A kiln shatters in Japan. Thousands of miles away, decades later, a Chilean fiber artist studies pre-Columbian knotting. In Oaxaca, a Danish weaver has spent thirty years turning mezcal's leftover agave into rugs. None of these facts belong together on paper. In a gallery in Wilton, Connecticut, they do.
Continental Drift: Encounters, North and South, opening at browngrotta arts on 17 October, borrows its title from plate tectonics: the slow, violent process by which landmasses separate, collide, and remake each other's coastlines. The gallery is using that geological drama as a lens for something textile people already know instinctively, that craft knowledge never respects a border. It travels in a Fulbright scholar's suitcase, in a teacher's slides, in the memory of a landscape that won't leave an artist alone.
Left: On Inca Time, James Bassler, 2019. Four selvedge (scaffold) weaving with handspun and commercial wool, silk, linen, ramie, sisal, cotton, natural and synthetic dyes. Right: Habitat-Jaune au Soleil, Mariette Rousseu-Vermette, wool. Photo by Tom Grotta
Take Sheila Hicks. Long before she became one of the defining figures of American fiber art, a 1950s Fulbright took her to Chile, where she learned the four-selvage panel and discontinuous warp from Andean weavers. Those techniques didn't stay souvenirs. They became structural to everything she made afterward. James Bassler had a similar reckoning in 1970s Oaxaca, living among indigenous weavers whose methods reshaped his entire practice.
Detail of Espina índigo, by Colombian artist Rosana Escobar. Photo by Tom Grotta.
Materials tell their own migration stories. Rosana Escobar, working in Colombia, has spent years exploring raw fique fiber alongside horsehair, testing what happens when two unrelated materials share a structure. Trine Ellitsgaard, a Dane who has called Mexico home since 1990, works with agave and espadín, collaborating with Oaxacan artisans to spin mezcal-production waste into rugs and bags, a genuinely circular kind of craft. Eva Soban, in Brazil, folds traditional and unexpected fibers together to push texture and volume further than either material could reach alone.
Painted Warp, Ed Rossbach.
Then there's the less visible lineage of teacher to student, an influence that rarely gets a byline. Ed Rossbach's 1960s research into historical basketry rippled outward for decades, shaping UK basketmaker Tim Johnson's own investigations into ancient technique, and reaching Belgian artist Stéphanie Jacques too. Yasuhisa Kohyama, after losing his kiln in Japan, found new form in the canyons and mesas of the American Southwest, his ceramics taking on the asymmetry of windswept rock.
Ximena Ibáñez, Atalaya. Glazed stoneware, rope, yute twine, 2026. Photo by Tom Grotta
Polly Sutton and Mary Giles sought basketmaking knowledge directly from Native communities, the Salish for Sutton, the Apache and Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe for Giles. Joe Feddersen and Dawn Walden continue those traditions from within, each bringing a distinctly personal register to work rooted in tribal heritage.
More than forty artists appear in the show, spanning the US, Canada, Chile, Venezuela, Argentina, Brazil, and Colombia, alongside international makers whose work bears an American fingerprint. What the exhibition argues, gently but persistently, is that no textile tradition is really self-contained. Every technique carries the trace of somewhere else it has been.
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Further Information:
Continental Drift: Encounters, North and South runs 17-25 October 2026 at browngrotta arts, Wilton, Connecticut. Free and open to the public, with private viewings available by appointment.
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Image Credits:
Lead: Heart-Braid-Elliipse, Ferne Jacobs, waxed linen thread, coiled & twined, 15” x 13”x 15”, 2024. Photo by Tom Grotta.
All further images as credited in captions.