ALI GIVENS
Artist Statement
My work is about the places we live and the memories we inhabit. Working with hand-painted cottons, silks, linens, and vintage fabrics, I layer color, pattern, and thread to distill interiors and artifacts into vibrant, tactile portraits. Shaped by my childhood in the American South and years in the Caribbean, New York City, Scotland, and Italy, my work blends bold palettes with subtle traces of memory and longing.
Domestic spaces and the objects they hold are a central focus of my work. I'm particularly drawn to vessels as a subject because of their infinite forms as containers and their deeper symbolic meaning. A home is a vessel for our lives, just as the body is a vessel for the spirit. My recent series, Kodachrome, prompted by my parents' 1970s slides of my early childhood home, combines painted and stitched textiles with silk photographic prints to build composites of time.This process links memory and material, reviving orphaned fabric fragments and honoring the labor embedded in cloth. By combining industrial machine-sewing and hand stitching, my collages gain sculptural presence and speak to resilience, community, and repair.
My work is composed of fabrics, each layer altered by painting, dyeing, or printing. I work to make the surface of each piece of cloth embody the artifacts they depict, magnifying the familiar details in our lives. The layered texture and strong black lines of my compositions celebrate the beauty of everyday life and the memories woven within it.