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.