American Scholar: Carly Owens

Multidisciplinary artist carly owen grew up in Asheville, North Carolina, near the site of a former textile mill. “Textiles were always on my mind,” she says. At university, while studying abroad at the Royal School of Needlework outside London, she learned the historic craft of Jacobean crewelwork. “I’ve always been a slow, meticulous worker, so the embroidery worked really well with my design process,” she says. After graduating, Owens completed a summer internship as a couture embroiderer at Marchesa, a high-end fashion designer in New York, before moving to Boulder in late 2019 to join an artist collective. There she began to create soft, detailed sculptures of women’s bodily autonomy.

Earlier this year, at the base of an old tree near his studio in Boulder, Owens came across an empty bird’s nest and scattered fragments of blue shell. The image stuck in his mind, and after the overthrow of Roe vs. Wadeshe began to explore the motif of cracked eggs as a metaphor for Dobbs decision. Inspired by the tradition of 17th-century Dutch still life painting, Owens began sewing life-size broken eggs, made from fabric, to help her understand both the wider implications of the decision and what how she felt about it personally. After finishing an egg, she spends hours sewing glass seed beads and embroidering the soft sculptures to look like breakfast meals. The plays are painstakingly detailed and loaded with heavy political themes, but Owens hopes viewers approach them with a light heart. “It shouldn’t be taken too seriously because life shouldn’t be taken too seriously,” she said.