Vicki Caltabiano

Artist Statement

My work is a tactile conversation with landscape, heard through the whispers of cloth. I begin not with a blank canvas, but with forgotten textiles: discarded clothing, drapes, and domestic linens. In their textures and histories, I listen for echoes of open spaces: the rhythmic grain of desert buttes, the silent expanse of a night sky, the layered geology of time. By hand-stitching, beading, and assembling, I reconstruct the experience of place and advocate for its enduring presence.

Sustainability is the foundational thread. Each piece is a reclamation born of a belief that beauty blooms from the discarded. Antique beads and salvaged fabrics are my pigments and minerals. This process mirrors natural cycles where nothing is lost, but reshaped into the new. In an era of disposability, my work proposes a slower, more attentive way of seeing; where a placemat can hold the grandeur of a canyon and a scrap of silk can channel the flow of a distant shore.

Pieces like “Desert Day” and “Desert Night” are direct meditations on this theme. Transformed from ordinary objects, they become tactile portals to the Arizona landscape. Metallic threads catch the relentless sun, antique glass beads hold the cool of twilight, and hand-stitched petroglyphs connect human marks to the ancient stone. They are maps of happenings, where the past of the material meets the past of the land.

I create to participate in a vital dialogue: between material and maker, human hands and non-human landscapes. I invite you to touch, look closely, and listen. In the symphony of repurposed fabric, we might remember that our inner wellness is tied to the preservation of these open spaces, and that every stitch, like every step on a trail, is a commitment to their future.

Vicki Caltabiano