© em kapp 2024
Portrait of a Blue Woman, 2024
My degree project explores the capabilities of textiles that can travel easily from place to place, and be slipped onto different types of furniture as a form of portraiture/dressing up. I was thinking about how we learn about ourselves through the stories we tell ourselves about the people who once inhabited the spaces we do, as well as the traces left behind that mold these stories.
Lamp Details Handmade paper, gouache, plaster, linen, digital embroidery, found lamp armature
Table Slip double bed machine knit, crocheted, dyed wool, handmade paper, gouache
Woven Length jaquard woven wool, machine and needle felted
Woven Length 8-harness floor woven and skein dyed wool, machine and needle felted
Chair Slip Details 8-harness floor woven and skein dyed wool, machine and needle felted
Cushion 8-harness floor woven and skein dyed wool
Book Excerpt handmade paper, ink, digtial photography
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Portrait of a Blue Woman was inspired by a previous project comprised of interior fabrics that are easy to move from place to place, and that can be taken off/applied to a variety of existing structures-- including blankets, pillows, and curtains, as well as a line of knitted fabrics that act as slip covers for chairs and tables. I was thinking about the general act of building home within a space haunted by a multitude of invisible & intertwined stories. Above are sketches and sample work for this project. 
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Chair Sweater Collection, 2023 Industrial machine knit, double bed machine knit, crochet, polymer clay, gouache
An initial prototype that would inspire the collection of fabrics made for Portrait of a Blue Woman. Using warm and familiar yet patchy textures and imagery, my collection is inspired by the tension between what’s comforting and what’s unfamiliar or unsettling.
Some of my past work thinks more about the interior textile creating a landscape of fiction and exaggeration, and the ways in which we map our surroundings through storytelling-- questioning where the line is drawn between fiction and experience, as well as symbiotic relationship between personhood and landscape. The image above shows some of my work installed together for a final critique in 2022.
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.Above: Inside Out Curtain, 2022 dye and silkscreen on muslin, machine sewn
Below: Bunched Together Duvet, 2022 dye and silkscreen on cotton, machine sewn
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Sun Comes Up, 2022 hand skein dyed cotton and wool roving on 8-harness floor loom, repurposed + painted lamp, ribbon, beads, wire
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Forest Grid, 2024 Handmade + dyed kozo paper, fabric scraps, crocheted wool, embroidery floss, repurposed yarn cones, gouache
Walk in the Woods, 2022 Tapestry woven on floor loom, hand embroidered