Moon, Fractured Mountain. He was particularly taken by the drama played on the fjords by the change of light, one half often shadowing the other — when translated to Fractured Moon, Fractured Mountain, it’s reminiscent of the drama of the familiar light and enigmatic sides of the moon.

It’s also magical, and mystical. Golden Moon, by Norma Minkowitz, has a large, intricate orb rising up. It is a symbol of illumination, insight and mystery. “The moon is a metaphor for beauty in this world,” she says, “as well as acting as a source of light in the darkness”. Golden Moon is one of a series of vessel forms that Norma Minkowitz been creating since the 1990’s. The vessels represent containers of different thoughts: some dark, some optimistic and some, like Golden Moon, ethereal.

The moon has been used by artists to express “longing, change, the spiritual, the mysterious, and the sorrowful, according to WikiArt, the Visual Art Encyclopedia. In When Darkness Comes Calling, John 
McQueen wanted to capture that magical moment when a full moon comes out in a dark sky. The light and dark contrast is achieved by surrounding the white birch bark of the moon with the darker back sides of the pine and birch barks. The title of the piece comes from the lyrics of a song by Lily Kershaw, As It Seems. In The Other Side of the Moon, McQueen makes a tongue-in-cheek observation about our obsession with the moon. One side of the vessel reads: Man made up the man in the moon. The second side says: The first self-serve in no man’s land.

Works inspired by the moon that reflects a visual language that crosses geography and history. Here are moon-inspired works from artists in Venezuela and the UK. Eduardo Portillo and María Davila use indigo to illustrate the night, the moon, the sky, the clouds, the dawn; moments of every day; moments filled with blue. 

Wishing you many lunar interludes and the mystical magic that accompany them.

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Transformations: dialogues in art and material this May 9 – 17th at browngrotta arts will feature works from Japan, Korea, Venezuela, the UK, and the US that incorporate indigo. Every culture that discovered indigo seems to have felt the transformation as something more than chemical: the cloth goes into the vat one color and emerges another, steeped in a blue that belongs simultaneously to sky and sea and shadow. The plant’s leaves are dark green, and the mystical blue color is unveiled through a fermentation process — when a dyed article is exposed to air, the color transition occurs, starting from yellow to green, and ultimately resulting in the well-known indigo shade. 

What connects the artists in Transformations  who work in indigo — across continents and generations and very different formal concerns — is a relationship with the material that goes beyond color preference. Each has submitted to the discipline the dye demands. Indigo is not a paint you squeeze from a tube. It requires a living vat, careful chemistry, patience, and what practitioners often describe as ritual. It is a dye that demands discipline to use, with some indigo textiles taking thousands of hours to produce, requiring prolonged concentration akin to a meditative state. 

Hiroyuki Shindo discovered the dye as a student: he first encountered indigo while at Kyoto City University of Fine Arts in Japan in the late 1960s, when an older artisan told him he was the last of 14 generations of indigo dyers. Shindo was determined to prevent the art form’s extinction. Over decades, Shindo maintained indigo vats in Kyoto and developed a distinctive technique entirely his own. He developed his own system, utilizing wide flat troughs in which he laid small stones, watching carefully as the indigo was drawn slowly into the fabric, creating gradations of hue — from nearly invisible shadows to areas of nearly black — through a combination of natural process and his own invention. The white of the cloth, Shindo insisted, was as important as the dyed portions.

James Bassler took a journey to indigo. In 1960, a voyage home from a civilian job in England via a cargo ship through Asia proved transformative. On this journey he witnessed the importance of world crafts and their essential role in cultures — a spinning and weaving demonstration in Bombay and the dyeing processes of Indonesia and Japan. Bassler has since explored the wedge-weave structure of the Navajo, shibori from Japan, and the scaffold weave of pre-Columbian cultures in his textile work. Indigo is threaded through decades of his practice. In works, such as Cumbe, he has used indigo-dyed silk and linen warps in combination with an array of other natural fibers — ramie, sisal, pineapple, nettles — creating textiles that feel like accumulated knowledge made visible.

Japan and paint were Polly Barton’s route to indigo. As a young artist, she worked as a personal assistant to abstract expressionist painter Helen Frankenthaler, from whom Barton says she gained “permission” to build up layers of color in her own work. In 1981, she moved to Kameoka, Japan to study with master weaver Tomohiko Inoue, living in the religious heart of the Oomoto Foundation. Barton has spent over four decades exploring ikat, the ancient technique of binding skeins of yarn in calculated patterns before dyeing, which produces the distinctive blurred, feathered color transitions characteristic of the form. Indigo is central to her palette. Her work uses indigo alongside pigment, sumi ink, soy milk, and metal and silver leaf — materials that she layers to create luminous, meditative surfaces.

