The artist taps into her curiosity, one stitch at a time, with her large sculptural works made from upcycled textiles and other found items
by Susanna Klingenberg | photography by Rebecca Necessary
As children, we were all students of the natural world. Who among us doesn’t remember being mesmerized by a line of marching ants? Delighted by a perfectly smooth stone? Our younger selves were willing to get up close to creation, unrushed and easily awed.
Patrizia Ferreira invites us back into that state of childlike wonder. Her work — colorful, mesmeric and endlessly detailed — offers us a gentle nudge to consider, really consider, the beauty and resilience of the outdoor world.
But she doesn’t do it by painting sweeping landscapes. She works in textiles, a medium often thought of as manmade and separate from nature — we see cloth used for clothing, upholstery for furniture or bags to carry our purchases. But Ferreira challenges that limited view: “I’ll take a walk in the forest and notice the way the branches tangle themselves together and I see ropes, I see yarn. Anything can be a textile: the bark of a tree, the moss on a rock.” And in Ferreira’s capable hands, the things we throw away serve this purpose, too.
“Patrizia’s work and process are rooted in the act of salvaging,” says Artspace creative director Annah Lee, who watched Ferreira’s work take off when she was part of their Emerging Artist Residency. Though Ferreira’s polished pieces belie their humble beginnings, she works entirely with discarded, donated and found items. Her studio is a jumble of yarn and thread, piles of nets, collections of plastic bottle caps, rolls of pantyhose and assorted other objects people have discarded.
It’s a far cry from Ferreira’s design school days — she moved to the United States from Uruguay in her 20s to study textiles — where her focus was on creating commercial products. “I was being trained to make beautiful things that seduce people to buy the new and throw away the old,” she remembers. It didn’t sit well with her, causing such an existential crisis that she quit school for a year. Her professors eventually convinced her to finish her degree, but she’s never forgotten the feeling. “I guess this work now is my redemption,” she says, “creating things outside the realm of consumption, things for education and collaboration.
“Found objects are an extension of life,” she says. “They’re a reminder that nature is constantly working, through time, to wear things out. It makes you ask, Who’s really the artist here? Sometimes I feel like I’m stealing these objects, because I’m not making them, I’m just taking.”
She’s drawn to the creativity and surprise of working with whatever materials come her way. She likens it to her favorite literary genre, magical realism (her current read is Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84), because working with found objects is both grounded in the grit of everyday life and transporting, otherworldly. It takes the “yes, and…” mindset of an improv artist (or, perhaps, of a child) to work with found objects. She says, “When you find an object it’s like, OK, this is the world we’re in, here we go, let’s do this.”
For Ferreira, “let’s do this” means committing an abundance of time and energy to each piece. Every one of the stitches in her work — and there are many — is done by hand. “I don’t use machines, because I don’t want to remove the humanity from the pieces,” she says. “Using needle and thread is an ancestral practice, it’s a process people can understand: they understand stitches, they understand yarn. So when I make something with my hands, it’s a built-in connection to whoever is looking at it.”
That connection is palpable when you view Ferreira’s work, as with her recent solo exhibition, Precarious Habitats, at Meredith College. It takes active restraint not to touch the work, as the layers of detail invite you closer and closer. “You can’t help but imagine the actual hands of the artist working with the material,” says Sarah Rose Nordgren, co-founder of School for Living Futures, which collaborated with Ferreira on an exhibition called The Future of Water at Golden Belt Arts in Durham last May. “There’s care in every detail.”
But that slow, deliberate, process-driven approach fits Ferreira’s posture toward her work: that the art leads the way. “She’s open to what may become,” says Nordgren. “Coupled with her meticulousness, she has this curiosity and exploratory quality.” It’s the way of nature itself, after all: slowly changing course over decades or millennia, responding to whatever it encounters.
Ferreira’s bent toward collaboration is embodied in both her artwork and her role as an educator. She has led community maker events, in collaboration with the NC Museum of Art and Artspace, where she enlists strangers to work together. She’s drawn toward weaving together disparate things, whether it’s found objects sharing a space or people sharing a project. “In human society, borders divide us, but in nature, borders aren’t rigid, and nature thrives in those liminal spaces,” says Ferreira. She witnessed this firsthand growing up on the Uruguayan coast, where the border between land and sea pulses with life. She also witnessed it as an immigrant to the United States: she moved to Pennsylvania for her graduate program, then married and settled here, with all the navigation of culture and language that came with it.
“I don’t think of my projects as having borders — they only end because I have a deadline or limited space,” says Ferreira. “Otherwise, they would go on and on forever, one thing merging into the next like the natural world.”
This article originally appeared in the April 2025 issue of WALTER magazine.
