Save the date for Maris's collective weaving workshop on Wednesday, March 25th!
Maris Van Vlack’s work is an exploration of destruction, vestiges, and memory. Using textile and painting techniques, she creates tactile objects depicting stone architectural structures, investigating how history becomes visible through destruction. Each work begins with a tapestry that is layered and collaged with paint, digital weaving, and knitting. The process mirrors the way that landscapes get buried and fossilized throughout time, losing their original structure but telling a story through the new forms that appear. She uses weaving as my foundation because the process mimics how architecture is meticulously built up and can be torn and weathered away, with each mark visually representing the history of what has occurred in that space.
Maris Van Vlack is an interdisciplinary artist from Massachusetts who combines digital and traditional weaving practices with painting to build tapestries that explore memory and history. Growing up in New England surrounded by remnants of stone textile mills inspired her to explore the connections between architecture and textiles, and how the ruins of a building tell a story about a landscape. Studying Textiles and Drawing at the Rhode Island School of Design taught her to think of a thread as a drawing material that can be used to create pictorial spaces. She has exhibited in the USA and Europe, including shows at the U. S. Capitol Building (Washington, DC), NADA New York (New York, NY), the RISD Museum (Providence, RI), the Icelandic Textile Center (Blönduós, Iceland), and FOG Art Fair (San Francisco, CA). She is a recipient of the Kennedy Center’s 2024 VSA Emerging Artist Award, the St. Botolph Club Foundation Emerging Artist Award, and the RISD Textile Department Award for Innovation in the Textiles Field. Her work has been published by the Boston Globe, Interior Design Magazine, Google Arts & Culture, Dwell Magazine, Miami Living Weekly, and Warp + Weft Magazine.
We welcome Maris to the studio as our March WIP resident!
You can visit her studio on Saturdays from 2pm to 5pm.
Textile Arts Center’s Work in Progress (TAC WIP) is a window into the studio practice of contemporary artists and designers that engages the public in a dialogue with the field of textiles.