Hadley Clark

Bio

With a background in fine art (University of Kansas, BFA 2001) as well as high-end fashion design and garment construction (The New School | Parsons Paris 2010), Kansas City-based Artist Hadley Clark maintains a fine art studio practice as well as an eponymous fashion label. Clark’s work includes handmade wearable coverings as well as wall and floor-based sculptural pieces, all of which draw from her belief in the importance of material reuse and natural dyeing processes. In addition to her independent studio work, Clark leads regular community-based workshops relating to her own studio interests on subjects as varied as sewing basics, methods of mending, 3-Dimensional construction, and collaging with reused textiles. She is currently a resident at Studios Inc.

artist statement

Part painter, part fashion designer, and part sculptor, I exist in the middle distance between art and fashion. Eschewing the commercial underpinnings of my training in the fashion industry–seasonal collections, exported labor, textile waste– I design and construct the pieces according to deadlines set by the work itself, and employing materials which are neither expedient nor easily reproducible, rotten silk linings, raw wool, clay, flowers and naturally dyed fibers, beeswax, salt, rice, hair, medical gauze. A transition to the use of found textile remnants and deadstock fabric as my primary construction materials began out of necessity in 2015. In the years following, I have continued to embrace the ethos of material reuse in the work and have found vitality there; the pieces became an ongoing archive of each other, neither new nor used, both art object and wearable garment, dead-come-alive.

Exhibitions