Katherine Gibson & Emily Van Walleghen 

Artists gain inspiration from many different avenues, one of the most predominant being their surroundings. In a time where most of us are spending more time than ever at home, it is only natural for inspiration to be drawn from the domestic surroundings of our living spaces. 

Home is a place of comfort, and it is arguably your most personal space. This show is focused on honoring those personal spaces and showcasing individual vulnerability through fiber art. 

This spring, 1628 is excited to be showing 12 regional or national female identifying artists with practices based in fiber. Cocoon: Fibers of Home aims to highlight the relationship between home and self. Featured in this show, artists Katherine Gibson and Emily Van Walleghen.

Here we are highlighting two such artists from Cocoon: Fibers of Home:

Katherine Gibson born 1980 in Middletown, Rhode Island, is an artist and educator primarily working in painting who has been trained as a metalsmith. She studied sculpture at the College of William and Mary, then moved to Richmond to study metalsmithing at Virginia Commonwealth University.  She completed her MFA at the University of Cincinnati in 2020.

Her research is focused on meaning-making in the intersubjective landscape of media, most recently the world of 1990’s teen magazines. Using textile techniques, painting, and recycled teen magazines, she creates items associated with comfort and protection. Quilts, coverings, and cloaks draw inspiration from and often use as a material the teen magazines she read in the 1990’s – texts that subconsciously shaped her burgeoning conceptions of the world and her identity within it.

Emily Van Walleghen currently lives and works in Cincinnati, Ohio where she earned a MFA in Studio and Fine Art from the University of Cincinnati in 2020. Her previous degrees include a BS (University of Illinois), MS (University of Arizona), and PhD (Virginia Tech) in the field of Nutritional Science. Her practice is informed by her education and professional experience in science and research and shaped by a reality of sensationalism where fact and fiction are so tightly interwoven the truth does not exist.

Through fiber work that explores time, labor, and the relationship between process and outcome, Van Walleghen investigates the explicit and hidden forces subverting data collection and dissemination. Using commonplace materials and familiar craft techniques, she stitches the scientific and academic into everyday experience.

Along with their individual pieces, Gibson and Van Walleghen have collaborative works in the show.

Covectors investigates the reality of home in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Private boundaries, public health, and politics have interwoven creating a national tapestry filled with rips and tangles. They explore public COVID-19 data and its visual representations and how both can be misinterpreted or used to mislead by re-interpreting technical depictions of data using historically female-gendered domestic techniques. 


All exhibit pieces are for sale. If you are interested in seeing the exhibition virtually, click here. If interested in purchasing or displaying art in the 1628 Coworking gallery, please contact us at art@tamaras.wpenginepowered.com.

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