About

ABOUT

Shelley Socolofsky’s work investigates the intersection of textiles, architecture, and landscape. Exploring a layered perception of place through the entanglements of technology, ritual, and geological processes (elements that inform human experience), her practice is situated within relationships between ancient weaving technologies and modern computers. Creating handwoven tapestries, collage, digital imaging and drawings, these works exude surface and imagery that suggest complex records of deep time and narrative.

See where my work is featured in local spaces: Shelley Socolofsky’s Wescover Map

BIO

Traditionally trained with master tapestry weavers at the Manufactures des Gobelins in France and Fondazione Arte della Seta Lisio in Italy, an historic Jacquard cloth fabricating workshop, Shelley’s current practice utilizes both preindustrial and new digital loom technology. The connecting thread between the ancient and contemporary weave together forming a symbiotic collective reality.

Socolofsky’s work can be found in both public and private collections. Recent exhibitions include Weaving Data at Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, Portland, Oregon, The Material Turn, FOFA Gallery, Montreal, QC, Canada, World Tapestry Now and The Art is the Cloth at NHIA Amherst Gallery at New Hampshire Institute of Art, and Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts.  Recent awards and residencies include Astra Zarina Fellow from the Civita Institute with visiting artist residency in Civita di Bagnoregio, Italy, the Jacquard Center in North Carolina, and the Ruth and Harold Chenven Foundation of New York.

Currently on the faculty in Portland State University’s School of Art + Design, Socolofsky serves as Board President of American Tapestry Alliance. She lives and works in Portland, Oregon.

GENERAL ARTIST STATEMENT

My work

devotes time

questioning

the relationship between

our embodied experience and the hyperspectral

through investigations into soft and hard sciences,

local lore,

archeological, geomorphological,

and evolutionary pluralities spanning time and place.

my practice is multi-dimensional

mathematical and sacred in geometry and ritual

using strategies of weaving, collage, bricolage; a joining, a combine, an interlacement, an overlap

creating a merging of spaces to produce

a creation of a third space:

a door leading to another realm and

by extension

a different way of being

creating new dialogue and speculative terrain for sustainable living and ancestral futures