Abigail Hogan

Born and raised in the U.S., Abigail Hogan currently lives and works in northern Virginia.

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     As an artist, I’ve instinctively approached art making as a way to elevate natural landscapes in response to the environmental deterioration that’s occurring around me. The landscapes I make have evolved into mixed media works, becoming painting/weaving hybrid tapestries, with elements of embroidery. My anxieties associated with climate change today is worked through in the weaving. The painted landscapes are altered, cut into, and segmented, embodying a more organic shape and straying away from the typical square or rectangular frame that paintings usually have. The weaving functions as connective tissue between fragments and reconstructs the landscapes. 

     The practice of weaving has been, for a while, a mode of relaxation. It’s allowed me to fall into a meditative focus with its repetitive movements. The meaning behind the weaving within my work has become more deliberate as I’ve developed these pieces. Historically, the process of weaving, at its beginning, was a more sustainable process, produced within individual households for their specific needs. But since the introduction of the industrial revolution, weaving became more mechanized and used in mass production of cheaper made textiles in factories. The fast fashion and textile industry today are one of the major contributors to environmental issues. When approaching my work, because at its most basic form, weaving is the foundation for textile production, using it in the artwork symbolically undermines the negative impacts of these industries. With the addition of fibers to painting, the pieces I create have become an exploration into reconciling my, and humanity’s relationship with the earth, and a way to cope with my eco-anxiety.  The repetitive processes and tactility of weaving and embroidery, done with my hands, allows for an intimate connection with the creation of the earthly environments in the work.

     The combination of painting and weaving has only recently emerged in my practice, creating the opportunity to experiment with the ways of connecting them, creating a more cohesive piece. The artwork I create, though it touches upon a universal issue that affects everyone on this earth, is a very personal process; physical movements within the weaving and embroidery processes work as a release for tension within the psyche. The threads extend outward from the altered painted surface, completing the landscape and reconstructing the environment. As it’s a personal journey for me creating these works, I source my subject matter from places I’m intimately familiar with, places I’ve lived and visited, and in the reconstructing of the landscapes with weaving, the work touches upon memory. I think about the emotional aspect of homes and hometowns being erased by ecological disasters and how it feels rebuilding these locations from memory. Fragments of places I know well are then recreated from my intuition and memory, transferring through movement, into something tangible and whole.