Cynthia Barton - November, 2019
“My time at Surf Point enabled me to do some of the most focused, intense work of my career. It was a privilege to have the company of excellent new colleagues, and inspiring to have the ocean nearly part of my studio.”
Cynthia Barton makes both policy and textiles. She is trained as an architect, and much of her work deals with post-disaster housing and community recovery. She works on textile projects for the same reason she is interested in climate change resilience: the problems are difficult. Whether the constraints are political or material, they require going forward in uncertain conditions, improvisation, and patience. As an artist, she engages questions of displacement, of what it means to lose one’s home in the larger sense, and how one regains a place in the world. For over a decade, she has been deeply invested in the study of textiles and embroidery, art forms found in the most provisional circumstances. In both practices, she is interested in fitting the resources at hand to unintended purposes. Using well-worn fabrics, she makes talismans that bring comfort and pleasure, and are inevitably linked to vulnerability. As soft objects that can wrap the body, textiles offer a unique and intimate form of relief from crisis. Her pieces to date have all been dedicated to specific people at moments of dramatic change in their lives. In many ways they provide both refuge from and connection to the environment.
More of her work can be seen at cynthia-barton-textiles.squarespace.com.