One of the foundational figures of American fiber art — and one of its great iconoclasts — Ed Rossbach taught for nearly three decades at the University of California, Berkeley, where he created works in almost every known textile technique during his five-decade-long career, experimenting with labor-intensive techniques such as Andean discontinuous warp weaving, Native American coiled basketry, European lace, and Indonesian ikat. Indigo appeared in his work as part of his deep engagement with global textile traditions. He used the dye not as an element in a restlessly curious practice that moved between the ethnographic and the anarchic — making a basket from plastic, a hanging from newspaper, a piece from tundra grass. Indigo was part of that global inventory, a dye he understood as one of humanity’s great shared materials.

Yeonsoon Chang takes indigo into the realm of philosophy. The Korean artist is known for creating ethereal works of starched indigo and was named Artist of the Year at the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Seoul in 2008. Chang’s signature material is abaca — a fiber derived from a species of banana plant — which she subjects to an elaborate 12-step process that includes starching, In her Matrix III series, she dyes the abaca fabric with indigo blue over thirty times, creating tightly stiffened material that pays homage to its disciplined creation. The Matrix series, she has said, illustrates the Asian perspective of the human mind and body as unified rather than separate — and the repeated dyeing, the compulsive labor, the rigid geometry are all in service of that idea.

The Venezuelan partnership of Eduardo Portillo and María Dávila may have traveled the furthest — literally and conceptually — to arrive at indigo. Working together since 1983, they have been dedicated to exploring the intricacies of the material production of textiles, traveling extensively in China and India to study the traditional techniques of indigo dye making, silk sericulture, and hand-weaving. Indigo became central to a pivotal body of work rooted in place and longing. Looking for blue in their mountain landscape and realizing they could only find it in the sky, they merged their previous projects — the silk, the vegetable fibers, the natural dyes — into a series called Azul Indigo, exhibited in 2012, recreating the hours of the day: sunrise, noon, sunset, night, and the night’s shadows — their interest in blue shifting with the intensity of light according to the hour.

That labor-intensive nature of indigo, paradoxically, is part of its appeal for contemporary artists working in an era of infinite digital speed. The vat slows you down. It insists on process. It connects you — through fermented indigo leaves and wooden mallets and resist-tied threads — to every dyer who has stood at a vat in Kano or Kyoto or the Carolina Lowcountry, watching cloth transform in the air. William Morris was right. There is only one real blue dye. And in the hands of artists like these, its presence is spell binding.

Join us to see their work at Transformations:dialogues in art and material (May 9-17). 

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The first work we highlighted was Karyl Sisson’s Pepsi Faux Pot. For years, Karyl Sisson has been collecting things like sewing notions — buttons and zippers, womenʼs vanity items — bobby pins, hair pins, and curlers, and paper drinking straws like the straws in Pepsi Cola Faux Pot. “I like the idea and practice of recycling and am drawn to undervalued and overlooked materials,” Sisson says. “These common, manufactured objects, reminiscent of my childhood, are the building blocks of my sculptures and wall art, while simple interlocking techniques found in basketry and needlework are usually the method of construction.”

Our video of Simone Pheulpin’s Nova, part of the Eclipse series, gives viewers an opportunity to see up close the remarkable alchemy involved in this artist’s work. In Pheulpin’s hands humble strips of cotton become remarkable objects that evoke natural phenomena. She uses a method of her own devising, using neither glue or stitches. “I’m very, very interested in the roots, the layers, everything that is natural,” Pheulpin says. “The concretions, the accumulations, I love that, that’s the basic nature, the basis of my inspiration. I really like everything that is linear, everything that is repeated, piles of wood, walls. I love the walls, also by the sea, for example, the flowing water, the marks in the sand, the desert, the dunes, all that.” Pheulpin’s work will be part of a deep dive into materials in our upcoming exhibition, Transformations: dialogues in art and materials (May 9 – 17, 2026). 

Barcelona-based artist Aby Mackie also approaches “humble” material in innovative ways — in her case, discarded textiles and household remnants are repurposed as fine art. Sourced from the streets of Barcelona, in works like Between Order and Chaos, she reimagines overlooked materials as powerful reflections on memory and value. In Barcelona, the contents of entire homes are often either thrown into the streets or auctioned off at Encants Vells market. The creation of Mackie’s work is driven by the selection and repurposing of objects and textiles from these sources in order to explore ongoing cultural themes, including materialism and consumerism. Mackie’s work will also be included in Transformations in May.

