March 2025: Textile Resident Introductions
This March 2025, we are excited to be receiving our fourth cohort of residents in our group residency program, hosted in collaboration with TEXERE.
This sessions residents include: Mayssa Kanaan, Raina Lee, Hope Okere, Nicole Castillo, Sadie Clarendon, Lella Crystal, Isabelle Morrison, Alida Rodrigues, Francine Milagros and Mallory Eloi Paisley.
We look forward to receiving this group of talented artists, connecting them with our collaborators in Oaxaca, and creating together. Below we share artist statements and photos of residents’ recent work.
Mayssa Kanaan
Mayssa Kanaan is a researcher and artist from Beirut, Lebanon. Her research and practice weaves forgotten histories, and explores connections between storytelling and crafts. She often experiments with archives, weaving, maps, natural materials, and clay, delving deeper into the narratives of the land of "Bilad el Sham" (the Levant), its people, and their stories. Her projects are co-created with communities, craftsmen/women, and storytellers.
Raina Lee
Raina Lee is a second generation Taiwanese-American artist and writer based in Los Angeles. Working primarily in ceramic glaze and clay, her practice is in conversation with classical ceramics as well as painting. Her work is influenced video games, science fiction futurism, and a Southern California immigrant upbringing. She grew up between Taiwan and her parent’s pizzaria in Torrance, California. Her work has been featured in press worldwide, including The New York Times: T Magazine, Surface Magazine, and MilK Decoration.
Hope Okere
Hope Okere is a Nigerian-American interdisciplinary artist, who recently received her MFA degree from UCSB. Her work exists at the intersection of sculpture, fiber, and movement. Informing her art praxis are theories of Afro-Futurism, neo-conceptualism, and research of improvisational modern dance, African dance, and craft arts. She also explores dualities, distortions, translations, and hybridity. She holds a BFA from Parsons School of Design in New York City and has a past career as a fashion designer, working for companies such as Marc Jacobs, J.Crew, Converse, Gap, and Target. Hope has attended workshops at Haystack School of Craft in Deer Isle, ME, Yucca Valley Material lab in Yucca Valley, CA, The Textile Art Center in NY, NY and Pioneer Works in NY, NY. While at UCSB she has been honored in receiving the Levitan award and the Ron Newby award; and was a nominee for the Dedalus Foundation 2024 MFA Fellowship in visual arts.
Nicole Castillo
My name is Nicole, a curious mind and a romantic at heart. My motto is simple: do all things with love. I try to approach everything in life with this mindset—whether it's in my experiences or with the people I meet. For a long time, this sense of love was missing in my life, but once I found it, it became a core part of who I am. The intention behind it has become my fuel.
As for the curious side of me, I’ve always had trouble staying still. I constantly feel the need to pursue new things, discover fresh ideas, and learn from every experience. I ask questions, follow my curiosity, and somehow find myself doing something new. It’s like I’m always chasing the next spark of curiosity, and I love it.
I’m also the owner of a textile studio in Guatemala called Querencia Creativa, where we’ve been creating one-of-a-kind, custom-made rugs in collaboration with talented Guatemalan artisans for the past four years. I design the products, and the artisans are the magic hands behind the weaving. I know the basics of weaving but haven't made the time to just play with it and learn it fully since it´s work. So my hope with this residency is that I’ll be able to get behind the loom and create something entirely with my hands and get off screen to experience the full creative process in a way I haven’t before.
Disclaimer: The image below has been made in collaboration with Guatemalan artisans, they are my designs and their magic in the loom.
Sadie Clarendon
Sadie Winter is a multimedia artist who creates in response to materials. Influenced by folk art, she incorporates found and recycled objects, as well as natural and foraged elements, in her work. The DIY ethic of repurposing and re-examining resources underpins her practice, reflecting a commitment to sustainability and class consciousness. This work highlights themes of transformation, and invites a reconsideration of the value and purpose of everyday items.
Lella Crystal
Lella Crystal (she/they) makes embroideries that are a little bit punk and a little bit soft. Images of birds, the ocean, and other parts of nature are consistent themes in her work. She enjoys sewing the embroideries onto clothing so they can be little pieces of protection and warmth for the wearer.
