Britny Wainwright ( she/her )

I employ fiber, clay, and pattern to rewrite modernism’s hierarchy because I reject decoration being excluded as a medium of power. I am an unsatisfied accomplice of ornament. I stitch and construct to share the stories of my foremothers and myself. Working between ceramics and fiber I generate objects almost suited for domestic space: a quilt that provides no warmth, a pillow that doesn’t comfort. Through a personal and political lens I participate in a dialogue with art, craft, queerness, and feminism.

I borrow and digest textiles, wallpaper, and gardens to develop my own alphabet of repetitive marks. Similar to how decorative motifs historically followed routes of trade across the globe, my decorative language shifts and changes over time and medium. Flowers carved from clay slabs translate to fiber appliqué on denim, and then back to clay through linear coil drawings. I research aesthetic boundaries that divided gender during Modernism. Women, for example, were encouraged to dress in a way to camouflage themselves into their embellished domestic spaces. In an industrial world, the perimeter of the home was their container. This history fuels my work.

The bare, unglazed, terra-cotta surface of my vessels show evidence of my touch. I leave fingermarks when I squeeze and build. The warm, earthy terra-cotta provides a compass for color and texture. In recent works I partner large terra-cotta vessels and textile cushions. The soft fiber form intersects the hard roundness of the vase. These pieces are a head on a pillow, a body, but also an image. Historically, flower painting was relegated to women, and patchwork belonged to craft guilds rather than the gallery.

I construct with fiber and clay in traditional and experimental modes. For example, in Embedded Relationships, I stuff leaf forms with sand and let them sag. In Together I combine couch upholstery material with automotive vinyl using historical quilt blocks. In Pockets and Other Places to Hide, I employ the transparency of amber vinyl to serve as a curtain, and I stretch a corduroy pocket, filled with linear terra-cotta flowers, across a wooden frame. In Sorry We Couldn’t Make it, I stud a sandbag with terra-cotta flowers. In all of these, I reference domestic moments and play with abstraction.

My practice continues to grow through questions posed with material. I choose ceramics and fiber because of their long connection to women’s labor. As a queer woman, I find it necessary to make work about my experiences, the objects I grew up with, and the significance of visual culture to one’s identity. My inter-material work pulls apart hierarchies within art, specifically the gendered complications of the exclusion of decoration, and the relationship between craft and art.

Britny Wainwright is a sculptor, curator, and educator based in Columbus, Ohio. She employs ceramics, fiber, and mixed materials to abstract and draw meaning from domestic objects. She investigates the gendered division of craft and fine art, and queer material culture. She has exhibited work at Contemporary Craft in Pittsburgh, PA, Vinegar Contemporary in Birmingham, AL, VisArts in Rockville, MD, The North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh, NC, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, AR among others. She has held several residencies, most notably as a co-facilitator for Clay in the Expanded Field at Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts in Edgecomb, ME and as a Benson Family Fellow at Hambidge Center in Rabun Gap, GA. She cofounded Dream Clinic Project Space in Columbus, OH and currently serves as visiting faculty and Director of Foundations Studies in the Department of Art at Ohio State University.