Artist Statement
I am a sculptor who makes forms with cloth through tailoring and sewing.
My work explores the interaction between light, surface, and gravity. I like to experiment with my material—unbleached cotton canvas—to explore themes and techniques of elasticity, volume, scale, and texture. The work is ritualistic in its process: making patterns, cutting, sewing. The repetition of gesture that turns into reliefs.
My works are also interconnected. Ideas worked through in one piece are often the basis for a next one. Each work breeds a new one. There is an ever-present sensibility of landscape, the Irish countryside, to be exact. The Irish landscape of my childhood is innate within me, but my works are not inspired by or representations of landscape. The material is my focus and my inspiration.
My work evolved from a twenty-five-year furniture practice. As I grew as an artist, I became motivated to strip away function from the objects I was making, which at the time were mostly chairs. I realized, and others noticed, that what stood out about my furniture was what I created through the manipulation of fabric. I removed the function element as an artistic intervention and now focus on form making.
The completed works are an interplay between precision planning, my emotions, and the unpredictability of the canvas.
Biography
Born in Northern Ireland, Mary Little moved to the United States in 2001 to take up a teaching position at California College the Arts (CCA), San Francisco. Trained as a furniture designer at London’s Royal College of Art, she has always approached her work as sculpture.
In 2015 she made a conscious break and began to create works devoid of functional references. In 2018, Little exhibited this new direction at Craft Contemporary Museum (formerly CAFAM), Los Angeles. Followed by a solo show at Craft in America Center, Los Angeles.
Her work is in the permanent collections of the Vitra Design Museum in Basel and Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris. Her commissions and gallery works have been acquired for private collections in Europe and North America, as well as public collections including the Victoria & Albert Museum, London. Little's work has most recently been reviewed in Architectural Digest, Galerie, and Surface magazines.
She is a 2019 recipient of the prestigious Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant and lives in Los Angeles.
