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Artist Rose Malenfant



Rose Malenfant is a multidisciplinary artist, curator, and educator from New York, based in Brooklyn. She primarily works with textiles and biomaterials creating sculptures from embodied rituals. Her practice dismantles mass production, and hyper consumption through slow cumulative processes mimicking rhythms of the kitchen, body and earth. Rose uses a variety of techniques and materials including nylon pantyhose, avocado skins, found silverware, bioplastics, wax, silicone, gravity and time. ​


Rose is an artist in residence at Textile Arts Center (2024-25). Her work has been exhibited by galleries throughout Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens including El Barrio Art Space, Atlantic Gallery, and the Factory LIC, with a solo exhibition forthcoming at Tempest Gallery (May 2026). She has received awards from The Art Students League of New York and the International Society of Experimental Artists. Rose continues to invest in her practice with the Textile Study Group of New York, Women Sculptors Group NY and The Alternative Art School. ​


Rose was a recipient of Beam Center’s Artist in Residency Program on Governors Island, 2022 where she continues to work as Director of Design and Programming mentoring young artists through collaborative projects and public art. ​Her curatorial work includes exhibitions "Semi-Permeable" at Living Skin, "Propagation- Suspended Roots" at Studio 9D Chelsea Arts Building, and “Body as a Conduit” at Textile Arts Center.





"I'm interested in slow accumulation. I work incrementally, forming sculptures by physically tracking material rituals. By examining repetition through the lens of labor, consumption, and conscious ritual, I seek transmutation. I’m interested in how we change ritual and how in turn, ritual changes us over time. My practice revolves around tactile stories. I often work with nylon hosiery, viewing the material with charged associations of women’s bodies and societal conditioning. Nylon carries a loaded history rooted in mass production, industrialization, labor and commodification. By transforming the material, I create new associations, reclaiming something familiar yet restrictive. I’m intrigued by our bodies' protective responses. I investigate how materiality seeks to protect itself, experimenting with how natural and synthetic “skins” hold memory. I work “merging memories” through techniques mimicking implantation. By grafting organic matter and fabricated nylon together, I create false memories of harmony repairing our poisoned environment and bodies. My process ranges from hand stitching, to marinating textiles in bioplastic or wax to examining how touch can both harm and heal. I use my body and earth as armature and I often see my work as collaborations with gravity and time. Through these various techniques I examine the body as dually an accumulation, and filtration system, materialized through sculpture and installations."




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

I was born in Albany, NY and grew up in a small town nearby. I’m a mix between Carpathian and Italian on my mom’s side and Quebecois and Sicilian on my dad’s. I draw a lot of inspiration from material lineages from my family in hay farming, carpentry and working in textile factories making shirt collars. I think about the way industrialization and labor contorts the body’s tempo and how to restore rhythms, choreographed by ritual repetition.


My background in the arts is in arts education. Both my parents and my grandpa were teachers and I figured if I liked art, then becoming an art teacher was the most viable career path. When I finished teaching in the public school system after the pandemic, I started working with the arts non-profit Beam Center. Here I was surrounded by many working artists and received my first residency. It was a great opportunity to embody my practice with a renewed focus and sense of value.


What kind of work are you currently making?

Currently I’ve been between bodies of work, one more consumption oriented and the other speaking to our relationship with resistance and release. Both involve alchemy and material change. I’ve been soldering spoons together—reimagining instruments that symbolize relationship repair and conscious consumption.


The other body of work I’ve been developing has involved freezing water in organic bulbous shapes then dipping and patching them repeatedly in hot beeswax to create pods filled with water. This series of sculptures becomes a type of fountain when activated, puncturing small holes in the wax releases the water from within. By incorporating water in my work I'm seeking to create reservoirs, referencing fruit, land and even our own bodies in the way we hold fluid memory.


What is a day like in the studio for you?

A day in the studio is doing one thing in repetition or batches. I enjoy when the physicality and tools I’m working with limits how much I can do at a time. In the way you can only fit so many cookies on a baking sheet, this is the way I work, my material rituals informed by the boundaries of the size pot or freezer I’m working with.


A day in the studio is always composed of a ritual, whether filling water balloons to stack in the freezer, or cooking bioplastics to marinate my textiles in. It's always slow, messy, and the best days are surprising.


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

Currently I just finished reading What It Takes to Heal by Prentis Hemphill. A very expansive and grounding book, her perspective is refreshing and charged with wisdom. I’ve also been listening to her podcast Becoming the People. I’ve been looking at food recipes in general, bioplastic recipes, and maps of water runoff in the Carpathian Mountains.


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

Upcoming shows: I have an exhibition opening September 11th for the culmination of my residency at Textile Arts Center AIR cycle 16, and a solo exhibition May 2026 at Tempest Gallery.















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