embroidered linen on upholstered chair, 2008, 32” x 32” x 48”

This chair maps author William Faulkner’s beloved homestead, Rowan Oak, in Oxford, Mississippi. The pilgrimage to Rowan Oak is a time honored one for readers of Faulkner. I wanted to craft a three-dimensional expression of how you experience the site by moving through a thicket of coleus in the foreground of the property, into the Celtic maze, and then into the iconic allée of crepe myrtles in front of the house. The device of the map is of particular importance to Faulkner as he often drew a map to chart the development of his stories. He actually very much crafted his home as a superior form of procrastination from the work of writing.

Photos by Jennifer Hudson and Caleb Crawford

Southern Writers are different.-Didactic Decorative Objects

Commission for the Atlanta magazine, A Bitter Southerner this series of eight decorative pillows explore the odd archiving habits of southern writers. Drawing from photographs of four southern writer’s habitats; Flannery O’Conner, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, and Margaret Mitchell these interior scenes examine certain legends about how these writers organized, stored and collected their writing and the books they surrounded themselves with while they worked. Pairing the interior with a sentence that explained the peculiar habit propels one into the way each writer might engage with the written word.

The interiors where drawn from vintage photographs, then drawn onto linen by hand stitching. The linen is hand dyed from colors that evolve certain very southern sensibilities; hydrangea green with Scarlett O’Hara velvet, lilac paired with aubergine velvet to evoke a stormy Mississippi sky, Crisp blue linen and light blue velvet like church clothes, egg colored linen, the same as gentlemen’s summer suits next to a deep Georgia red clay velvet.

Embroidery on hand dyed linen with velvet trim.

Fall 2015

Fabrication by Christina Venson

2012, found furniture, linen and embroidery thread, 24" x 18" x 18"

This piece was inspired by research of American itinerate stencil house painters in Maine during the 18th Century. The pure forms and shapes that build up to a botanical form fascinate me. This is part of an ongoing attempt to push the medium of upholstery by exploring the negative space of decoration.

Photos by Caleb Crawford

2012, found furniture, linen and embroidery thread, 24" x 18" x 18"

Having grown up in and around the site of the Battle of Atlanta, the traces of the troops’ movements influence how I think about the landscape.  A stitched mapping of General Sherman’s 1867 assent into Georgia during the Civil War is a way to map this knowledge and personal history. This piece involves appliqué techniques as well as machine and hand stitching to create the epic terrain of the Northern Georgia mountain landscape.

Photos by Caleb Crawford

embroidery on Linen, 2013, 24" x 24"

The Musing Pillows are an exercise in how to hand craft documentation. My research on Julia Grant and Varina Davis bought to the forefront their senses of humor and capacities for a happy life. These pillows bring these historical acts of humor to life.

Photos by Caleb Crawford

3rd Annual One Night Stand exhibition at the Ole Miss Motel, Oxford, Mississippi
Curated by Erin Austen Abbott

Annie's pieces in the exhibition are Six Attributes of Mapping:
Bedcover 1, Places I've been 
Bedcover 2, The Map to Waverly Plantation, as told by a Modernist
Chair Group, Walker Evans Builds a Chair: four chairs built in the conceit of Walker Evans
Wing Chair, William Faulkner’s Homestead chair
Yellow Chair, Mrs. Welty's Garden Chair
Loveseat,  Loveseat for 

Photos Caleb Crawford

embroidery on linen, 2013, 20" x 20"

I was commissioned by the daughter of an art historian who studies the work of Charles Wilson Peale to develop a series of pillows about the famous 18th Century artist family, the Peales. Father Charles Willson Peale, son Raphaelle and daughter Angelica all reside in pillow form for this series. Elder Peale actually practiced the art of silhouette so these are derived from his work.  This commission furthered my charge to bring meaning to decorative objects and have even the pillows tell stories.

Photos by Caleb Crawford

embroidered linen on upholstery, 2008, 
36” x 32” x 30”
Exhibited at the Ole Miss Motel Oxford Mississippi in 2009

This piece is a loveseat that maps Marie Antoinette’s gardens at Le Petit Trianon, her sanctuary away from the rigors of court life. She developed this property in order to illustrate her readings on the philosopher Rousseau's "back to nature" ideals. The embroidered garden plan maps the expanse of her vision and shows how a specific space can generate a set of ideas.

Photos by Jennifer Hudson

Starkville, Mississippi, 2010, Little Building Cafe

In the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, I brought together the Little Building virtual artistic community as well as the Starkville, Mississippi local artistic community to auction off original art work to benefit Architecture for Humanity’s emergency relief work on the island. The event raised $3,000 and exposed the young creative Starkville community to a variety of nationally known artists and designers such as Allen Wexler, Charles Miller, and Erin Wilson, and nationally known artists now know the power of Starkville artists.

