Meet Your Maker: Mandy Greer, Installation Artist and Fiber Alchemist
Mandy Greer has spent 30 years making art that's hard to categorize. Large-scale fiber installations that feel like walking into a fairy tale. Crocheted rivers strung through trees. Costumes, performances, pottery. She's shown work at the Henry Art Gallery, Bellevue Art Museum, Tacoma Art Museum, the Frye, and Seattle Art Museum. She won a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award in 2011 and an Arts Innovator Award from Artists Trust and the Chihuly Foundation in 2012. The New York Times has written about her. She's been on the cover of Fiberarts Magazine.
And this August, she's going to sit down with you and teach you how to make a basket.
The Long Version
Mandy describes herself as a mixed media artist who has done a lot of seemingly different things, but sees the threads connecting everything together. That's not a metaphor, or at least not entirely. Fiber really is the through line.
For 25 years, she's primarily worked as a large-scale installation artist and public artist, building fantastic natural worlds out of fiber. These creations have a theatrical quality to them, almost like walking onto a stage set built from yarn and crochet and pure imagination. That work led her into costume design, performance, film, and photography.
Her most well-known project locally is probably Mater Matrix Mother and Medium, which started in 2009 as a commission from the Seattle Office of Arts & Cultural Affairs. It began with over 30 community crochet events, where Mandy taught anyone who showed up how to crochet. Together they made a 200-foot fiber river installation that she spent six weeks crocheting into the trees at Camp Long in West Seattle. That piece traveled from Seattle to Agnes Scott College, the Herbert Bayer Earthworks, and the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine in New York.
Themes of geology, fairy tales, mythology, and transformation run through everything she makes. She sees it in her massive installations. She sees it in a bowl she has built by hand. Mandy came full circle. She got her MFA in ceramics in 1999, and after years of building enormous fiber worlds, she recently came back to working with clay, as a potter, which is where she started. That kind of return says something about how she thinks about art and about making.
She runs The Silver Studio in Columbia City, Seattle, where she hosts fiber art workshops in weaving, beading, felting, and all kinds of textile work.
The Workshop: Reclaimed Fiber Coiled Baskets
This is a four-hour session, and the pace is nothing like what you'd expect from an artist who builds 200-foot installations. It's slow. Quiet. Meditative.
Mandy uses coiled basket-making as a personal meditation practice, a way to soothe ruminating thoughts and settle into the present moment through color and repetition. That's exactly what she'll be sharing at camp.
You'll work with reclaimed fibers, vintage yarns, and other materials from Mandy's own collection, transforming worn-out materials into something beautiful. The technique is ancient. You spiral around and around, building the basket outward, and the rhythm of it starts to feel like a walking meditation through a labyrinth. As Mandy puts it, the basket can tell the story of your life through color, expressive stitching, and experimentation.
Expect to leave with a beautiful handmade basket. If you don't finish during the session, Mandy provides extra fiber to wind onto cards to take home and a video refresher so you can keep going on your own. (One student from her last retreat went home and started making baskets out of newspaper bags. It's that kind of satisfying.)
No experience needed. If you're the kind of person who needs something to do with your hands while your brain slows down, this is the one.
Why This One's Special
Most workshops give you a new skill. This one gives you a new practice. Coiled basket-making is the kind of thing you can do at home on a Tuesday night with whatever fibers you have lying around. It doesn't require special equipment or a dedicated workspace. It just requires you to sit down and start spiraling.
Mandy's approach to teaching is the same as her approach to art: show people how to be free and use whatever they have around them to make and express themselves fully. She's not going to hover. She's going to set you loose with color and texture and trust what comes out.
Save Your Spot
Mischief & Makers Camp runs August 7 through 9 on Vashon Island. Mandy's Reclaimed Fiber Coiled Baskets workshop is one of several hands-on sessions over the weekend, alongside chef-prepared meals and a full schedule of making, eating, and doing absolutely nothing productive.
Check out more of Mandy's work at mandygreer.org and on Instagram at @mandymandygreer.