Artist Caitlin McCormack

Philadelphia-based fiber artist and educator Caitlin McCormack has contributed works to solo and group exhibitions at Elijah Wheat Showroom, Field Projects, Hashimoto Contemporary, The Mütter Museum, Museum Rijswijk, The Mesa Contemporary Art Museum, The Taubman Museum of Art, The Fort Wayne Museum of Art, Feinkünst Krüger, Blah Blah Gallery, SPRING/ BREAK Art Show, Future Fair, and BravinLee Programs in NYC. Their sculptures have appeared in publications including The New York Times, Hyperallergic, BOMB, Juxtapoz, Whitehot Magazine, Smithsonian, and Bust Magazine.

In addition to holding teaching positions at The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and Hussian College of Art and Design, McCormack has participated in artist residencies at The Vermont Studio Center, Monson Arts, The Peter Bullough Foundation, The Wassaic Project, Byrdcliffe Artist Colony, Kimmel Harding Nelson, and The C-Scape Dune Shack Artist Residency Program in Provincetown, MA.

McCormack was the recipient of a Joseph Robert Foundation grant in 2021 and received the Woodmere Art Museum’s Maurice Freed Memorial Prize in 2023.

"Exploring existential dread, sexuality, and mental illness through a strangely melancholic or humorous lens, I contemplate societal reluctance to legitimize gendered craft and regard crochet as a behavioral response to apocalyptic conditions. Inspired by folkloric botanical motifs, natural history museum displays, sci-fi/body horror cinema, and abundant solitude paired with an overactive imagination, each object is the unraveling artifact of a memory or thought. Tethered to a surface and made viewable from a distance, these works are vital outlets through which I express my trepidations as a queer, anxious person inhabiting a volatile world. My practice contributes to craft’s ongoing conversations surrounding hierarchy, ecology, and grief experienced both individually and collectively. Externalizing intangible recollections and emotions, I create automythographic rhizospheres, forsaken creatures’ remains, and folkloric totems that appear simultaneously solid and in a constant state of unraveling. Invasive blossoms and tangled root systems serve as proxies for bodily desires and consternations. Through these preternatural growths, I portray lust, longing, and discomfort in one’s skin as parallel experiences of attraction and estrangement, where the self presents as both a swollen, florid seedpod and a xerophyte husk. Using hand-crocheted cotton thread dredged in glues and foraged pigments, I fashion soft forms into rigid compositions. This process recontextualizes moments of despair and rage as ornate, provocative, sometimes comical specimens. Obscured by overgrowths of lace flowers and fibrous vines, each object's integrity is reinforced by complex networks, just as we are all strengthened by the intricate ecosystems of our experiences."

Tell us a little about yourself (where you are from) and your background in the arts.

Both of my parents are/were artists. I’m an only child. The three of us lived together in a tiny cabin with a wood-burning stove on a relative’s property in a rural part of New Jersey. Our household was very low-income so my parents encouraged me to make my own toys out of repurposed materials and scraps from their own art supply stashes.

My Italian grandmother taught me how to crochet when I was four years old and, using doily-making materials I inherited from her side of the family, I carved out a studio practice that has become inseparable from my sanity and survival since adolescence.

What kind of work are you currently making?

Since my dad’s unexpected death in 2024, my work has started to resemble mineral formations inspired in part by ’pataphysical writer René Daumal’s peradams. These objects are what it would look like if I launched my memories into outer space and had them return to Earth, compressed and distorted by the conditions of the unknown.

Each rock is encrusted with delicate lace encasing objects collected over my lifetime, and reflects the ways my experiences have vulcanized themselves like mineral formations in my body. Housed either in coral-like, heavily textured vessels or as solitary objects in-the-round, these works explore the accumulation and analysis of events in my life and how these moments continuously shape who I am.

What is a day like in the studio for you?

I split my work time between the second bedroom in my South Philly rental and my actual studio. My mornings typically begin with me ambling towards the bathroom in my pajamas with every intention to brush my teeth, only to wind up distracted for hours by some unsolved crochet riddle spotted out of the corner of my eye in my home workspace.

When I’ve committed adequate time to whatever is going on there, I’ll take a 45-minute walk up to my studio just north of Philadelphia’s Chinatown and will tend to sculptures in various forms of completion.

This time may be comprised of crocheting with a tiny hook for many hours, dredging handmade lace in stiffening agents and blocking it on plastic sheeting, positioning and repositioning objects on a flat surface or display object until they’re properly situated, delicately nudging individual strings into place with a tiny paintbrush, or all of the above.

What are you looking at right now and/or reading?

I’m reading an anthology of short stories from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, released by The British Library, all of which revolve around “weird media” or bizarre, paranormal encounters the stories’ subjects bear witness to through the use of new (to them) technologies. I have always been very influenced by horror and speculative fiction so I’ve been enjoying these tales of otherworldly daguerreotypes and radio transmissions from the unknown.

As a fiber artist, I’m also always fascinated by costume design and have been obsessing over the series The Righteous Gemstones, particularly the strange, unresolved, hybridized geometric and botanical-patterned fabrics used consistently in the cast’s audacious wardrobe. The freaky motifs feel very intentional and I would love to pick the brain of the show’s costume designer.

Where can we find more of your work? (ex. website/insta/gallery/upcoming shows)

I currently have an installation on view in Philadelphia at Glen Foerd on the Delaware entitled Scorpion Grass, paying tribute to the historically undervalued labor of landscapers and gardeners.

One of my large-scale rhizospheres will be included in Fiber Iterations at Textile Art Gallery NYC, located at 529 W 20th Street in Chelsea, which opens August 6th.

Lastly, I will be participating in Acquiescence, an exhibition curated by Lucas Moran at The Ely Center of Contemporary Art in New Haven, CT, starting August 30th.