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...
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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