Annie Coggan: The Smocked Building Project
"Articulating the calm that each stitch gave me is quite hard. I think I just come from working stock, people that made things, making things require repetition and focus. In this current world five days of doing just one thing was a miraculous gift. I don't necessarily enjoy a painterly gesture, I enjoy the intensity of regulating drawing lines or making even stitches. The possibility that each line or stitch could be better than the next." - Annie Coggan
From frock to facade, New York-based artist Annie Coggan is on a fascinating journey taking the art of smocking into a whole new realm. She came to this technique after a long-term embroidery practice which was an extension of drawing, and as a trained professional architect naturally responded to the action of taking a 2-D surface and folding it into a 3-D surface.
"I immediately started asking if smocking could be at least at furniture scale", she says.
Smocking Chair, Tatter Blue Library, by Annie Coggan
Coggan began her theoretical practice with narrative furniture, using embroidery and upholstery to tell stories. Jordana Martin, director and founder of Tatter, asked her to craft a chair highlighting a stitching technique in the Blue Library, and from then on she continued to explore scale and structure, over time developing her unique ‘Modernist’ approach.
"I am enlarging the scale of each stitch, the precedents for this are Modernist painters who turned paintings upside down and the surrealist played with scale shifts in their images. Secondly, I am proposing that smocking can be a functionalist and performative surface, both priorities that Modernist designers put forward."
Annie Coggan and Ruth Helen Smith,The Smocked Building Project by Oren Ford, Spirit Sounds Studios.
From January 16th – February 15th, 2026, The Ruth Smith Gallery in North Tawton, Devon, pioneered Annie Coggan’s first Smocked Building Project. The large-scale, "inside/outside upholstery" textile installation combined a rural English frock-smocking technique with a traditional building material, honeycomb-smocked hessian, to play with ideas of decoration and functionality. Coggan taught two workshops (honeycomb stitch and bird beak stitch), and collaborated with Berlin / Exeter artist Sam Godfrey who researched images depicting the history of smocking and its contemporary uses.
We sat down with Annie Coggan to discuss the ins and outs of this project:
Annie Coggan Portrait by Ash Bean.
Deborah Eydmann: How did this collaboration come about exactly?
Annie Coggan: Sam Godfrey took my Modernist Smocking at Tatter class about two years ago. She then reached out as she was really working with smocking for her practice-based PhD at Exeter. I mentioned I would be in the UK and she asked if I would come down to see her work at a residency at the Ruth Smith Gallery.
I spent the day there with Sam and Ruth and at the very end Ruth looked at my instagram and saw a photoshopped smocked building that I posted. I could see her wheels turning and later in the month she found some start up money from the Red Mud Arts collective to initiate the project.
We worked for a year planning and orchestrating the trip. I sold silkscreens of Little Smocked Buildings (produced by Russell Janis Gallery) and got a faculty development grant from Pratt to further fund the project.
Hessian Smocked with Honeycomb Stitch by Ruth Smith Gallery
DE: What role did Sam Godfrey play?
AC: Sam’s role has been as a researcher in and around Devon. She looked at real smocks at the Museum of English Rural Life and the V&A. Her practice really is in the realm of the future of smocking. She has generated digital imaging of smocked interiors and has done smocked full-scale installations. Her thinking is closer to the transformation of smocking from the body to the interior. So she is a smocking comrade. Her work will be more evident as we write and publish about the project.
DE: You smocked the facade using hessian, a traditional material for covering buildings during lime rendering, and the honeycomb stitch, which can be traced to 18th/ 19th century rural English smocking. How did you make the columns?
AC: The actual smocking was an amazing experience. I smocked each 20 foot column for 5 days for about 14 hours a day, plus or minus. Each smocked diamond was around 8 inches, which is the size of a brick, a size designed to fit nicely in the palm of a hand. We used a bright blue mason’s twine to tie in with the Gallery blue that Ruth uses on the front woodwork. Each stitch is 4 or five lashes.
Annie Coggan Smocking Setup. Oren Ford, Spirit Sounds Studios.
DE: Tell us about the process - what difficulties or surprises did you encounter?
AC: This was 112 linear feet of smocking. We wanted the smocking to clad this building but NOT do a Christo. We were asking the building where it would receive smocking. The rose bush played a big role in the placement and the hessian covers the grid of the rose bushes' wire trellis. We chose January to be able to cover the rose bush while dormant. A rose bush on an English building is an important partner.
The hessian continues to amaze. We did wet tests for the textile to make sure that the fascia could hold the fabric if rain added weight. It just sheds water. Noah and Ruth check it regularly and they keep coming back with reports that it's only wet at the folds. So it is really acting as a rain screen for the building. The smocked panels are slated to move into the community center in February for acoustical dampening. This is a Modernist smocker’s dream, reuse, functionalism, utility… oh my!
Little Smocked Buildings by Annie Coggan.
DE: How did the local community and visitors respond to the installation?
AC: They were joyfully sceptical. Many asked “have you ever done something so big?”- blessedly I am an architect so I have built buildings. The Saturday I was at the cherrypicker there was a small party below. When we came down there were lots of good conversations and feedback. It was a live action critique of the work….stressful but rewarding.
DE: Tell us about the two workshops
AC: The conversations with the workshop participants were amazing. It was a constant query into what the smocking could be used for - seedling trays, bird’s nest, egg cups?
Since smocking is on the UK Heritage critical list. I really want to make sure the stitching techniques are disseminated throughout. I'm really proud that I taught about thirty people how to smock and how to think about smocking. And they will now pass this along and propel it into the future.
"In Walter Benjamin's essay ‘The Storyteller’ he says that in the act of telling a story, the receiver of the story is not passive, it's their job to absorb and to pass it on. Stitches are storytelling."
Annie Coggan's Honeycomb Smocking Stitch Workshop by Ruth Smith Gallery.
DE: What did you learn from this experience?
AC: Oh my - still processing. But Ruth said something very potent the other day: “The material will not be silent.” I feel very connected to the hessian, my clothes smelled like it when I got back to the States. I'm anxious to get back to testing the form of hessian columns.
Every large-scale project can be improved upon but I love that I made and taught for this endeavor. The workshop and the installation together are crucial components.
DE: Is this project the natural evolution of your chairs and buildings practice?
AC: Yes - It did take me a while to realise I was going on a road back to architecture but with textiles this time. Over the past decade I have just been demanding more and more from the smocked surface. I really believe it will be a tremendous partner to buildings soon.
DE: What next?
AC: I am talking to comrades about small smocked temples in the landscape and smocking a tiny town house. I would love to smock a barn, utility meets utility…
DE: Thank you Annie!
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Words: Deborah Eydmann
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Further Information:
Annie Coggan is an artist, designer, educator, author, principal and associate professor. Her practice involves textiles, furniture and drawings that create a haptic agenda.
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Image Credits:
Lead: Annie Coggan Smocking Setup. Oren Ford, Spirit Sounds Studios.
All further images as indicated in captions, courtesy of Annie Coggan