10 Questions With… Liz Collins

Liz Collins Weaves Identity and Innovation Through Textiles

Interior Design: What first inspired you to explore fiber?

Liz Collins: I started making things when I was a kid—crafty stuff—needlepoint, weaving, latch hook kits. My mom taught me to sew early. I was using her sewing machine and making clothes by the time I was 9. I did many other creative things as well, including drawing, painting, photography, and ceramics. But I learned to weave at RISD. From there, I was fully hooked on making fabric. I was and still am enthralled by how yarn carries color and all these other material properties in a way that is more dimensional than paint.

ID: How were your studies at RISD formative in solidifying, but perhaps also expanding, your approach to the medium?

LC: In the Textiles program at RISD, I was exposed to iconic and influential textile giants like Junichi Arai and Jack Lenor Larsen, which opened my eyes to what fabric could be and the ways and places it could be made. I studied with Lisa Scull, who had worked for Larsen for years and traveled the world designing for companies like Maharam and Knoll, and Maria Tulokas, who was from Finland and had connections to the world of Marimekko and a huge network of textile curators, designers, and artists. Weaving became an obsession for me, especially the structures and systems of complex weaving. I went back to RISD for my MFA years later and refocused my obsession on knitting as a sculptural medium. Through all my experiences at RISD, I learned to be equal parts creative and technical. This has allowed me to push textile technology, to do innovative things and break all the rules.

ID: Why did you decide to transition away from fashion—in the conventional sense—and move into a more broadly defined artistic practice, all while still operating as an interdisciplinary designer?

LC: After four years of building my clothing brand and working tirelessly on my own in an industry that felt relentlessly demanding, I saw that in order to thrive and continue, I needed things I did not have: a business partner, a backer, and a deeper understanding of manufacturing. I was also losing interest in the whole system and in making clothes. I was restless and curious about more expansive ways of working that were not tied to commerce or the body.

So rather than taking a designer job with Donna Karan or another brand, so that I could learn more about manufacturing, I accepted a professor position at RISD in the Textile Department. This gave me the freedom to explore persistent urges around art making, especially performance and installation. It took me several more years after that to build a bridge into the interior textiles world and to develop my art and design practice into what it is today.

ID: Talk about the importance of craft in your work, not merely as a means of controlled production but also personal expression.

LC: Craft—making things with my hands—from an early age was an essential thing. My hands have always been hungry to work with materials and respond to intuitive creative impulses. I look at something as banal as cardboard and have a reflex to imagine what it could transform into. This process—using one’s hands and one’s imagination to transform one thing into another that somehow expresses something—even just a new version of itself—is the core of craft for me. It’s what gives me creative energy and keeps me moving forward. One of my main focuses now—and the most handmade—is needlepoint. It gives me the feeling of suspending time and provides a daily ritual of making that is fundamental to my well being.

ID: How can textile as both a physical and metaphysical form be harnessed to address socio-cultural topics like ecology and gender?

LC: Textiles are everywhere in our world so broadly. With such a vast range of characteristics: fluidity, malleability, diversity of types, materials, uses, historical and cultural traditions and contexts, and so much more. Textiles can fulfill the goal of addressing these topics in the hands of creative beings. Because textiles usually require some sort of multifaceted labor to produce, and they either come from natural or synthetic materials or both, they are tied to ecology and gender in relation to these realms. Once you enter into a dialogue of making textiles and telling your story, you are directly tied to these topics because of labor histories and the environment.

ID: How has your work evolved from early output like Specimens, Worst Year Ever, and Knitting Nation?

LC: From that era, I moved into working with jacquard weaving and knitting technology, which gave me the ability to create images and patterns in a way I was not doing with the works mentioned. There was a transitional moment where I started working with industrial knitting technology at RISD, playing around with graphic patterns—something I was doing in earlier years with hand weaving but abandoned during my years with knitting. So, by 2012, I had fully transitioned from sculpting through knits in favor of image making through drawing, painting, and collage using graphic and geometric abstraction that I then translated into constructed (and deconstructed) woven and knit fabrics.

ID: How is developing a textile for brands such as Sunbrella and Flavor Paper different from creating an art piece of your own initiation?

