Pamela Wiley
Pamela Wiley is a studio artist based in Tybee Island, GA. She has always viewed the world through the lens of fabrics and textiles. Her 40+ years of professional experience include 24 years of teaching in the Fibers department at SCAD, as well as working as a studio artist producing lines of hand-dyed fabrics and kimonos, a freelance textile designer/design consultant in New York City, a stylist in the New York ribbon and trim industry, a freelance designer for Anthropologie, Artist-in-Residence for West Elm, consultant to Proctor and Gamble, and a prop designer/fabricator for Broadway shows.
Her constructed drawings are thread-based and built on quilting and embroidery traditions. Reappropriating the feminine domestic language of textiles, brings a subtext of cultural narrative regarding issues of hierarchy of imagery, beauty, and materiality. Incorporating quantum mechanics to the language of traditional embroidery and quilting, Wiley’s mark-making and line-work engage the textile surface to explore volume, dimension and light.
Wiley is constantly readdressing the natural grid of the textile. The push/pull of vertical/horizontal of loom-based textiles is her platform for re-engagement and rearrangement. By bending lines and light, she pulls her drawings off the grid and seemingly into space. The textile expands and contracts through interference and insertion of the stitches, creating dimensionality where negative spaces rise to become primary structures, metaphorically giving rise to the potential of reimagining how we see cultural structures and hierarchies.
Pamela Wiley maintains an active studio practice in contemporary fiber work and functional studio textiles. Her works have been exhibited throughout the United States, as well as internationally in Italy, France, and England.