The inspiration for Lizzie Farey’s work comes from the inherent qualities found in the natural materials around her Scotland location. Using willow, birch, heather, bog myrtle, and many other locally grown woods, her work ranges form traditional to organic sculptural forms — much of it pushing the boundaries of traditional technique.  In Willow Ball – 2 and Pussy Willow Bowl, willow seems to have been plucked unchanged from its natural surroundings, yet, with shape and color, the artist adds more. The works achieve Farey’s aim, to create baskets as reminders of the intense pleasure of nature – taking viewers to a place and a time that is universal.

Mariette Rousseau-Vermette was a noted Quebec-based Canadian tapestry artist who pioneered innovations in fiber art during the 1960s, 70s and 80s. Rousseau-Vermette created weavings in which she experimented with scale, form, material, and color, which became known as tapestry-paintings. In Verticles dans le bleu the artist incorporates metal tubes wrapped in wool to create dimension and interest. Rousseau-Vermette’s work mixing optical fibers and wool will be included inTransformations in May.

In Charred Black 2, part of his Seven Baskets series, John Garrett fashions welded wire mesh into a vessel shaped by conflict and renewal. Inspired by images of war-torn landscapes, layers of paint, metal leaf, and bound wire evoke structures scarred and rebuilt, holding both destruction and resilience within their forms. “I had seen many pictures of the destruction of wars in Sudan, Ukraine, Israel, and Gaza,… Piles of debris littered landscapes,” Garrett says. “My painted paper baskets looked to me like structures distressed and damaged and covered in dust.”  Forms were painted and repainted and became new again while speaking of horrors between the layers. Shiny metal leaf covered the interiors and exteriors of others. Charred Black 2 was wrapped with rings of plied wire and tied down with more wire or fabric, bringing to mind a structure awaiting more layers of concrete or plaster. 

In the 1970s, when she was in her 40s and early 50s, Dorothy Gill Barnes taught herself basketry through books, independent study, occasional classes, and connections with traditional makers, also drawing inspiration from contemporary artists and emerging developments in the field. Within a decade, her strikingly original works—crafted from natural materials—gained national and international recognition. Barnes delighted in revealing the ingenuity of nature, from animal-made forms to processes of growth and decay. Her work invites viewers to slow down and truly notice. In Spalted Maple Looking Glass, she has created an interactive experience: a glass lens, frames a small twig, magnifying both the object and its hollow. Through the lens, the tiny scene appears vast — refashioning something ordinary into a moment of wonder.

Marion Hildebrandt studied at the University of California, where she received degrees in the decorative arts and home economics. The artist lived and worked in Napa Valley, California, where she collected the plants — grasses, branches, pine needles, and bark — that she used to make her baskets. She employed the same materials that Native Americans used when they inhabited the area. Like them, Hildebrandt appreciated the natural materials that surrounded her, utilizing her artistic vision to create artistic art forms into structural objects like #r165.

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This year’s Spring “Art in the Barn” exhibition at browngrotta arts is Transformations: dialogues in art and material. In Transformations, we’ll highlight the unique materials adopted by artists we represent, including lead, stones, feathers, seaweed, and coconut fiber. We’ll also explore the singular results achieved by different artists approaching the same material.

One of the those materials is linen — we’ll exhibit “quivers” by Gary Trentham, figures by Mary Giles, vessels by Carol Shaw-Sutton, and wall works by Chiyoko Tanaka, Sara Brennan, and new to browngrotta audiences, Merja Keskinen.

Merja Keskinen is a Finnish artist whose explorations of color and linen intrigued us. She is an illusionist, creating single surfaces that appear dimensional like that in Rhthym of Colors which gives the impression of a three-dimensional work. Her method provides additional surprises.”The texture and structure of the surface imitate woven fabric,” she says, “but I make the works without looms by braiding and sewing. I wind my yarn around frames of different sizes. Usually, the warp thread continues unbroken in the direction of the weft. I weave parts with a simple plait binding, threads of different colors cross each other vertically and horizontally, one over, one under.”

Keskinen’s explorations of color are equally mesmerizing. “I combine colors and threads according to a preselected system. The impressions and changes created by the colors are based on mathematical considerations and systematics. In parts of the works, the thread colors change a few threads at a time according to the chosen system.”

The colors blend optically; subtle shifts and delicate changes are optimized. In Horizontal Colors 1 and 2,  the starting point for each work is three colors — blue, red and yellow, and three different shades of the colors —  nine thin linen threads each. The combinations of three colors created different shades of brown. The combinations of two colors created different shades of violet, orange and green. The works consist of all 81 different color combinations according to Keskinen’s predefined system. Rhthym of Colors consists of 184 differently colored parts.

For viewers, the experience of Keskinen’s work is multifaceted. The different colored threads can be distinguished when viewed closely, when viewed from a distance, the color is formed by the combined effect of the shades. The third element that impacts the viewer’s experience is spatial. “The delicate works made of transparent, light structures take their final shape only when hung in the space…, “ Keskinen explains. “The colors live according to the space. The same work in different spaces can appear as different color experiences. Light plays an important role in shaping the works.”

