SHOP 108 Featured Artist for February and March 2025
Sally Garner
I am a sculptural fibers artist that is newly based in Tulsa. Raised in the Southeast, I earned my BFA in sculpture from the University of North Carolina at Asheville and my MFA in textiles from Georgia State University in Atlanta. I am an arts educator as well, and before moving to Tulsa, I was the Fibers Artist in Residence at the Appalachian Center for Craft in Smithville, Tennessee.
My current body of work interrogates humanity’s belief in its control over nature, contrasting this illusion with nature’s inherent unpredictability. Through contemporary, abstracted basketry, I explore how technology has cultivated a misguided sense of entitlement to interfere with the natural world. In my practice, I manipulate natural and found materials with the act of weaving and interlacing. In this collection, I have focused mainly on the basket weaving technique of twining, where the threads twist as they weave between the rigid spokes.
Basketry has been a fundamental technique across cultures for millennia. It is both a symbol of knowledge and survival, bridging the ancient and the modern. From the tools our ancestors crafted for everyday life to the digital systems that evolved from the Jacquard loom, weaving has influenced not only the material world but also technological progress. Basketry, like cloth, serves as a record of time—its fibers, patterns, and construction methods speaking to both history and innovation.
In my work, I like to emphasize the tension between order and chaos by combining geometric forms with more tumultuous, random-weave structures. I invite you to view these sculptures as speculative “thought experiments” that prompt reflection on humankind’s manipulation of the natural world—leaving each observer to find meaning in the balance, beauty, or destruction within my work.
SHOP 108 for Featured Artist work here
