Jacqueline Qiu (b. 1999, New Jersey) lives and works in Manhattan, New York. She received her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. With an emphasis in fiber and painting, she explores traditional craft breaking down and combining with personal expression alongside her investigation of Eastern and Western painting philosophies. The artist forgoes underdrawings and detailed sketches. Her process flits between assured stream of consciousness and fraught vision of how internal energy will translate to tangible form.
Most recently, Qiu’s work was exhibited at the Icelandic Textile Center in Blönduós, upon her completion of the Ós Textile Residency. Her work has been shown in group exhibitions at Latitude Gallery (NY), Harper’s Chelsea (NY), Underdonk Gallery (NY), Dustin Yellin’s Studio Show (NY), Woods-Gerry Gallery (RI), Dye House (RI), Rhode Island Hall (RI), Prov-Wash Gallery (RI), Gallery 263 (MA), and the Gelman Gallery (RI). She has completed workshops at Tianzifang, Anderson Ranch, and the New York Academy of Art.
My work is the interface between my inner landscape and the outer world, expressed through playful rearrangements and reconstructions of nature to immortalize transitory attachments and nomadic pondering.
The spaces that hold me through life have always been my most comforting companions. Amidst isolation and calamity, I ground myself in nature while drawing connection to histories of craft. Ritual and devotion are undercurrents that flow through my work across textiles, paper-making, painting, and installation. The work carries a transparency that reveals the experience of making, which is often layered with exploration in many mediums and processes. My body submits to the labor of gathering and transforming material for my own creations. This humbling process makes me confront my physical mortality, but also brings me closer to my spiritual compass.
In ritual, I sit at the loom each day to weave glimmers of when the natural world met my spirit. I allow my body to hurt for the creation of a personal relic, dancing in tension between devotion and pain. This practice emerged alongside my investigation of Kesi through Chinese dynasties, a technically demanding, time consuming slit-tapestry weaving and painting technique which translates to "carved silk" or "carved colors". It coalesced from disputed origins and has since faded into obscurity. In our time, as humanity's relationship with material, landscapes, worldly and spiritual desire feel more dire than ever, what does it mean to hold an object, to make an object? To grow on soil and to cross lands? I want to walk on this earth gently.
By making work that serves as a record of the present time and memory, no matter how mundane, I ground myself. While the pieces are arduous and demanding to make, it is always in the hopes of creating a serene oasis. The final tapestries appear effortless and radiant, singing with color, floating in light.
I come from a painting background and formally studied mostly western painters when I was young. I was captivated by the Impressionists, John Singer Sargent, Degas, Gustav Klimt, and Edward Hopper. Interspersed throughout this early education was dips into traditional Chinese ink painting—always in anomaly, never consciously integrated into my projected art practice.
When I transitioned to textile craft, I kept searching for pathways reaching back to painting, color, and figuration. Delicate and bold specificity of mark making and line, precise tones and tints...but there’s more to how a textile sits with space, breaths in air with the viewer staring back at it. They exist in the same plane. I was drawn to how fabric and thread interacts with light, bodies, and environments.
Craft is a much more involved, embodied process. It’s less a mental translation to enact a desired composition on a panel, and more about becoming a student to the materials. Seeing what forms after surrendering to the learning process. In my fiber explorations, I found connections to abstraction, sculpture, and installation. The inherent spirituality and presence of material ran alongside my redirection towards Chinese art principles, which often prize a sense of spirit and energy rather than realist illusion and reconstruction.
Traditional Chinese painting often sees what is not there. Brushstrokes encapsulate blank spaces. The relationship between each mark is critical. The visual aftermath is evidence of the fluidity of ink’s impact on paper, the brush’s caress across surface and time. I approach tapestry weaving in a similar way. Each woven color relates to every other woven mark, coming together just so to suggest an image, impression, or feeling. The spaces left in-between hum just as intensely as the moments of color.