Photos by Jennifer Hudson

2009, embroidered linen on upholstered chair, 30” x 30” x 38”

The chair was devised after a visit to the famed Mississippi writer Eudora Welty’s home in Jackson, Mississippi, where she lived from 1925 until her death in 2001. In Welty’s work the role of the garden and working in the garden plays a part in how her female characters cope with the outside world. The garden is a place of peace and organized thought. The chair has an embroidered plan of Welty’s actual garden and the remainder of the chair is an expression of the garden in full force.

Photos by Jennifer Hudson and Caleb Crawford

Found chair, embroidery on hand dyed linen, 2014, 34” x 34” x 36”

This is a private commission for a client as a gift for his partner of 30 years. They began their relationship on a college study abroad trip to Rome and the first book they read together was Memoirs of Hadrian. I was asked to commemorate their time there with a furniture piece that spoke to Rome as an idea. The furniture base was found, reconstructed, and painted using a color found in the Roman murals at the Metropolitan Museum. The linen fabric was also dyed to match the mural. Using stitching techniques that mirror Piranesi’s drawings, this chair is an homage to a Roman beginning.

Photos by Caleb Crawford

Black Chintz on Found Chairs, 2010, 
30” x 30” x 40"

In 1903, the famous widow of Ulysses S. Grant and the famous widow of Jefferson Davis found themselves in a West Point, New York resort.  Julia was the first to knock on the other’s door announcing, “I am Mrs. Grant,” with Varina responding, “I am very glad to meet you.”  And then they had tea.

These chairs celebrate the two heroines of the Civil War, Julia Grant and Varina Davis. The dress skirts were sculpted to evoke the dramatic skirts of a late 19th Century widow.

Fabrication assistance by Corrinne Olsen

Photos by Caleb Crawford

Watercolor on paper, 1998, 12” x 10”

I was interested in the contention put forward by the feminist author Carol Gillian that states that the biography is a limited method to document the life of a woman. One goes to the library and sees that the biography of Susan B. Anthony was markedly slimmer than that of Harry Truman. Was this because her life and accomplishments were slimmer? Of course not! Therefore, I began to investigate the potential of a piece of furniture as a more vivid illustration of a woman's life. These works are all gestures of function; each piece represents something that the woman would need to further her work, rather than a motif of her life.

Photos by Caleb Crawford

October 2010, Mississippi State Visual Arts Center Gallery

My theoretical work is research-based. Reading history, visits to house museums and pilgrimages to historic sites result in a built manifestation, a chair and room, a place. The work examines questions of economics, sensibility and cultural values by reinventing the material culture of the subject. The research provides the impetus for design decisions and offers a take on history, identity and values by embellishing the reality with design interventions.

At the time of this exhibition, my focus was on the collection of ephemera that resides at the Ulysses S. Grant Collection at Mississippi State University.  For the collection’s reading room, I designed two upholstered pieces of furniture that illustrate Grant’s military movements through the Mississippi countryside during the Civil War. These pieces were on view courtesy of the Ulysses S. Grant Collection. My method of working through embroidery and upholstered furniture is part of a career-long exploration of the relationship between furniture and storytelling. For this exhibition, I developed a sitting room that depicts the meeting of Ulysses S. Grant’s widow, Julia Grant, and Jefferson Davis’ widow, Varina Davis, in New York City long after the Civil War. The stories on the furniture illustrate the journeys the two women each made through the war years. The Visual Arts Center exhibition also included drawings from the series Julia Grant’s Opera Shawl and All that it Suggests as well as earlier drawings and chairs from the Walker Evans series.

Photos by Caleb Crawford

found chairs and artifacts, Mythic paint, 2008, approx. 18” x 18” x 32”

Chairs were either garbage or thrift shop finds grafted together and repaired using other furniture finds. Paint was used to integrate with the space but also to highlight the history of the chair.

Photos by Caleb Crawford

Fabrication assistance by Nels Long

Initially these works were a series of experiments in line, form and color.  As the practice evolved the textile sketches began to combine multiple hand made conceits; stitching on to knitting, weaving via stitching, appliqué and melding of textiles into three-dimensional space.  The series then became a practice of Stitching Landscape and investigations into Soft Construction.

Embroidery thread on linen, knitted cotton twine.

Summer 2015

photography by Madeline Crawford

Embroidery thread on linen, 2013, 
approximately  12” x 18”

This is a series of formal stitching exercises that investigate color, the nature of stitching, and abstract mapping.

Photos by Caleb Crawford

Initially these works were a series of experiments in line, form and color.  As the practice evolved the textile sketches began to combine multiple hand made conceits; stitching on to knitting, weaving via stitching, appliqué and melding of textiles into three-dimensional space.  The series then became a practice of Stitching Landscape and investigations into Soft Construction.

Embroidery thread on linen, knitted cotton twine.

Spring 2015

Photography by Madeline Crawford

Series of experiments in line, form and color. Embroidery thread, artisan wool on linen.

Winter-2015