fabric reborn
meet the artist
tracy flanagan
Handmade textiles used in everyday life connect place to the human experience.
This precious connection to land and place is the basis for Tracy Flanagan's textile art, study, and research in ecoprinting and dyeing, stitching, and marking, with found, vintage, and discarded everyday objects and cloths. She is interested in women’s relationship to cloth, and the rebirth and transformations of textiles and fiber.
Raised in Connecticut, Tracy Flanagan grew up in a household of artists. Her mother, a recognized NY/CT artist, excelled in creating organic stone and metal sculpture, and mixed media wall collage. Her studio was a creative space for Tracy’s experimentation in color and design as well as conversations about creative inspiration.
From childhood, Tracy has been engrossed with repurposing and remodeling old and broken everyday objects. As a girl, she sewed and reworked garments into new designs. In her travels around the world she found the heart of culture, family, and place in conversations with female artisans and with their textiles.
about tracy
Tracy practiced Obstetrics and Gynecology in the Bay Area and recently retired, May 2020, to focus on textile art full time. She has exhibited with Surface Design Association and O'Hanlon Center for the Arts.
inspirations
Artistic influences include eucalyptus ecoprinter India Flint, ecoprinter and designer Irit Dulman, stitch markers Lisa Binkley and Lorie McCown, paper ecoprinter Elisabeth Culshaw, Slow Fiber's Yoshiko Wada, Maiwa's Charlotte Kwon, UK's tapestry artist Cass Holmes, and fiber sculptor Carole Beadle.