AS IF NONE OF THESE THINGS CAN HAPPEN IN A HOME: Jonathan Agin talks to Caitlyn McLaughlin

In February, the artist Caitlyn McLaughlin lost her job managing another artist’s studio. So she found another job, with an artisan textile company. The pandemic hit New York, and she was laid off before stepping foot in the office. With no job and unable to afford her own Sunset Park studio any longer, she moved all of her art supplies, fabrics, and furniture into her small apartment in Bay Ridge and began to sew.

Caitlyn’s work deals with comfort and personal space. The many parallel curves of her stitchwork is at once soothing, like waves crashing along the beach, and arresting and curious in their maze-like quality. She uses salvaged and hand-dyed fabrics to create her art quilts; the color palate is simultaneously inviting and uncanny.

We talked about the way she’s had to transform her art practice amid the present health and economic crisis.

Jonathan Agin: I think being stuck at home right now, when we'd rather be with our friends and family, maybe you have a favorite bar or restaurant. It's all pretty heartbreaking and overwhelming to think about how urban public spaces have quickly gone from representing the danger of contagion to kind of transforming into a scene of beatings and tear gassings. And yet your work does seem to really celebrate home life, the quiet, the intimate. There's a lot about textile arts, and quilting particular, that pushes viewers to consider the concept of home. And I'm curious what factors over the years have drawn you to that medium.

Caitlyn McLaughlin: Well, what I love about textiles is the accessibility, right? The clothes on our body, the bags we carry, the sheets that we sleep in, wrap ourselves in. That closeness, the comfort that comes with textiles, it’s so intimate. Most textiles are made because they have to be.

I think a lot about folk art, the way art is interpreted and produced outside the “art scene,” outside of formal art educations. I think of quilting communities, of circles of women working, collectively hand stitching. I also consider the abstraction in improvised quilting. And Black artists like the women from Gee’s Bend, Rosie Lee Tompkins, Faith Ringgold.

JA: I think of the ways in which historically those textile arts have been important components of a home economy, of early home-based industrial practices.

CM: Yes, there’s that functionality to it. It’s not really inspired by any of the so-called “Greats.” I’m interested in the crafts that have arisen in communities, handed down through generations. I find that really exciting. 

There’s obviously a close tie between like the creation of textiles and quilts and the home. At art school, it was sort of ingrained in us that an artist has her studio: a separate space, a “sacred,” yet experiment space, a messy area but also one of quiet contemplation, time spent by ourselves for long, long periods of time. As if being a fine artist with no money means you have all this time to work in the studio, that any of that is spent actually alone. As if none of these things can happen in a home.

JA: You worked as the studio manager for another Brooklyn-based artist. In what ways did you find working many hours a week in another artist's studio influencing your own practice?

CM: It’s where I had to start thinking about how a studio space is really mostly an office space, a place of business like any other. It's not necessarily just about making, experimenting. It’s a place where the artist hustles to make money to survive.

JA: This is a pattern I notice in the conversations I have with writers – that very little happens in an MFA program to equip artists and writers to survive day to day.

CM: “Where do you get the money to keep that studio?” was a question that was never asked. Nobody ever talked about that. Like, who's paying for that studio, for you to get to work there? I’ve always worked several jobs, struggling to find time to create. In this city, artists historically managed to find this Bohemian space to work in, which no longer really exists. 

JA: Even the descendants of those places were shuttering long before the pandemic. Signal closed a few years ago, Silent Barn too. These DIY art and music spaces that once easily slipped through New York real estate’s cracks.

CM: Exactly. The artist I worked for, she’s an illustrator, who also makes jewelry and home goods. It’s inspiring. I’m like, OK, maybe not everything I make has to be hung in a gallery, especially since, you know, those aren’t really functioning at the moment.

JA: So how did all these forces collide to transform your own studio practice, with its focus on gallery pieces, into an at-home commercial endeavor?

CM: I had to part ways with the artist I was working for when she decided to close a portion of her business, the jewelry part that I was involved with. For her, it was the same factors we all face: the exhaustion of constantly working to keep up with consumer demand, designing new products, keeping customers happy… the exhaustion of capitalism. She just decided she wanted to focus on the area of her business she was most interested in – she had grown big enough to be able to do that.

I got a job offer from a larger artisan textile company, then the pandemic hit. That job fell through, and all the classes I taught were cancelled. Everything fell through.

I started to panic a little bit, like, what am I going to do? I don't have any income, and rent’s going to be due. I knew I wasn’t going to be able to afford having a separate studio space anymore, this thing that I felt had been so integral to my practice. I loved the space, the other artists who worked there, all the open studios and shows that were held in the building. But that was gone and I needed to find a way to keep going.

