When Material Speaks: Transformations at browngrotta arts
There is a moment in the making of any textile — any object shaped from raw matter — when the material stops being passive and begins to assert itself. A silk thread catches the light at an angle you hadn't planned for. A strand of horsehair resists the hand and, in resisting, suggests a better path. This is the conversation that lies at the heart of Transformations: Dialogues in Art and Material, the spring exhibition at browngrotta arts in Wilton, Connecticut, open from 9–17 May 2026.
Works in Flax. Clockwise from top left: Serenity and Cottage in the Clouds, Susie Gillespie. Dans le creux de ta main (In the hollow of your hand), Stéphanie Jacques. The Garden of Diverging Paths I and II, Irina Kolesnikova. Fuhkyoh, Tsuroko Tanikawa. Air Hole #833, Ma sako Yoshida. Photo by Tom Grotta.
Featuring some three dozen international artists, the exhibition is less a survey than a sustained argument: that the choice of material is, itself, a moral and aesthetic act. The works range across clay, silk, linen, paper, cotton, bark, bamboo, seaweed, steel, and horsehair — but what unites them is not their fibre content. It is their shared insistence that process and material are co-authors of the finished work.
Indigo works. Left to Right: Wall Hanging, Hiroyuki Shindo. Cumbe, James Bassler. Synapse, Polly Barton. Photo by Tom Grotta.
Some of the compelling dialogues on view are those shaped by deep cultural memory. James Bassler draws from Navajo wedge-weave and Andean shibori, working with nettle fibre and natural dyes extracted from avocado seeds and madder root — materials and methods that carry centuries of knowledge in their very structure. Meanwhile, Venezuelan artists Eduardo Portillo and María Dávila grow their own mulberry trees, rear silkworms, and weave their Azul Indigo series with silk dyed from locally grown indigo: a mountain sky, translated over hours into textile. Transformation here is almost geological in its patience.
Works in Bamboo by Jiro Yonezawa, Kogetsu Kosuge, Hisako Sekijima, and Nancy Moore Bess. Photo by Tom Grotta.
Japan's Hisako Sekijima offers a different proposition entirely. Working with bamboo, bark, sticks, and kozo, she finds meaning not only in the material present but in its deliberate absence — the holes and voids that give a form its breath. Her compatriot Yasuhisa Kohyama has spent five decades wood-firing clay in Shigaraki, yielding surfaces formed by ash and flame as much as by the human hand.
Works of Cotton. Clockwise from bottom left: Sophia’s Heart, Norma Minowitz; Voluma, Mercedes Vicente; Simone Pheulpin, Tourbillons II, III, IV, V,; and Bruxelles – Série Éclosion. Photo by Tom Grotta.
In France, Simone Pheulpin achieves something altogether improbable: coiling humble cotton webbing into biomorphic forms that appear to have grown rather than been made, evoking coral, shell, and ancient stone. And Kyoko Kumai, whose stainless-steel mesh works have entered the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Victoria & Albert Museum, speaks of her chosen material as possessing its own language — fluttering, breathing, dissolving into air.
Unexpected Materials. On the wall, left to right: Basket for the Crows, Chris Drury; Mourning Station #4, Dominic Di Mare; First Snow, Lewis Knauss; On the pedestal: Of a Feather (group of 8), John McQueen. Photo by Tom Grotta.
What Transformations makes clear is that materiality is never merely technical. It is biographical, cultural, ecological. When you stand before these works, you are encountering not just the skill of making but the long history of a substance — and the particular moment when one artist's intelligence met it, and changed it, and was changed in return.
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Further Information:
Transformations: Dialogues in Art and Material is on view at browngrotta arts, 276 Ridgefield Road, Wilton, CT, from 9–17 May 2026. A full-colour catalogue will accompany the exhibition.
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Image Credits:
Lead: Works of Linen from Transformations: dialogues in art and materials. Left: Hanging Baskets, Gary Trentham. Right: Rhythm of Colors (detail), Merja Keskinen. Photo by Tom Grotta.
All further images as credited in captions and courtesy of browngrotta arts.