Bio

Carlyn Clark is a Southern California-based textile artist with over four decades of experience working with cloth. Beginning in 1980 with her first fashion label, Choosey Beggar, her career has spanned work as a designer, arts educator, and maker of functional and decorative art meant to endure.

Clark’s practice centers on natural dyes, surface design, and visible mending. Raised in a generational tradition of maker-menders, her work is guided by the belief that materials carry the physical presence of those who held them before. For Clark, repair is both an act of care and a quiet resistance against a culture driven by rapid consumption and novelty.

Her process layers harvested and foraged plant dyes with painting, printing, hand-stitching, and structural fabric manipulation. She has deepened her technical and historical practice through intensive study with master dyers Aboubakar Fofana, Michel Garcia, and John Marshall. In 2018, Clark joined the Hana Kark Art Collective, and she regularly teaches visible mending and dye workshops across Southern California.