Liz Collins discovers transcendence through labor-intensive fiber art

Liz Collins cut her work when she conceived two 16-foot tapestries displayed at the Venice Biennale last year. Both textiles have mountain ranges, with peaks emitting rainbows that twist in the dark sky, and although they are one of the largest works in the Biennale, they are elegantly made and look effortless.

In 2022, when she began working on Textiellab in the Dutch city of Tillburg, Collins envisioned the two textiles as a 40-foot weave. She thought, “I’m just going to find my mother. I want to do this Huge. “But, going to mother’s batch quickly showed that it was not an easy task.

Collins soon realized that her ambitions had exceeded what was actually possible, which led her to split the planned large drawers into two points. In the initial trial, she didn’t look like she wanted, and she switched to lighter yarn. She was happy with the final product, which brought it back to the New York duffel bag, and it is not yet known that curator Adriano Pedrosa would be interested in showing them at his biennial.

During a recent visit to her Brooklyn studio, Collins was transparent about the difficulties in producing these textiles, titled Rainbow Mountain: Moon and Rainbow Mountain: Weather (all are 2023). But despite the arduous process of making, she also talks about the resulting work being transcendent and transportable. She described both representing “this huge distorted space” and saying that her mountain range “is a lasting duality for me: danger, prec, horror, horror thoughts – bad things – bad joy, euphoria, power of life, life, love, community and community and passion.

As Collins said, textiles portray “the promised land – what you are looking for is always a little out of reach.”

Since the 1990s, Collins has been creating fiber art in an attempt to reach the land of this promise. She has carefully crafted wearable clothes, weaving of paintings, and performances involving collaborators, many of whom use large textiles as collective weaving. She weaves strange themes into her work—the flag of relapse and pride throughout—and often produces textiles with tangible qualities, with spilled yarns that remind people of hair or blood.

These labor-intensive works have been conducted at commercial galleries, art fairs and design fairs and will now be investigated by the Rhode Island School of Design Museum, where Collins has both undergraduate and graduate work and later faculty in the textile department. The RISD survey, which opens on July 19 until January 11, 2026, coincides with the iteration of the Museum of Modern Art’s “History of Weaving: Textiles and Modern Abstraction”, features three of her works.

To create this elegant art requires physical and psychological endurance (sometimes the help of factories in Italy, Peru and other foreign countries). The catalog of the RISD exhibition includes a paper by Zoe Latta, co-founder of the costume label Eckhaus Latta, who also participated in Collins’ students who participated in one of the artist’s “Knitting Country” performances, for which Latta and others helped make a giant red weave and produced a giant red weave in an audit at the Contemporary Art Academy. “At some point, I remember my machine turned red and I realized my hand was bleeding from the blisters that popped up.” (The museum worker wrapped up Rata’s wounds and she returned to the show since then.)

From such a heavy labor spring weaving, the dark red shades, the glittering pink and the seductive blue. The fact that Collins was able to turn pain into beauty was not lost to her collaborators. For example prick (2013).

For artists, Kate Irvin, curator of the Collins RISD investigation, said that for the artist, “the idea of ​​labor leads to the idea of ​​this magic, alchemy, that creates form or structure with fiber threads.” Irvin compared Collins to a liar, saying: “She is looking for a path to other places of generacy, creativity and security.”

Collins himself said that the body of her process helps root her in her body, and even welcomes the boredom that comes with the weaving. “Either it’s boring or you’ve found a way to make it transformative,” she said. “You can go beyond monotony.”

Collins was born in 1968 She said in Alexandria, Virginia, she visited the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, D.C. during her childhood, “experience art is part of my life,” she recalled her experience of participating in the National Museum of African Art such as attending the African Art Museum, and on a visit she watched a video about men making Kente Blote.

She described an early compulsion that made “the weight of the painting heavy.” But she eventually found herself reluctant to accept this medium. As part of her basic research needed for her freshman needs at RISD, she tried painting, but “something that stressed me – rectangle, Rigid rectangle“She found herself enjoying modernists like Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Anni Albers and Sonia Delaunay, all of whom have smoothly translated their abstractions in cross-painting and textiles. These artists “really helped me know I could do that, too,” Collins said.