Izzy Morrison
Izzy Morrison is a textile-designer based in Los Angeles, California. Her design studio specializes in hand-embroidered linen tablescapes and natural botanical dyes. She incorporates traditional embroidery techniques and botanical natural dye processes as a way to connect to our past and weaves these two practices together to capture and memorialize stories.
Izzy is inspired by childhood memories and the evening ritual of setting the table with her three sisters. Time spent together around the table has continued to cultivate her love for gathering, creating community, and storytelling, which are the foundational pieces to her work intersecting textiles, natural dye, and food.
Alida Rodrigues
My artistic practice weaves together collage, textile, and installation, using 19th century black and white photographs and botanical illustration. At its core, my work, delves into layered concept of identity, investigating themes of belonging and un-belonging. I am deeply motivated by the need to confront the enduring legacies of colonialism, unravelling how this complex past continues to shape global dynamics of race, culture, politics, land, economics, and society.
Central to my practice is the exploration of the racial dimensions of historical imagery, questioning whose stories are preserved and celebrated and whose narratives remain obscured. This inquiry extends into the realm of ethnobotany, where I investigate the intertwined histories of plants and people. I examine the roles women have played in plant exploration and the extraction of botanical knowledge from indigenous women to serve colonial interests. Through archival research, I explore the act of collecting and cataloguing drawing connections between the classification of plants and the racial categorisation of humans. The linguistic heritage of plant naming, encompassing both Latin and Indigenous languages, also features prominently in my work.
Recently, I have been expanding the textile aspects of my practice. Initially, I started by transforming my mixed media collages into embroidered pieces which then led to be awarded a fellowship where I learnt to weave for a month. This experience has inspired me to delve deeper into the traditions of textile work, particularly the rich techniques and histories of practices from South America, Africa and Asia. As I move forward, I am excited to explore how textile traditions can further deepen my engagement with themes of identity, history, land and belonging.
Malaury Eloi Paisley
I explore the memory of colonial cities and landscapes through textiles, film, and sound. My work is a continuous process of weaving, dyeing, braiding, and collecting—gestures that reconnect me to an erased history. I understood that through these atavistic movements, I want to engage with memory through the body. Weaving becomes a metaphor for fragmented narratives, echoing the past and present of Guadeloupe my native island. I carry a complex colonial history, being of Indian, African, and Indigenous descent.
Since 2016, I have observed Pointe-à-Pitre through photography and film, capturing its shifting landscape. I document the city’s rapid transformation. However, film alone cannot preserve all that disappears. This led me to explore textiles as an archive of the intangible, translating urban textures and sonic imprints into tangible matter.I was first initiated to natural dye in South india, Tamil Nadu India with master dyer Dhaksina Murthy, discovering that many plants used in traditional dyeing had traveled to Guadeloupe with indentured laborers. I am part of a group “ Art Tisserands” / (“Weaving arts”), that is working for the inventory and preservation of natural dye, weaving and braiding techniques as well as natural fibers on my island. In my filmmaking, I also encountered spectrograms—visual representations of sound frequencies—revealing unexpected landscapes and textures reminiscent of textiles. This discovery initiated my research into the visual and material possibilities of spectrograms, leading to Matière(s)-ville(s)/ ( City-Matter(s)), a series of textile experiments embodying the urban memory of my homeland.
Francine Milagros
I am a Mother, Midwife, Bodyworker/Community health worker and Artist living and working in Lisan Ohlone lands, colonially known as Oakland California.
I have been involved in movement arts for most of my life, receiving my BA in Dance Ethnology from San Francisco State University.
I put my creative energies into birthing and mothering my 2 nearly adult kids for the last 20 years and for the last few years have been rekindling my creative art practice.
I enjoy curious and exploratory work. Playing mainly in ceramics, wood sculpture, textile arts with found, repurposed and natural materials, movement and vocal expression. I like to get messy! I have created site specific works that explore themes of interconnectedness, eroticism and birth.
