The Shape of What's Gone: Craft, Labor, and the American South

Artist and educator Kimberly English explores how cloth can be used to interrogate American mythologies of labor, heritage, and belonging, particularly as they take shape in the South. Working with inherited textile structures such as overshot and coverlet drafts, the artist reconfigures pattern through interruption, distortion, and negative space, treating absence as both a formal strategy and a historical condition. These gestures reflect broader tensions between nostalgia and lived reality, where ideals of self-sufficiency and “heritage” craft often obscure histories of extraction, dispossession, and ecological precarity. Through a combination of material exploration and critical reflection, the talk positions cloth as a site where systems of labor and identity are continuously reimagined.

About Kimberly English:

Expanding upon her undergraduate textiles education from Savannah College of Art and Design, Kimberly English (b. 1994) earned her MFA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as a Carolina Digital Humanities Fellow in 2018. Kimberly has been awarded residencies at the McColl Center, Woodstock Byrdcliffe Artist Colony, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, Penland School of Craft, Berea College, and The Gibbes Museum. Her work has been featured in various publications including The New York Times, Burnaway, and Design Milk.

English’s fiber-based practice explores the connection between the individual agency and collective experience through historical, personal, and perceptual interrogations of textile structure. Her woven and sewn forms synthesize narratives informed by the American South and globalized labor, investigating the nuance of interdependence between land, machines, people, and the objects they create. Her work has been exhibited widely and internationally, recently at the Spartanburg Art Museum, New Bedford Art Museum, the Delaware Contemporary, the Ackland Museum, Vox Populi, CICA Museum, and the Museum of Craft and Design. Kimberly was the ’24-‘25 Emerging Artist Fellow in Fiber at Virginia Commonwealth University and runs a weaving residency, Tabby Studio, out of the shared studio space on her property in Canton, North Carolina.

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Host or Publisher The Gaines Center for Humanities at the University of Kentucky