CURRENT EXHIBITION

ARTIST BIOS + STATEMENTS

CECILIA CHARLTON

I am a Glasgow-based American artist and researcher working primarily with the processes of weaving, embroidery, spinning, and natural dyeing. Holding a BFA Painting from Hunter College (2015) and an MA Painting from the Royal College of Art (2018), I utilize historically-grounded textile techniques to pursue interests in geometry, color, and the role of the subconscious.

Themes of feminism, human history, time, and transcendence are inherently part of the hand-made work, and investigations into the history of textiles from creative, cultural, and socio-economic perspectives underpin my studio practice. Spanning the mediums of textiles, installation, and art in the social sphere, the work results in conversation tending towards both the personal and the universal.

Recent works meditate on the intersection of traditional craft practices, ecological systems, and sociopolitical events towards a deeper understanding of intercultural and environmental relationships.

Cecilia Charlton is a PhD candidate at the Glasgow School of Art. She has exhibited widely in the UK and internationally, with recent shows at the Ragged School Museum, London (2025), Harewood House, Leeds (2024), Garden Museum, London (solo, 2023), and Candida Stevens Gallery, Chichester (solo, 2023). Charlton’s awards include the Arts Council England Project Grant (2024), Lithuanian Cultural Council Mobility Grant (2025), Brookfield Properties Craft Award (shortlisted, 2022), Jerwood Makers Open Award (2021), Fulbright UK Scholarship (shortlisted, 2015), and the Ellen Battel Stockel Fellowship at Yale University’s Norfolk Residency (2014).

Her work is held in the public collections of the National Museum of Lithuania, Guy’s & St Thomas’ Foundation, London School of Economics, and NHS/Bart’s Trust, as well as in private collections. Charlton's work has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, El País, Crafts Magazine, The Times, The Guardian, Vogue UK, The Financial Times, and in Helen Adams’s recent book Textile Fine Art.

JULIE COCKBURN

I am a visual artist living in Suffolk, UK, working with a wide range of materials to create hybrid, highly crafted collages.  My practice is difficult to define, though in the past I have been described as a book artist, a sculptor, and a photographer. I use all these monikers to explore the way we look at and interpret the plethora of images that surround us, preferring the term maker or craftsperson.

I trained as a sculptor at Central Saint Martin’s art college in the 1990s, and we were taught to use anything and everything as our materials – lack of funds meant that I spent a lot of time in charity shops and skip diving, and it’s that way of working that continues in my practice today.  I source old photographs, postcards, and second-hand books from the internet or car boot fairs – found images that I alter using traditional techniques such as hand embroidery, painting, inlay, and screen printing.

I also work with my own childhood drawings – found images of a sort. There is an obvious timeline that links those crude, immature drawings with the contemporary, delicate, crafted embroidery, and it is that arc of time that I like to imagine when working with the mid-century found photographs that I use, bringing them into a meaningful present.

Julie Cockburn has shown extensively in the UK, Europe, and the USA. Solo shows include: Painting the Photograph, The Photographers’ Gallery Print Sales, 2021; Balancing Act, The Photographers’ Gallery Print Sales, London, 2020; Telling It Slant, Flowers Gallery, Kingsland Road, London, 2019; Waiting Room, Flowers Gallery, Kingsland Road, London, 2014; Slight Exposure, Yossi Milo Gallery, New York, 2013. Group shows include: In the Now: Gender and Nation in Europe, Selections from the Sir Mark Fehrs Haukohl Photography Collection, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2021; All Eyes, Akzo Nobel Art Foundation, Netherlands, 2021; Break the Mold: New Takes on Traditional Art Making, North Carolina Museum of Art, USA, 2021; Habiter L’intime, Fondation Thalie, Brussels, 2019; Allure [Fr. style, elegance] Photographs from the Susanne von Meiss Collection, C|O Berlin, Berlin, 2016.

Cockburn’s works are represented in renowned collections such as the Akzo Nobel Art Foundation, The Netherlands; Art In Embassies, USA; British Land, London, UK; Caldic Collection, The Netherlands; Nottingham Castle Museum and Art Gallery, Nottingham, UK; John Jones, London, UK; Miniature Museum of Contemporary Art, The Netherlands; Pier 24, San Francisco, USA; The Arts Club, London, UK; The Wellcome Collection, London, UK; Yale Center for British Art, Connecticut, USA; Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, USA; Collection R. Patt, Brussels; Goetz Collection, Munich, Germany.

KATE RUSSO

I am a multi-disciplinary artist and writer, based in Portland, ME. I work in both oil on panel and thread on paper. Through an art historical and feminist lens, I produce heavily patterned, grid-based works that combine explorations into color with the labor intensity that is synonymous with women’s “craftwork.”

