Stitch Field : Alice-Marie Archer’s Agritextiles

 February 14 – June 9, 2024 at the Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College, California.

Alice crafts living architectural-textile creations that invite us to contemplate how we can co-exist with nature, challenging our separation from the natural environment and expanding our ideas of how we might interact with the species and ecologies around us. Her current work is centred around creating textile scaffolds from which living entities such as plants, bacteria, and mycelium flourish.

Stitch Field offers an alternative to the plastic-filled warehouses of plants associated with hydroponic systems by using knitted sheep’s wool as substrate and replacing engineered crops with locally occurring plants.

Alice hand-knits fibre sculptures that are each embedded with seeds, creating patterns suited to the needs of each seed species—whether it grows best in a divot, pocket, or row. For this site-specific installation at the Benton, she has chosen seeds of locally occurring California plants with either edible or medicinal properties.