The artist, who graduated with a Master of Arts degree from the University of Art and Design (now Aalto University) in 1988, lives and works in Helsinki. Keskinen’s career initially focused on industrial textile design and expert positions on textile collections for public spaces, eventually becoming a full-time visual artist. She has held several solo exhibitions and participated in group exhibitions with her works at home and abroad. Her commissioned work for the Finnish Embassy in Paris was completed in 2012 and for the Finnish Pensions Agency in Helsinki in 2020. The Textile Artists Association TEXO awarded Keskinen with the Textile Artist of the Year award in 2019. The Arts Promotion Centre has granted Merja Keskinen a 5-year state artist professorship grant for 2022–26.

The artists in Transformation: dialogues in art and materials, including Merja Keskinen, all meet curator and historian Glenn Adamson’s definition of material intelligence, that is: “a deep understanding of the material world around us, an ability to read that material environment, and the know-how required to give it new form.” We hope you’ll come and see her work this May.

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Each March, New York becomes a global gathering place for collectors, curators, and lovers of Asian art. Asia Week New York (March 19 – 27, 2026) brings together the world’s foremost galleries, auction houses, and museums for 10 days of exhibitions and cultural programming. Here’s a guide to museum exhibits – https://asiaweekny.com/asia-week-march-2026-museum-exhibition-guide/ – from Chinese Porcelain at the Frick, to Hindu Devotional Prints, 1860–1930 at the Met, to a solo exhibition of work by Choong Sup Lim at the Korean Cultural Center. 

At browngrotta arts, it might as well be Asia Week all year long as we have a glorious group of contemporary textile and ceramic artists from India, Japan, and Korea whose work we promote. Asia Week 2026 gives us a good excuse to highlight a select group of their works. Whether you’re a seasoned collector or simply curious, it’s a great time to explore works from these countries in depth.

First up, are stitched and resist-dyed textiles from India by Neha Puri Dhir. Her works explore negative and positive space, reflecting ideas of balance and contrast. The textured surfaces, shaped by stitches and dye migration, add a tactile depth, emphasizing the labor-intensive process she undertakes.

browngrotta arts also promotes singular ceramics, sculpture, basketry, and wall works created by more than 20 artists from Japan. Among these works are ceramics by Toshiko Takaezu and Yasahisu Kohyama. We also show vessels and sculptures by several inventive basketmakers including a group that has studied with Hisako Sekijima — Norie Hatakeyama, Kazue Honma, Noriko Takimaya, Tsuruko Tanikawa, and Masako Yoshida — as well as Shoko Fukuda, Jiro Yonezawa, and Kosuge Kogetsu. Remarkable weavers are also represented, including Hiroyuki Shindo, Masako Nakahira, Jun Tomita, Chiyoko Tanaka, and Naomi and Masakazu Kobayashi.

Five Korean creators of innovative art textiles made of steel, paper, velcro, silk, and ramie are among those whose work we highlight. The effects of light and color in Jin-Sook So’s works of stainless steel reflect her years living in Korea and Sweden. Yong Joo Kim has reinvented velcro as a fabric to create evocative sculptures while Young-ok Shin explores ramie with great impact. Yeonsoon Chang transforms the “softness” of fiber, and transcends the material’s limitations with structures made of abaca fibers and Teflon-coated, glass-fiber mesh to which she attaches gold leaf. Sung Rim Park uses knots of paper, determining the shape and size of each knot based on the meanings and symbolism it holds. While the knots and fibers works that result may appear delicate, they have the power to shape space. 

Pictured here are just a sampling of the Asian artworks at browngrotta arts. Visit our website to see the entire group, by name, or filter by country: Yeonsoon Chang, Neha Puri Dhir, Shoko Fukuda, Norie Hatakeyama, Kazue Honma, Matsumi Iwasaki, Kiyomi Iwata, Yong Joo Kim, Naomi Kobayashi, Masakazu Kobayashi, Yasuhisa Kohyama, Kosuge Kogetsu, Kyoko Kumai, Maki, Nakahira, Nio, Park, Hiroyuki Sato-Pijanowski, Toshiko Sekiji, Hisako Sekijima, Kay Sekimachi, Naoko Serino, Young-ok Shin, Hiroyuki Shindo, Jin-Sook So, Toshiko Takaezu, Noriko Takamiya, Chiyoko Tanaka, Hideho Tanaka, Tsuroko Tanikawa, Jun Tomita, Mariyo Yagi, Jiro Yonezawa, Masako Yoshida. 

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