The Currency of Glow Sticks (detail), Greta Coalier
Soft Armor
Greta Coalier
August 1 - September 20, 2025
Opening Reception August 1, 5-8pm
STATEMENT
From an early age, handwork was how I stayed present—its methods and materials became tools of survival in spaces that demanded silence, obedience, and relentless vigilance. I use cloth, color, and form to map internal landscapes and external systems: how we absorb control, how we survive it, and how we might resist.
I’m interested in how domestic materials, patterns, and objects carry both comfort and constraint. Once central to caregiving and shelter, they are often dismissed as sentimental or decorative. In my hands, they become a language of refusal and repair. I use them to decode the expectations placed on women—to be beautiful, maternal, desirable, and endlessly productive, all while managing the emotions of men and earning approximately 25% less for the same labor.
I combine fabrics from my own narrative alongside salvaged textiles—ghost traces of gendered, unpaid labor—with plaster and mixed media to create surfaces that serve as physical records of submission, adaptation, and pushback, particularly in the lives of women. Through layering, sanding, and the fluid unpredictability of watercolor, I examine the ways we are conditioned to shrink or comply—and how making can become a quiet form of refusal, a blueprint for autonomy.
My sculptural practice expands this conversation. For the past six years, I’ve been developing a series called Obedience Units. Shaped through intentional physical processes—knitting, stitching, crocheting—these forms begin in moments when I’m required to sit still and later grow into spatial structures that resist containment. What started as quiet acts of compliance and survival has evolved into something unruly: objects that assert presence, command attention, and privilege material intelligence over spectacle. Built through repetitive, meditative gestures—knotting, threading, shaping—they become traveling shrines to endurance and transformation.
Whether recognized or dismissed, across time, women have relied on handwork to survive, to push back, and to speak—I approach it as a structure of agency. Through passed-down materials and repeated gestures, I shape, claim, and reveal the often invisible toll of emotional labor.
About the Artist
Greta Coalier’s practice operates at the intersection of memory, material, and contemporary femininity. Her work—primarily painting and textile-based—embodies a quiet rigor: intuitive, honest, and deliberately constructed. Each piece is rooted in a politics of care—for the body, for history, and for the often-invisible labor carried by women. Without resorting to sentimentality, Coalier transforms domestic materials into vessels of protection, resilience, and resistance—building armor from thread, softness from structure, and presence from what is often overlooked.
Born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri, Coalier grew up with access to public museums and libraries that nurtured her early fascination with both visual art and the natural world. She began sewing in childhood and developed an expansive studio practice integrating painting, handwork, and sculptural forms. Coalier received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1999. She currently lives and works in St. Louis, where her work continues to explore the aesthetics and politics of care, containment, and survival.
Events & exhibitions at the Foundry Art Centre are free and open to the public. For more information, please email Jessica Mannisi, Director of Exhibitions, at jmannisi@foundryartcentre.org