LC: The things I do with Sunbrella, Flavor Paper, and other companies usually start from the same creative mindset as any other work I make because they are most often intended as components of my artworks. I’m not a market-focused textile designer, but rather an artist who designs textiles (and wallpaper) for my artworks and installations. These textiles subsequently find their ways into the market. For example, the Mischief wallpaper I did with 4Spaces is something I first created for an installation that the company brought back years later as a product for the market. A new colorway of that design will be in the Motherlode show in a new installation I worked on with a group of RISD students.

In 2019, I made an upholstery collection with Pollack that was specifically designed to be just that, but I then brought one of those three fabrics into my pieces as a base canvas for paintings. I work in a big feedback loop and collaborate with many brilliant textile designers, technicians, and design brands, who allow me to push my creativity in different directions.

ID: How can fiber take on different structural dimensions, even mono-material furniture?

LC: Constructed fabric can be a complex architectural pursuit and each methodology—knitting, weaving, knotting, and all the other ways of building structure through yarns, threads, and fiber—offers its own elaborate realm of possibilities. It’s completely limitless and that’s what keeps me in it. Fiber and textiles coexist as one of the most ancient and the most advanced areas of creative and utilitarian work.

ID: Let’s talk about your role as an educator. What do you endeavor to impart and how does this shape your practice?

LC: I was a professor at RISD from 2003-2013 and that was my big educator moment. While at RISD, one of the most exciting things I did was teach a multidisciplinary seminar course in Grad Studies called Contemporary Production Practices, which was about manufacturing and production in art and design, including topics such as labor history and theory, the global supply chain, and factory work. I was invited to create that class based on my own research interests about factories—mechanized, human and collective labor; machines and textile technology; environmental concerns and world history and politics through the lens of industrial manufacturing. It was rewarding for me to be able to expose students to these realities in a way I wish I had experienced while in school.

The most direct thing to come out of my time teaching at RISD within my own creative work was the collective labor of the school knitting studio that sparked my Knitting Nation project. It felt timely for me to instigate a new project that involved many people making one thing, on the heels of doing runway shows and making clothing collections, another sort of collective labor. The project, which was a performance and installation project that went on to span 11 years and manifest in 15 different iterations, laid bare the labor behind making knit and stitched textiles as a way to illustrate the physical demand of this type of work, the dance that humans do with machines, and the cacophony of sound, movement, color and form characteristic of such Endeavors.

The Motherlode exhibition will have within it a gallery dedicated to a queer social space project I created with a group of six RISD students over the spring ‘25 semester called Homecoming. It’s a show within my show and was done through a course I taught called Queer People/ Places/Things where I invited students to work with me and the museum to curate and produce an exhibition featuring the work of queer artists connected to RISD. I can’t wait to see the results of this project as one of several in an ongoing series of these types of installations I have done that are inspired by Victorian parlors and libraries and are places to connect and convene surrounded by queer art.

ID: What is the significance of this first retrospective? How have preparations for the exhibition been a chance to revisit the full scope of your work thus far and look to what’s next?

LC: It feels natural and timely and hugely monumental. I’ve been working professionally as an artist and designer for more than three decades and have come full circle in certain areas of my creative work, so it felt like the right time to do this survey. With my inclusion in the Woven Histories exhibition, my work has finally been contextualized in the way I have yearned for it to be—alongside women artists and designers who worked across art and design with textiles in the ways I do: Sonia Delaunay, Sophie Tauber-Arp, Anni Albers, Shelia Hicks; and others like Andrea Zittel and Rosemarie Trockel, whose works long ago confirmed my instincts to put my textiles and hybrid practice squarely into the contemporary art arena.

This show was inspired in part by my connection to the RISD Museum, and to RISD, where so much of my creative work was formed and developed. That’s why I named it Motherlode—as the school and the museum really have been an abundant source of so many facets of my creative life. I went to RISD Pre-College program in 1985; BFA 1991; MFA 1999; and was faculty from 2003-13. I’m not yet sure of the impact it’s going to have on what I’ll do next. I continue to want to work at a large scale, to do more sprawling immersive installations that engage other creatives and create social space, and to show internationally. Once the show is up and I can really see it, I’m guessing I’ll have new sparks and opportunities.

Additionally, I’m so excited about and proud of the Liz Collins: Motherlode monograph that’s coming out alongside the exhibition. It really shows and tells my work, career, and story so well, and features contributions from several people like Glenn Adamson and Julia Bryan-Wilson who for years have been instrumental to my career.