I want to hide under a blanket, and I bet you might, too. That’s due partly to fascism, partly to a late-April blizzard signaling that winter is just as fickle as U.S. tariff policy. Those injustices aside, why does a blanket seem like an obvious source of comfort? Is woven softness always reassuring, or could it be destabilizing?
In “Immortal Threads,” a group show that Readsboro artist Sienna Martz has guest curated at the Phoenix in Waterbury, soft sculptures based in fiber arts raise those questions and many others.
Charlotte, N.C., artist Katrina Sánchez‘s works in the show are made from brightly colored knitted forms, like long, stuffed noodles about the width of a hand. She knots and weaves these into sculptures that hang on the wall.
Several of them, from her “Warm Thoughts, Knot Series,” tie three noodles together into roundish knots of different colors. “From Start to Finish” weaves them loosely together into a square. It looks a lot like a large version of the bright, somewhat awkward pot holders kids make with loops on a plastic loom.
Because of their scale, Sánchez’s forms seem to relate to human arms or legs. They recall the works of artists such as Eva Hesse and Senga Nengudi, who have used soft sculpture so effectively to suggest the body. But where their sculptures, often made from materials such as pantyhose or latex, were subversive — dangerous, even, invoking the empowered or the abject — Sánchez’s are more like a warm hug.
Instead of wrestling with concepts of the body, Sánchez’s sculptures create a tension between what’s comforting and what’s commercial. The two would seem to be at odds, but they aren’t. Her materials and the scale at which she works — Sánchez has created larger installations elsewhere — both point toward the industrial and away from the homespun. Her brightly colored yarn and evenly knit surfaces read as happy and accessible, in part because they seem manufactured: They’re not precious or laboriously made but rather as sweet and familiar as a bowl of Froot Loops.
Susan Maddux‘s three pieces in the show are likewise enticing and vivid, but instead of playfulness, the Los Angeles artist’s wall sculptures exude an air of haunting mystery. Her forms are deceptively simple: Each is a pile of folded canvas, draped over a single screw in the wall. Maddux paints the canvas with ombré gradations of blues, greens, yellows and browns. The pieces are symmetrical, with a curve of narrow folds at the top opening up to wider ones of varying lengths. The sculptures look for all the world like giant moths that have alighted on the wall.
Maddux’s works take something from the minimalist shaped canvases of decades past, such as those by Frank Stella or Ellsworth Kelly, while acknowledging that canvas is a textile and theoretically has a relationship to textile traditions. Viewers might think of origami or furoshiki, the Japanese tradition of wrapping gifts with fabric, but the forms are so unassuming that they also seem like curtains draped over a hanger. Even more than the folds, color creates depth and movement; the canvases are something between sculpture and painting.
Jai Hart‘s works on display also fall into that ambiguous category. Like Sánchez’s, the Concord, Mass., artist’s work incorporates long, stuffed tubes, but hers are made of canvas. Hart paints on flat swaths of unstretched canvas, expanses that seem supported by the tubes but aren’t. Sometimes she rests the tubes on the floor like bent metal legs; sometimes they hang on the wall. The paintings slump but stand up, as though halfway inflated.
Hart’s colors are also buoyant. In “Tweet,” fluorescent pink and mango yellow play against teal and gray, with layers of creamy white paint subsuming and releasing each color in the abstract composition. “Pressing Love and Light to Keep It Together” uses fluorescent pink in the flat parts of the painting and to accentuate the tubes, which frame sections and draw the eye into layers of blues. Hart’s tubes create channels and dimension that turn the painting into a sort of pinball game for the eye, which ricochets through depths and reflections.
“Coral and Blues” similarly gives off beachy vibes, this time as much from its bold contrast of navy blue and white as from its odd form. The painting spans a tall, narrow shape made from a coral-colored tube, like some kind of derelict pool toy. Hart’s paintings don’t relate much to traditional textiles except in that they resemble a half-assembled sewing pattern, at once flat and dimensional. Like Maddux, she’s using canvas as both a painting ground and a fabric.
Martz’s works in the show aren’t painted, but they rely on color and several different techniques to create distinct effects from recycled and sustainable fabrics. “Pulse,” about 30 by 40 inches, looks like a stack of hot-pink bubbles, held together with a mortar of fuchsia shag made from felt. Across the room, “Supple” uses a similar format, but the bubbles are shades of puce, and the shag is beige. Instead of erupting vertically, the composition spreads horizontally across the wall. Where “Pulse” has a psychedelic quality, “Supple” is natural, bodily and maybe a bit gross.
Likewise, “Molten Heart” and “A Whispered Plea” each consist of layers and layers of folded bamboo felt rounds, but color sets them apart. The latter’s baby-pink folds suggest a flower, while the former’s red and burgundy evoke something visceral.
In “A Realm Unseen,” Martz creates a form from a series of small, stuffed tubes, the color of red wine, made out of upcycled clothing. She adds variation and depth by using some fabric that’s opaque and some that has worn thin, revealing a hint of white stuffing. The slight shift is enough to infer something growing — or perhaps coming apart.
The unsettling feeling it provokes is a good thing. Underneath their works’ enticing coziness, these artists are asking hard questions about things that seem soft.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Going Soft | In “Immortal Threads,” four fiber artists present sculptural works in Waterbury”
This article appears in Apr 23-29, 2025.
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