A group of artist here at TI are doing "Fiber in Focus", including Natale Adgnot, Sandra Giunta, Nicholas Cueva, Kathie Halfin, Elise Putnam, and Melissa Zexter.
_______
Natale Adgnot
Email: info@nataleadgnot.com
Website: www.nataleadgnot.com
IG: https://www.instagram.com/natale_adgnot/
Natale Adgnot is a sculptor and fiber artist who uses mixed media to explore cognitive bias and logical fallacy. Best known for wall sculptures, she incorporates a variety of materials that are emblematic of her personal history into her work. Adgnot earned a BFA in graphic design in Texas and studied fashion in Paris, eventually becoming a dual American/French citizen. Her experience making garments for haute couture runways led her to focus on sculpture. Later, while living in Japan, she began using thermoplastic (an artist-grade shrink plastic) to work three-dimensionally and has expanded her mediums to include fabrics, horse hair, and other materials that signify all of these places.
_____
Sandra Giunta
Email: sangiunta@gmail.com
Website: http://www.sandragiunta.com/
IG: https://www.instagram.com/sangiunta/
Sandra Giunta is a self-taught Brooklyn based artist. She draws her inspiration from the natural world and creates felted and stitched sculptural work with wool and natural fibers. Sandra’s work is sometimes a realistic representation, but in examining living organisms closely, one is invited into the flow, patterns, and textures that evoke a more emotional connection. Her work is both a celebration of the diversity in the natural world and a reminder that understanding the human impact on the environment is essential for survival of our interconnected ecosystems
_____
Kathie Halfin
Email: katyhalfin@gmail.com
Website: https://www.kathiehalfin.com/
IG: http://www.instagram.com/eclectic_body/
Kathie Halfin’s weaving reclaims the power of a practice long marginalized as craft, restoring an embodied dialogue between body, plants, and land. In her slow, meditative process, power is not proclaimed but revealed—line by line, loop by loop—moving through the hands and body. Drawing from her cultural experiences in Ukraine, Israel, and New York, as well as her ongoing shamanic practice, Halfin creates tactile sculptures using sustainable materials such as sisal, flax, and hand-spun paper. Rooted in weaving and basket-making traditions, her work evokes plant forms and engages the sensory essence of plants—exploring how touch and texture can reconnect us with the natural world. Halfin holds an MFA with honors from the School of Visual Arts, New York, and a B.Des in Textile Design from Shenkar College, Israel.
_____
Melissa Zexter
Email: mzexter@gmail.com
Website: https://www.melissazexter.com/
IG: https://www.instagram.com/melissazexter/
Melissa Zexter combines embroidery with photography. She sews by hand directly onto photographs she has taken, combining a traditional practical skill, embroidery, with a modern and mass reproducible process, photography. The artist’s fundamental concern is to explore the photograph's material status as a three-dimensional object as well as to examine identity, memory and technology. Her interest in the creation of hand-crafted, unique photographic objects is related to the proliferation of images in the modern age, one where images – and specifically photographic images – have lost their own object status altogether. Through their manipulations of the image’s surface with embroidery, the photographs become unique, no-longer reproducible objects. Concerned with the interaction between hand and eye in relation to the photographic image, Zexter's complex works explore memory and personal experience while manipulating the generic qualities of the photographic print.
Zexter holds a BFA in Photography from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA from New York University. She has exhibited throughout the United States and internationally and her work has been published and reviewed in numerous publications.
_____
Nicholas Cueva
Email: nicholascuevastudio@gmail.com
Website: nicholascueva.org
IG: @nicholascueva
Nicholas Cueva’s work is a multifaceted exploration of fabrics in the context of visual information and the compression and expansion of information available with the texture and pattern of the weave of different fabrics. His series of woven bags and purses speak to the nature of consumption, identity and utility, while playfully remaining fashionable.
_____
Elise Putnam
Email: eliseputnamstudio@gmail.com
Website: eliseputnam.com
IG: @putnamelise
Elise Putnam creates drawings on fabric with crayon, dye, collage, applique, and embroidery. Her exaggerated self-portraits critically reflect familiar characterizations of white women such as fairy tale characters and art historical figures. The images permeate domestic objects such as window coverings, handkerchiefs, napkins, and bedsheets.