This artist talk is a 40 minute conversation between five artists: Kathie Earle, Erin McQuarrie, Stephanie Eche, Kathie Halfin and Elizabeth Tolson, whose practice lies in weaving and textile arts.

These artists are inspired by the themes of weaving as a form of spirituality and world building that appears in many origin stories around the world. In conversation artists reflect on how the weaving tells story of the woven fabric and helps us to make the sense of the world by weaving new connections with the past, honoring planetary gifts and initiating an exchange that is essential to the functioning society today. All linked in some way through their manner of working, these artists push the framework of fibers as a medium to incorporate sculptural elements, to draw, to dye, waffle, wrap, wind and bind. Artists respond on how their work and textile practices touch upon magical and mundane to unify individual threads into something all together new.

Kathie Halfin

Kathie Halfin is a textile, performance and an installation artist and an independent curator. As a Crimean, Ukrainian-born, Israeli raised, based in Brooklyn, Kathie’s work incorporates cross-cultural mythologies and rituals, family history, language patterns and woven messages. Kathie's current practice involves the use of a Morse Code that Halfin weaves into her textiles. Creation of her coded, handmade fabrics is a meditative act of remolding the social construct in the self and vice versa. Halfin weaves insights, affirmations and mantras that reflect upon the personal and political. By re-shaping the inner structure she aims to create the new new mental and social space.

Kathie Halfin showed at the Bronx Museum AIM Biennial, the A.I.R. Gallery, Assembly Room, Itinerant Performance Festival in Smack Mellon, Knockdown Center: Sunday Series, Art In Odd Places Performance Festival, Clemente Soto Velez Cultural Center and the Immigrant Artist Biennial among others.

Katherine Earle

Katherine Earle engages what falls outside of our periphery, both conceptually and materially. Whether it be by working within the space held by branches in a forest, or re-imagining refuse, she highlights the details so embedded in our lives that they have become almost invisible. Her work also explores what is left out of the stories we tell ourselves about how we engage with our world. A fiber artist, multimedia sculptor and writer, Katherine is based in New York. Her work has been shown in two-person and group exhibitions internationally including Copeland Gallery, Sculptors Alliance, Art Aqua Miami, Site:Brooklyn, The KUBE studios and Diagonale. She has participated in residencies in Canada and the United States, including 77Art, the Cha North Residency, Concordia FARR Residency and the Inaugural Streamhouse Residency.

Katherine has a BFA in Fibres from Concordia University in Montreal.

Stephanie Eche

Stephanie Eche, b. Gilbert, AZ, 1986, is a Chicana artist based in Brooklyn, NY. She uses found materials and natural fibers to create soft sculptures and paintings. Eche has been in various group exhibitions, including “Unraveled: Confronting the Fabric of Fiber Art” at Untitled Space, NY, NY, “Live Wire” at Form and Concept, Santa Fe, New Mexico, and “In the Abstract” at Site: Brooklyn Gallery, Brooklyn, NY. Eche’s work has been written about in Vantage Art Projects and Artsy. Eche has been a teaching artist for the Center for Urban Pedagogy, the SU-CASA program in Lower Manhattan, Root Division, and the Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts in San Francisco, CA. She was a Creative Community Fellow with National Arts Strategies and a Healthy Places Network Leader for Urban Land Institute. Eche is the founder and CEO of Distill Creative, where she curates and produces equitable and inclusive public art projects. She is also the creator and host of the First Coat podcast, where she interviews artists and creators about art in public space.

Erin McQuarrie

Erin McQuarrie is a Brooklyn based Scottish textile artist. She graduated from The Glasgow School of Art, Scotland with a BA in Printed Textiles in 2018 and Parsons School of Design with an MFA in Textiles in 2021. Her work has received recognition through numerous awards and grants and is held in both private and public collections. She is a UK/US Fulbright scholar and a St. Andrew’s Society of The State of NY Carnegie Trust scholar. Her practice finds a marriage between craft and digital techniques, exploring the topics of archival research, sports culture, urban spaces and the physical body. Often, utilising ancient or traditional textile techniques, which may be undervalued or underused, she contemplates how they can be revived and combined with new technologies to continue a dialogue with the past.

Elizabeth Tolson

Elizabeth Tolson is an Expanded Media Artist and Educator whose work explores the boundaries of art, technology, and feminism. Through wearables in performance, video, and installation, Tolson creates her own narratives about the female body. Tolson holds an MFA from Parsons School of Design (2013) and a BFA from Alfred University (2010). She has participated in residencies at the Textile Arts Center, Chashama’s ChaNorth Residency, Benaco Arte, Open Wabi, Lacawac Sanctuary, and ProjectArt at the Bushwick Brooklyn Library. Exhibitions include the Target Gallery in Alexandria, VA; The Washington Project for the Arts Experimental Media Series at The Philips Collection in Washington D.C., and Cuchifritos Gallery in New York City. Tolson is currently based in Brooklyn, NY where she is Part-time Faculty at Parsons School of Design and an Artist in Residence at Trestle Projects.