We’re always searching for bits and pieces of magic to complement our collection–pieces that reflect our love for artful design, craftsmanship, and color. When Araks discovered the world of interdisciplinary artist Wilder Alison, she instantly fell in love. It was a serendipitous moment to find that Alison creates beach towels, aligning beautifully with our vision, and complementing our swimwear collection.

Created from 100% jacquard-woven cotton and produced at one of the last remaining terrycloth manufacturers in the USA, Alison’s towels are a work of art in themselves. Two limited edition towels are now available at our Soho store and online.

Can you tell us about your upbringing? What was your childhood like, and how was creativity and self-expression cultivated in your adolescence?

Although I am the only artist in my family, I grew up with a strong culture of making - my parents were very accommodating of my creative drives. My dad is a biomedical engineer, mad-scientist type, and it seems he has imparted to me a sort of "scientific method" that we each apply to our rather singular passions. My mom grew up in a Finnish community in rural Vermont and she and my grandmother passed down quilting and knitting traditions to me - these practices were strongly affiliated with values of thrift and reuse, and when I was a kid we spent a lot of time going to yard sales, where we would find craft supplies and materials, and sometimes old quilts. I also grew up close to the Shelburne Museum, a colonial living history museum in Vermont with a well-known quilt collection. We moved to the midwest when I was young, and it was very difficult for me to leave the mountains of the northeast. I somewhat attribute my artistic dedication in my childhood to having been confronted by what I felt was an absence of nature in my new environs. My making was self-directed and constructive, and I explored a wide range of materials as a teenager - making clothes, mosaic, stained glass, screen printing, dyeing, video, photography. I also sang for many years.

Can you share a little bit about your background as an artist.

I have worked with textiles since I was small, but my art education revolved more around sculpture, installation, printmaking, music/performance, and eventually  painting in graduate school. Most of my creative pursuits took place outside of school until college. I went to Bard, which is not officially an art school, but being there gave me the freedom to pursue making what I wanted to make - and I generally had to figure out the technical aspects of that on my own. I moved to Brooklyn after school and spent several years there finding my community and refining my practice while also leaving town to do artist residencies whenever possible.

We love that some of your work involves wool blankets, dyed in a palette of four to six colors and then cut and sewn into a final composition. What attracted you to the mediums of fabric and dye rather than paint and canvas?

It was fabric and dye that led me to making works stretched on canvas. I have been working with wool since my childhood, and I began making the paintings I now refer to as “slit subjects” out of wool starting in 2014. I found some army blankets at an antique store and I was working with food dyes. At the same time I had discovered a text by Monique Wittig called The Lesbian Body, in which the “I” - the “je” - in the original French version is cut by a slash. And in the English version the translator made the decision to italicize the “I” - such that the I itself functions as a slash cutting the text. Motivated by this intervention in Wittig’s “I,” I created a cutting structure that would allow me to make a wide range of compositions out of simple dye patterns I created on these blankets. This process has evolved and I am now making more elaborate compositions using this framework. I think of the textual origin of the work as part of its materiality. 

The way that I process and stretch the wool means that in the final forms of my paintings, the material resembles raw canvas from a distance, but there is a compelling dissonance in the texture of the dye patterns that leads you to understand that the material is not canvas - it is not really a painting at all. I have always been drawn to the way wool brilliantly absorbs dyes, and I find that my paintings have an almost backlit, screen-like quality because of this intense level of color saturation. Unlike paint, which is comprised of pigment - a particle - dye changes the chemical structure of the fabric: the color in my paintings goes all the way through the material rather than resting on the surface like paint and pigment would.