Karolyn Hatton

My work consists of interrelated strands that include tapestries, banners, weavings, objects, and an ongoing series of wearable capes or wraps. I regard my practice as both sculpture and collage, objects in space that synthesize a whole from disparate parts. For the past decade the majority of my works have incorporated found items such as printed t-shirts, clothing, commercial packaging, and furniture. The materials still bear traces of their former lives but are transformed, embellished, redeployed. The combinations of elements that occur are suffused with a female perspective, disruptive humor, provisional open-endedness and playful rebelliousness.

My recent wall-hangings and capes are informed by the language of abstraction and gesture obliquely toward its history while engaging with the democratizing presence of DIY, craft and female labor. Rather than building from a planned design, I more frequently respond to existing, discarded fragments and off cuts, working provisionally so that each work is the collision of parts that coalesce in the moment.

My cashmere capes have evolved from a series of protest banners, as I felt the need to move works off the wall and into public space. Initially inspired by Gees Bend quilts and Bauhaus textiles, each is a one-off, pieced together from cast-off, often moth-eaten, cashmere sweaters. Organic in contour and process, they are meditations on luxury, sensuality, visibility, utility, and survival.

Selected Shows

Malevolent Eldritch Screaming

Press release for Malevolent Eldritch Screaming, curated by Paul Morrison at AttercliffeTM, Sheffield, UK
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Tiny Acts Topple Empires

Curated by Heather Bhandari, Woskob Family Gallery, State College, PA
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Poster at Black Ball Projects

Brooklyn, NY. An exhibition of protest signs. Catalogue.
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12 x 12, 2016, Black Ball Projects

at BlackBall Projects, Brooklyn
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Assembling Narratives

Dorsky Gallery Curatorial Programs Curated by Donna Harkavy and Flavia S. Zuniga-West Long Island City, NY Installation of 3 stitched fabric banners
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Like, a Conversation

Queens International 4 Curated by Jose Ruiz and Erin Sickler Queens Museum of Art, New York (Publication)
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A Dance Around the Maypole: Proto-speed Dating and the Ancient Rite of Spring

Proteus Gowanus Brooklyn, NY I created costumes that physically connected each of the twelve dancers to the central pole. As they danced their clothing wove around the pole and their movements around each other grew more curtailed, intimate, and contorted. When the dancers became immobilized they removed the costumes. The woven pole was carried then […]
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Quiet Riot

March Gallery, Curated by Karolyn Hatton & Julian Kreimer Artists: Ólöf Björnsdóttir, Vanessa Chow, Anne Chu, Hagan & Assoc., Jim Hegge, Carrie Moyer, Sheila Pepe, Judy Pfaff, Stefan Saffer, Craig Taylor, Wallace Whitney
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Curating

Quiet Riot

March Gallery, Curated by Karolyn Hatton & Julian Kreimer Artists: Ólöf Björnsdóttir, Vanessa Chow, Anne Chu, Hagan & Assoc., Jim Hegge, Carrie Moyer, Sheila Pepe, Judy Pfaff, Stefan Saffer, Craig Taylor, Wallace Whitney
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