MSU Union Art Gallery | 49 Abbot Rd. East Lansing, room 230

October 19-December 9 | Reception: November 13, 4-6pm, artist talk at 5pm

My studio practice integrates fiber art, drawing, wearable objects, and large-scale installation as interconnected ways of exploring place, environment, and imagined worlds. Travel and the experience of encountering unfamiliar landscapes, cultures, architecture, plants, and ecosystems are central to my research. As I move through new places, I collect photographs, sketches, patterns, textures, colors, and observations that become an evolving visual archive. These experiences provide a foundation for imagining environments that exist somewhere between the familiar and the unknown. I am particularly interested in how the natural world might transform over time. Plants, anatomical structures, geological formations, marine life, and other biological systems become starting points for creating speculative organisms and landscapes. Rather than recreating environments I have encountered, I alter, combine, and exaggerate their characteristics to imagine what a future ecosystem or an ecosystem from another world – might look like.

About the Artist:

Kristen Duckworth is an American artist based in Jonesboro, Arkansas. She earned a BFA in Fashion Design from the University of North Texas and an MFA from Michigan State University with an emphasis in Drawing and Painting. Her interdisciplinary practice spans fiber, drawing, wearable
art, and installation, exploring the intersections of the natural world, the human body, material processes, and imagined environments.

Travel and field research are central to Duckworth’s creative practice. She has traveled extensively throughout the Middle East, Asia, Europe, Antarctica, and national parks across the United States, studying diverse landscapes, ecosystems, cultures, architecture, textiles, patterns, and natural forms. These experiences form an evolving visual and material archive that informs her work and her interest in imagining speculative, otherworldly environments.

Duckworth’s work has been exhibited extensively in galleries and museums throughout the United States and internationally, including exhibitions in Seoul, South Korea, Nova Scotia, Canada, and Australia. Her work reflects an ongoing engagement with place, material, and the ways natural and
constructed environments can influence our understanding of the world around us.

She has received multiple grants and awards supporting her creative research and exhibitions, and her work has been featured in publications including Fiber Art Now. Through her studio practice, Duckworth continues to investigate relationships between material, place, biological form, and
changing ecosystems, drawing upon direct observation, travel-based research, and imagined possibilities for environments yet to exist.