Carlyn Clark is a textile artist based in Southern California, with more than four decades of working with cloth — beginning with her first fashion label, Choosey Beggar, in 1980 — as a designer, arts educator, and maker of things meant to last.

Her current practice centers on natural dye, surface design, and visible mending. She comes from generations of maker-menders, and that inheritance shapes everything: the belief that materials carry the people who used them, that repair is a form of care, and that every rescued garment is a small, quiet act of resistance against a culture that would rather you buy something new.

She works with harvested and foraged natural dyes layered with painting, printing, stitching, and fabric manipulation — and increasingly with the needle and thread of the mending basket. She teaches mending workshops, and has deepened her practice through intensive study with master dyers Aboubakar Fofana, Michel Garcia, and John Marshall. In 2018 she joined the Hana Kark Art Collective.