MARY LITTLE
Trained as a furniture designer at London’s Royal College of Art, Mary Little has become a sculptor working solely with unbleached cotton canvas. Her work explores the interaction of light, surface, and gravity. Her textile sculptures present themes and techniques of elasticity, volume, scale, and texture. The work is ritualistic in its process, expressed through the acts of making patterns, cutting, and sewing, and is evocative of Ireland’s landscape visualized through the lens of her childhood memories. Mary Little is featured in the Craft in America PBS episode INSPIRATION, available to stream from the website craftinamerica.org at this LINK.
Born in Northern Ireland, Mary Little moved to the United States in 2001 to take up a teaching position at California College the Arts (CCA), San Francisco. Trained as a furniture designer at London’s Royal College of Art, she has always approached her work as sculpture. In 2015 she made a conscious break and began to create works devoid of functional references. In 2018, Little exhibited this new direction at Craft Contemporary Museum (formerly CAFAM), Los Angeles, followed by a solo show at Craft in America Center, Los Angeles.
Her work is in the permanent collections of the Vitra Design Museum in Basel and Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris. Her commissions and gallery works have been acquired for private collections in Europe and North America, as well as public collections including the Victoria & Albert Museum, London. Little’s work has most recently been reviewed in Architectural Digest, Galerie, and Surface magazines.
She is a 2019 recipient of the prestigious Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant and lives in Los Angeles.
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