Meet the Artist

Karin Graves

Wearable Fiber Arts

Karin Graves has drawn, painted, quilted, spun and woven fabric most of her adult life. Most recently, she has hand painted linen yardage and designed clothing for sale. She has also designed dresses and jackets from vintage cloth, often taking classic old jackets and refashioning them into new designs. She adorns these with a stitching technique she created and calls Swarming. This involves following the contours and landscape of a garment with swirls of stitches that softly define its character. She grew up in Port Orchard, Washington, on the Puget Sound. She studied art at Tacoma Community College, where she earned her associate’s degree, and at the Oregon College of Art and Craft in Portland. For the past 33 years, she has lived with her husband in Beaverton, Ore., where they raised three children, and she taught preschool and summer art classes for children.

Karin uses a fluid approach to paint linen and fashion it into garments. Using a projector in a dark room, she casts forms from nature, math and script onto linen and paints them with black textile paint. She draws on images that evoke the energy of murmuration and the intricacies of nature. She is inspired by the murmuration of birds because it reflects her creative process. Her ideas and images dip, turn, expand and contract in her imagination and flow through her thread and paint into artistic forms.