Alice Wiese is a textile artist based in Marin County, California. Wiese draws inspiration from architectural patterns such as wrought iron fences, tiles, and brick, and antique embroidery books, but always works the organic or unexpected into these ordered paths. Her work is inspired by themes of grief, loss, change, and the process of rebuilding oneself.
Her monochromatic and highly detailed work is meditative as a practice for Wiese. Stitch after stitch, each piece can take hundreds of hours. As a viewer, the experience is similarly calming. One’s eye can follow the currents of order and repetition, and can find intrigue in the ways Wiese disrupts and manipulates pattern in each work. Using only white thread, she experiments with the ways in which how the light reacts to her thread depending on the direction of the stitches, creating different levels of dimension and a changing viewing experience. In the active surface of each of her works, the viewer experiences undulating dimension and a compelling and ever-present tension between order and chaos.
Alice Wiese received a BFA in Textiles from California College of the Arts in Oakland, CA in 2012. In 2018 she received a scholarship to show her work at West Coast Craft and completed a residency at Penland School of Craft in the Blue Ridge mountains of North Carolina. Wiese has also has traveled to Australia and Japan to learn about different textile techniques, fabrics, and fibers. Wiese’s work has been exhibited locally and internationally, including the 2024 Inaugural Northern California Open at MarinMOCA and the 2023 de Young Open Juried Exhibition. She was featured in San Francisco Design Week in 20218. In 2019, Wiese co-curated a show at Heron Arts in San Francisco and exhibited at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in Tokyo.