I am a book artist, printmaker, and writer whose practice merges textile traditions and historical book structures to create sculptural handmade books. Working primarily with vintage and reclaimed textiles, including wedding dresses, hand-stitched linens, and historic fabrics, I treat these materials as witnesses to memory, labor, and cultural inheritance. My work reclaims domestic and textile labor, particularly the creative and physical labor of Black women whose contributions have often been excluded from formal archives.
Rather than illustrating texts, I use material structure to expose tensions, absences, and contradictions within inherited literary and cultural systems. Shakespeare’s sonnets function as conceptual frameworks through which I examine questions of preservation, reproduction, beauty, and self-containment. By placing the intimate histories of domestic textiles alongside canonical literature, I ask whose labor is preserved, whose stories are collected, and whose forms of knowledge survive.
I call this methodology Material Excavation. Through stitching, layering, and formal transformation, I approach making as a form of critical reading. The page becomes a site of accumulation where textiles carry histories alongside language itself. These investigations currently unfold through 52 Weeks of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, a year-long durational project of weekly textile-based responses to Shakespeare’s sonnets, and Love Sonnets from Shakespeare to Baltimore, an ongoing series exploring literary interpretation through histories of Black domestic labor, fashion, and material inheritance.
Grounded in the discipline of slow making, my practice treats the handmade book as both object and method of thought. My work has been acquired for the permanent collections of the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, the Folger Shakespeare Library, and Ohio University Libraries.
Beyond the studio, this research continues through Coded Threads, my Substack dedicated to the slow reading of cultural inheritance, material process, and the evolving life of the handmade book.
Coded Threads by Suzanne Coley
