Madelaine Corbin notices the world around her. She explores the observations with research to learn more about what piqued her interest. Once she begins noticing and collecting these moments earnestly, she plans her artwork. They are researched and composed with careful material decisions.
How did you find yourself on an artist’s path?
I have always been an artist.
I come from a creative family—my paternal grandmother was a curator, traveler, and an appreciator of craft. Her house is dripping in handwoven textiles, ceramic objects, vivid paintings, ornate masks, and pieces she collected from dear friends around the world. Each object is infused with a story of her travels and the artisans who crafted it.
My siblings and I spent lots of time with both of my grandmothers growing up while my parents cultivated creative businesses in woodworking, food, and so much more.
As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. Read more about our affiliate linking policy.
How does the environment influence your creativity?
My artwork exists in confluence with place. Humans are constantly making our environments—digging into the earth, building structures at human scales above the horizon, making gardens that transport plants from there over to here.
Not only do we make our environments, but our environments make us, too. Our soft, sensitive bodies are affected by the water we drink, the air we breathe, and the sun that hits our skin.
My artwork is also sensitive to its environments. What I make is attuned to things that seem simple but are in fact overwhelmingly complex: the weather, a shadow, the way water dries, how a silk worm spins their cocoon in one long strand.
My creative projects and all projects of life are woven into the fabric of our environments. We are connected.
What different creative media do you use in your work?
I am a fiber artist with a research-based practice.
I begin subconsciously by noticing the world around me. Eventually something I have seen—dust under a rug, sunlight fading naturally dyed fibers, the choreographed way a broom is swept—builds into an undeniable and common occurrence.
These noticings sometimes grow into a world of their own. For example, a plant I noticed in a field with a thick stalk eventually led me to a field full of dandelions. The field was nearly entirely covered by flowers that had multiple, conjoined heads and stems as wide as my palm!
I began to research this environmental phenomenon and learned about the area in Detroit, Michigan around my home. The soil, the water, the plants were telling a story. Eventually, the occurrences became so common and so loud that it inspired a project called Hazmatters. The project consisted of handwoven cloth used in a patterned garment that mimicked the nature of the flowers I had found.
This work was related to previous years of research and a book project about the color blue called, “The Stuff of Everyday Magic”. Blue is an indicator species in our environments—there are water-sensitive blues on land, migrating blues in the ocean due to its changing temperatures, and disappearing blues over the skies of many cities (terrifyingly, sun blotting experiments are beginning to gain traction as a method for cooling the earth). This research led to the very real discovery that the climate crisis is a crisis of color.
The media in my work reflect the questions I am communicating. Sometimes this takes the form of hand-collected dust from underneath old rugs. Other times it might look like blue particulates I helped synthesize as an artist-in-residence in a chemistry lab. It might be textiles woven from fibers I dyed with plants I grew or perhaps plants I foraged alongside my dear mentors in Greece.
Some projects require a specific wood while others make the most of donated supplies like my weaving that incorporates used water tubing from an irrigation system meant for growing food indoors. Maybe this sounds vast and hard to picture, but it’s because our material world is endlessly complex and meaningful.
Paint, clay, fiber, color—these materials can communicate deeply if you listen to the world at your fingertips.
When it comes to creating, are you more of a planner or an improviser?
My project ideas follow environmental themes but the specific inspirations are discovered spontaneously.
I give my attention to accidents and the unexpected. Once I begin noticing and collecting these moments earnestly, I plan my artworks. They are researched and composed of careful material decisions.
There are still times with improvisation happens. Afterall, you can’t decide when the unexpected will unfold. I try to remain open to astonishing moments whenever they present themselves.
Do you have a dedicated space for creating? If so, what does it look like?
My space is mobile. I pack up my studio to attend residencies and I bring materials home to work in my garage studio space.
Sometimes my creative space is out in the field—while foraging and making plant paints, collecting photographs of water and translating them into weaving drafts.
Other times my creative space is rooted firmly in place; my floor loom has a way of keeping me put when the warp is wound! I also work in my dad’s woodshop alongside my partner Kai and my brother Keene.
And I find other spaces to pop-up when needed. It’s a mobile hustle to get the work done, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. I learn new techniques, perspectives, and from experts everywhere I am lucky enough to go.
Which part of the design process is your favorite? Which part is a challenge for you?
At this moment, the loom has my attention. I love the challenges presented by the mathematics, the grid, and when they smash (often elegantly!) into reality.
I enjoy figuring out something that seems like it should be impossible. Right now, I am translating water imagery into handwoven cloth. It is challenging to coax curves, undulations, and irregularity out of a grid. And it is exciting.
The biggest challenge I currently face is how to translate research into design. Both have depth and both demand the respect of the other. It can be difficult to draw attention to craft’s complexities in ways that reflect the contemporary and urgent concepts developed in the research.
Is there an overarching theme that connects all of your work?
My work is meant to connect the viewer with their environments. To show how we are entwined, how the threshold between home and land is an invented barrier, how we are our ecologies (and not simply constituents within the environment).
My work is meant to put hands in the soil, taste the wetness of a tear, listen acutely to our world and to offer what I am hearing through artwork. It’s meant to make you feel: to feel a handwoven rug and see its vibrating yellow dyed with plants; to fall in love with the way a simple blue flower grows at the base of a woven irrigation system; to grieve the documented loss of the same sweet color blue around the world.
Our environments are speaking loudly. If we listen, if we care, if we act, we can change our world for the better—for the earth itself and its inhabitants—for each other.
What’s the best piece of advice you’ve received?
The quality of the work is determined by the quality of the questions.
Commune with the universe, not the room.
Make every day.
How has your creativity evolved over the years? What triggered the evolution to new media/kinds of work/ways of working?
I adore craft. I didn’t always know it, but I always have.
My creativity has evolved to be less concerned with prompts and structures, success and failure. My work feels equally motivated by non-human viewers—its reception by a tree or a sea wave instead of an algorithm or a syllabus.
What is your favorite accomplishment?
I am proud of the Natural Dye & Textile Program I am building collaboratively with Pine Meadow Ranch in Sisters, Oregon. We completed our 5 pilot sessions last week, and it made me excited for next year! The Ranch grew the dye plants that we used all season long on silks, wool, cotton, and so much more.
The relationships we built each workshop between plants and their powers, between place and materials, and between each other was powerful. I am grateful to do this project and look forward to returning next summer to continue our work together.
I am also proud of my new business launching this fall called OMNIBLOOM. My partner and I are designing furniture and crafting each piece together.
We are dyeing the yarn, weaving the upholstery fabric, sewing the cushions, building the hardwood pieces, and constructing obejcts we are really proud of—objects that can be understood simply by using them: sitting in a couch, watching your rug change over time (a super power!), and sharing a chair with a friend over a long evening conversation. The work is beginning to bloom. It feels beautiful and functional, and it stands for everything my practice advocates for. You can keep up with our work and the launch of our website here: @OMNIBLOOMSTUDIO
Where can people see your work?
www.madelainecorbin.com
@madelainecorbin
@OMNIBLOOMSTUDIO
Interview posted September 2024
Browse through more inspiring stories about natural dyeing on Create Whimsy.