Art + Artists

Kimberly English’s fiber-based practice examines the relationship between individual agency and collective experience. Working with woven and sewn forms that merge narrative and contemporary motifs, she reflects on labor, heritage, and belonging in the American South. Through pattern, precision, and suspended cloth, her textiles become metaphors for historical continuity and systemic tensions.

Expanding upon her undergraduate textiles education from Savannah College of Art and Design, Kimberly English (b. 1994) earned her MFA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in Studio Art as a Carolina Digital Humanities Fellow in 2018. Kimberly has been awarded residencies at Woodstock Byrdcliffe Artist Colony, Berea College, Penland School of Craft, VCCA, and The Gibbes Museum.

English’s work has been exhibited widely and internationally, recently at the Spartanburg Art Museum, New Bedford Art Museum, the Delaware Contemporary, the Ackland Museum, Vox Populi, CICA Museum, and the Museum of Craft and Design. Kimberly is currently the Emerging Artist Fellow in Fiber at VCU and runs a weaving residency, Tabby Studio, out of the shared studio space on her property in Canton, North Carolina.

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My fiber-based practice examines the interplay between individual agency and collective experience through critical engagements with textile structures, both historical and contemporary. By manipulating woven and sewn textile forms that obscure the distinctions between found and manufactured materials, my work foregrounds tension - both structural and conceptual - often through the strategic use of negative space. Synthesizing narratives rooted in the American South with broader discourses on globalized labor, my practice interrogates the complexities of interdependence, both real and imagined, between land, machines, people, and the objects they produce. Reinterpreting traditional southern Appalachian weaving patterns, my work integrates narrative, sculptural interventions, and contemporary motifs to critically examine the socio-political and cultural landscape of the American South. Through ambiguous woven compositions, the work disrupts binary constructions of southern labor, interweaving historical representation, personal narrative, and speculative futures.