When she became a textile major the following year, she finally found her purpose. As she said in the RISD directory, she learned to weave with warp boards and found the experience of “so special, novel, perfect for my body”.

However, even textile plans leave behind something that needs: She wants to create clothes, and all her teachers are fiber artists or designers. “I want to work with Jean Paul Gaultier, who can turn my magical fabrics into magic clothes,” she told me. Although it is impossible to find a Gaultier-like mentor in RISD’s faculty, Collins follows his intuition. When she was assigned to create a “political work” for a class, she took a fake fur and cut it down. Since then, she has continued to produce weaves with gas.

After graduating with MFA in 1999, Collins founded a knitting company that briefly made her a fixture in the fashion world. “My symbolism and recognition of liquidity goes up because my job is very unusual,” she said. “I’m breaking the rules. I’m making things with a knitting machine instead of using a factory and making these very unusual structures that people have never seen before.”

Many of these buildings are eager for liberation. For example, a tight bust that appeared in 1999, for example, in MoMA’s “History of Weaving” has red veins that cross over the torso and one shoulder; a clear dress worn by a runway model hangs red lines and open holes. “I came out wearing clothes and was a weird person,” Collins said. “This is the original expression of my emotional landscape, my sexual behavior, my anxiety and depression.”

Her clothes went into the mainstream, with rapper Lil’Kim wearing pink silk and wool tops designed by Collins in a 2000 music video. Some people in the art world also appreciate them, including art historian Julia Bryan-Wilson, a long-time friend who dedicated her 2017 books, Frey: Art and Textile Politicsgo to Collins. “When I want to feel my most ferocious, protected and charming, that’s when I choose to wear Liz Collins outfits,” said Bryan-Wilson. “They are witches and striking. They are the works of statements. People are always like, ‘Oh my God, what is That Are you wearing it? ”

But Collins began to feel burned by the fashion business. She didn’t make enough money, and she was already exhausted by customers who made specific demands for her, unaware of everything in her clothes production. Collins knew she was no longer doing it herself, so she applied to work with other designers, including Donna Karan. But when she came across a position in RISD’s textile department, “everything was transferred for me.” She recalled the “slowly” outdated fashion of a project with designers like Gary Graham, who she made with. Proud dress (2003), made of tattered American flag.

Bryan-Wilson put it on himself Proud dress for Weaving the country’s phase 1: Wartime weaving (2005), the first of a series of performances that helped cement Collins’ place in the art world. On Governor Island Wartime weaving Many collaborators involved, working together to weave an American flag, then place it on the ground, step on the ground and deface it. Collins intends to respond to Sonny A. Smith’s response this mustera series of artworks are asking about the recurrence of the Civil War. Smith is eager to answer: “Why are you fighting?” Wartime weaving As the U.S. continues to conflict in Afghanistan, it seems many Americans are asking something similar. Brian Wilson recalls Wartime weaving As a “combust”, it was emphasized by the loud noise of the knitting machine and said she understood the work as “a criticism of wartime nationalism and knitting labor.”

Future “Knitting Country” performances involve making piles of pride flags and red fabrics. Through these performances, Collins said, she “focused on telling a story about the manual labor of making fabrics and exposing this medium, which I think is like alchemy, holding a yarn and putting it on this machine.”

Collins held the final “Knitting Country” show in 2016, and has since produced a fantastic series of textiles. In 2017, she worked on the Little River Cafe Commission in New York, where she made it heritagea group of hanging white textiles hanging over diners’ heads. (This is an allusion to the sails of the ships of Collins’ father when he was a child. Secret cavea device bathed in blue light, which includes two chairs of different heights, used together with violet fibers.

Collins said these days, she is experiencing a “strange color moment” in which her work is often in conflicting tones. She points to a new weave called the “Zagreb Mountains” series that showcases jagged, jagged lines in a variety of colors, from noisy yellow to soothing Cerulean. “I’m alone and I can come up with some weird shit,” she said.

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