Artist Statement

Carlyn Clark creates mixed media art with a strong engagement around textiles, exploring the variances between memory and experience and the plurality that develops through shifting interpretation. She increases the dynamic between audience and artist by objectifying emotion, drawing the viewer in as a participant rather than an observer.

In a culture driven by relentless consumption and the pressure to buy new, Clark uses repair, hand-stitching, and repurposed textiles as acts of quiet resistance, confronting the lingering stigma that mended cloth signifies lack and reframing visible repair as a deliberate act of care, memory, and agency. To ground this commitment, she has bought no new art supplies or materials since mid-2019—relying exclusively on materials scavenged, traded, or inherited across three generations.

Using these scavenged, repurposed, and transformed materials alongside traditional and historic processes, her work celebrates usage—embracing unevenness, irregularity, and decay as ways into memory and projection. Through modifications and mutations that probe the uncertainty of origination, she absorbs the historic traditions of remembrance art, dye processes, and stitchery customs into her daily practice, describing personal events through additions and omissions, acknowledgment and disavowal.

Most recently, this inquiry has turned toward what she calls Embodied Inheritance—working directly with family heirlooms as material, drawn so far from a cedar chest of inherited textiles: her mother's baby dress, her father's baby shirt, her grandmother's linens, her great-grandmother's dining room seat covers. These are objects that were held, worn, and often made by the hands that came before her—carrying not just history but literal inheritance, absorbed rather than taught. It's an evolving thread within the same questions of memory and origination that have long shaped the work, not a departure from.