A few things conspired. My roommate moved out as things started shutting down in the city. And my cousin, a nurse upstate in a Covid unit, asked if I would be able to make her some scrub caps and masks for her and her coworkers. They barely had any to go around in those hospitals at the time. My mom is also a nurse in a different hospital upstate, and was having the same problem.

A couple other friends would be like, hey, could you make me a mask? They just knew I could work a sewing machine. 

I posted the results on Instagram, these hand-dyed masks I was making, and more people started emailing me about them. The orders have just kept coming, so for now, I’ve been able to make rent turning out masks.

JA: It sounds like you’ve landed at this intersection, where community needs have met your own artistic sensibility.

CM: Yeah. Which of course takes us back to quilt-making historically, right? It's making something I hope is beautiful, and something you need. Interestingly, a customer told me that they love their mask as a kind of memento. That years from now, when they think back to the pandemic, they'll have my mask and be like, oh, look at this pretty thing from that time. 

JA: So as your work has taken on different meanings and uses, how have you made due, fulfilling orders from your apartment, without the benefit of a separate, larger studio in which to spread out?

CM: I really love my home. It’s an old pre-war building in Bay Ridge, nice floors, pretty molding in all the rooms, lots of sunlight. I have so many plants and friends’ artworks, and a cat – I’ve always taken home life really seriously. But as a textile artist, I have to be really careful in a space like that. Like, you can’t dye fabric in the bathroom ‘cause it's all porcelain and it’ll permanently stain! So I have to use a bunch of stainless steel buckets and big pots and pans, all spread out across the small kitchen floor, and in my sink. I’ve got to shift everything in the kitchen around so that none of these chemicals get near the spices or the pantry or anything else I’ll eat. 

I put up a child barrier so my cat doesn’t get in the kitchen while all the dye is out, and I make sure I’m stocked up on N-95 masks. Everything dyed has to be moved extremely carefully from the kitchen to the bathroom to dry; I have to make sure not to accidently stain the floor permanently blue or whatever. Most of the cutting and sewing happens in my roommate’s old room, which I co-opted into a small studio to sew in. So with the door there it’s some separation from my home life, but not much.

When everything hit, I was sewing in the living room on like a side table, all hunched over, killing my back. I’m a little more set up now, with a big table to work on. Things are less covered in cat hair. Still, without the separate studio building, you have to create this separation in your mind where I’m like: I’m working now, and then at a certain point, OK I’m just home now. It can be very hard for me to shut off my work brain because all my work is always all around me. 

I have to be more strategic than I’m used to. Like, right now I'm making sixty masks. I can't think about that art quilt project or that commission, all the other things that need to get done. The at-home studio is more like a workshop, much less like a creative space. 

JA: It's become an office space. 

CM: Yeah. I want it to be part creative space, part commercial workshop, but right now it’s all just a pile of work. There’s no separation.

JA: I would characterize New York city as deeply hostile to professional creators of any sort, including visual artists. And obviously I'm saying this as a literary agent, most of whose clients work a day job of some kind. The reality is of rent, buying supplies, application fees, and so on ought to preclude any creative impulse, and yet even amid gallery closures, looming austerity measures and so on, here you are. So how do you maintain any sort of creative impulse amid, you know, the stress and chaos of the present times.

CM: I've been in New York, my people are in New York, you know? I’ve got limited supplies, limited space. But fabric and dye is easy enough to come by. At the same time, I’m seeing my actual artistic practice wilting. I have so many quilts, stacks of drawings and drafts, projects I need to finish but that I haven’t been able to work on in months, because they’re just not the priority. 

I'm very fortunate that I can be dying and sewing and making these pretty objects for a living.  But my art practice as I knew it is on hold. In the past, I would get up and go to the studio and like really experiment with color, space, pattern. But for now, it's just about cutting square pieces of fabric and folding and sewing them together. How fast can I do that?

Sewing was a very personal thing for me before this. Now there’s the customer to consider.

JA: On top of this like forced resourcefulness, there are these compromises that need to be made in order simply to survive under capitalism, whether you're an artist or writer or creative worker of any kind. I wonder, how to you envision the future of your practice? Will you start to realign your artwork with your product line?

CM: I don't really have the answer for that at the moment. I do know that there has to be some sort of balance, that I haven't quite struck yet. Though bringing my studio home was a forced decision, I will say that it’s given me more time to make things, and hopefully that will end up translating to more time experimenting, making art, gallery pieces. I need to find that balance, to make this sustainable. It can't just be one or the other.