My work is known for being intricate and meticulous, suggesting time is as much a medium as oil paint and thread. My palettes and patterns are both derived from historical painting, particularly paintings of interiors: rooms where women are reading, stitching, bathing, and other “passive” activities. My work invokes both domestic and personal interiority.

In my series Artist Rooms’, I employ needle and thread to build imaginary spaces for artists whose work has helped build my own “room.” Playing with Virginia Woolf’s theory in A Room of One’s Own: every woman who wishes to be an artist needs a room with a lock on the door in which to create. Female artists who had a subversive relationship with pattern, repetition, domesticity, and obsession, such as Eva Hesse, Emma Kunz, Louise Bourgeois, Agnes Martin, Anni Albers, Lenore Tawney, and Gwen John, are featured in this series.

The temporality and repetition inherent in my creative process are a means of expressing my need for solitude, autonomy, and the power of thought — attributes not easily afforded by women.

Russo was born in 1982, and her family moved to Maine in 1991, where she’s had a presence ever since. She attended Colby College, graduating in 2004 with a B.A. in Art History and Studio Art. In 2007, she earned an MFA from The Slade School of Fine Art at University College London, where she was awarded The Henry Tonks Prize for drawing.

Russo’s first solo exhibition with Sarah Bouchard Gallery was 2023’s Storyteller. Other solo shows include Stitched Works at Postalco Shibuya, Tokyo, Japan, in 2017, and Settings at Foley Gallery, NYC, in 2014. Group shows include Temporality: The Process of Time at The Center for Maine Contemporary Art in 2019, People Watching: Then and Now, at the Fitchburg Museum of Art, 2017, Currents: “Do you Hear What I Hear?” Curated by Anthony Elms at A.I.R. Gallery, NYC, 2016, and The Creekside Open, 2015, in London, selected by Lisa Milroy and Richard Deacon.

Russo is also a novelist; her novel Super Host came out in 2021 with G.P. Putnam and Sons and was a New York Times Editor’s Choice. Until Alison was published in 2025, also with Putnam. Every Infinitesimal Thought is Russo’s first foray into curation in over twenty years.

AMANDA VALDEZ

I am a studio and research-based artist best known for mixed-media paintings that incorporate sewing, hand-woven cloth, embroidery, fabric, oil stick, and other paint media. I begin my works through drawings that reference landscape, physical experiences, archaeological objects, and architecture encountered in day-to-day life, research, and travel. My paintings reflect the history and memory that the body holds in its somatic makeup: scars, sags, wrinkles, marks, symmetries, and asymmetries. I uncover these through the act of drawing, accessing a deep body of familiar and mysterious stored shapes and experiences.

The paintings then bring fabric into canvas, together creating a singular physical base for mark-making and a symbolic base for a feminist approach that dismantles the traditional gendered dichotomy of painting on canvas and the history of textiles. I build upon the uniquely engineered surfaces of my paintings, with approaches that require a considerable range of speed and patience, as the embroidery is slow and meditative, and quilt blocks are playful, whereas the oil stick is immediate, and acrylic even more so, particularly as it is applied last, and the success of an artwork relies on it.

My artistic practice has long been grounded in abstraction, with the intent to speak to the widest audience possible, which I’ve balanced with the inherent bodily nature of my work and its making.

My process is research-based and iterative, allowing experiences, texts, and processes to organically become part of my work over time, as we bear witness to a shifting canon that includes more space for fiber-based art and consideration of motherhood/parent-child relationships.

Amanda Valdez was born in Seattle, WA, and lives in New York, NY. She received her MFA from Hunter College in New York City and her BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Valdez has been the recipient of artist residencies at the Joan Mitchell Center, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and 100W Corsicana.

Valdez's recent solo and two-person exhibitions include Christy Matson & Amanda Valdez: Milk Tide, Reynolds Gallery (Richmond, VA); Wet Kiss, Landing Gallery (Los Angeles, CA); Breaking Wave, Danforth Gallery, University of Maine (Augusta, ME); Gratitude, Denny Dimin Gallery (New York, NY); Piecework, The Heckscher Museum of Art (Huntington, NY); and Ladies’ Night, Mead Art Museum, Amherst College (Amherst, MA).

Her work is included in the public collections of The Heckscher Museum of Art (Huntington, NY); Mead Art Museum at Amherst College (Amherst, MA); Davis Museum at Wellesley College (Wellesley, MA); Time Equities Inc. (New York, NY); US Embassy (Guatemala City); and Art in Embassies, US Department of State.

Valdez's work has been featured and reviewed in Artforum, LA Times, Brooklyn Rail, Whitewall, Newsday, Galerie Magazine, ARTNews, Forbes, Paper Magazine, and The Stranger.

ARTWORK IMAGES