Brooklyn-based artist Natale Adgnot brings her hybrid of couture craftsmanship and sculptural storytelling to Silk Wrangler, a new solo exhibition at Established Gallery. Blending denim, silk, horsehair and thermoplastic, Adgnot reconstructs fragments of her past — from Texas stables to Paris ateliers — into visceral reflections on identity and material memory. Each piece unravels and rebuilds notions of heritage and belonging, transforming fabric into autobiography. We caught up with Natale to talk about reconstruction, intuition, and the fine line between couture and sculpture.
Your new exhibition Silk Wrangler reconstructs materials and identity through textiles and sculpture. What sparked this exploration of self through fabric and form?
For years, my work has been informed by my experiences growing up in America and how they affected my perceptions of other people and places as an American living abroad. But in my earlier series, I was focusing on the universal human tendencies toward bias, intolerance and cultural misunderstanding. The choice of mediums I used to explore them was mostly arbitrary. In this new series, I began asking myself why I chose those mediums and what impact new materials would have on my work.
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Your work blends Western denim and horsehair with Japanese kimono silk and thermoplastic — how do these materials reflect the different chapters of your life in Texas, Paris, and Japan?
Since 2018, I’ve used wood panels as a rigid support for mounting my handmade thermoplastic details perpendicular to the panel. In 2023, I started using wire and fabric in order to free those raised details from the singular plane of the panel and give the artworks multiple facets. That’s how I began bringing fabric into the mix.
This year, I chose to expand my visual vocabulary with more culturally charged materials that people could more readily recognize. For instance, I’ve left the tags visible on denim wear by the iconic cowboy brand Wrangler. These clothes, along with the horsehair and horse hoof shapes, represent my formative years in Texas where my mom was a horse trainer. I’m using kimono fabrics with traditional Japanese motifs embroidered onto or woven into them as a nod to the years I spent living in Tokyo. And the fact that I’m using fabric as a primary medium – especially cotton muslin – can be traced back to my years working in Paris couture. It’s a humble fabric that is used as a disposable prototyping material and, like the torn jeans, it contrasts with the luxury of the Japanese silk.
The recognizability of these materials is a counterbalance to the peculiar and unfamiliar quality of the thermoplastic that I’ve used for so long. In this series, it often takes the form of semicircles that masquerade as frosted glass or horse hooves covered with acrylic paint, sometimes with bumpy or crusty textures whose method of creation most observers can’t figure out. The blend of the familiar with the unrecognizable is a metaphor for my experiences as a fish out of water, first in my home state of Texas, and then as a foreigner living abroad. Even more importantly, this diverse library of materials represents the complexity of class, education, culture and personal experience that inform every person’s worldview.
You’ve spoken about leaving “holes” in your pieces — literal and metaphorical — and filling them with horsehair, tulle, and gold thread. What does that process represent emotionally for you?
The holes represent opportunities to me – opportunities to add something of my own to an object that is made from pieces that were predetermined for me. I make these sculptures out of sections of garments married with shapes from a saddlemaking pattern. Instead of following the pattern’s instructions, I’m inventing my own puzzles and solving them in unexpected ways, so the holes are the byproducts of this unconventional method. These constituent elements are like my lot in life: when and where I was born, to whom I was born, and all the attendant privileges and burdens of those givens. Putting them together in this way represents my agency in creating the life I have.
The title Silk Wrangler feels both playful and symbolic. How did you arrive at that name, and what does it reveal about the spirit of this exhibition?
It’s a nod to both the Japan and the Texas of my influences, with a reference to fabric, which became one of my mediums while living in France. I was looking for a name that would include all three of those places and juxtapose things that don’t usually go together because the story of my life so far hasn’t followed the “normal” playbook that people like me usually follow.
Your practice often moves between couture and sculpture. How has your background in Parisian fashion influenced the way you think about structure, precision, and the body in art?
I feel like I have a lot more freedom in the medium of fabric when I don’t have to consider the way the object will feel for a wearer. But I still feel the need to manipulate the fabric in ways that could be compared to tailoring. I use my knowledge of tailoring and sewing techniques to coax an essentially two-dimensional material into three dimensions, just like couturiers do. I’m aware of imperfections in my execution that I might have brushed off if I didn’t have that background. Sometimes I redo things until they are perfect and other times I have to accept the imperfections.
You use kintsugi-inspired “visible mending” techniques to heal and highlight imperfections. How do ideas of repair, resilience, and transformation inform your work?
Using gold thread instead of matching my thread to the fabrics is one way I’m embracing the ethos of wabi-sabi. The gold thread jumps out and says “look at me.” It’s another way of acknowledging that my work, like my life, is a combination of factors that I can and can’t control.
This exhibition coincides with your participation in New York Textile Month and multiple group shows. How do you see Silk Wrangler fitting into the larger conversation around contemporary fiber art right now?
I think my work speaks to the themes of self-determination (both individually and societally) and of the struggle to define oneself alongside or against the grain of one’s apparent identity. Also the role of the body in both. We are, after all, our bodies and those bodies are how we act upon and receive the influences of the world.
You’ve lived across cultures — Texas, France, Japan, and now New York. How have these places collectively shaped your understanding of identity, and how do you see that dialogue continuing in your future work?
The biggest takeaway I’ve had from this fortunate position of having experienced such diverse cultures is that all of us are prone to making judgments prematurely. My identity has evolved in the counterintuitive direction of feeling more acutely linked to an identity when physically detached from its origin. Like fish in a pond who don’t know what water is, each of us hold views of what is “normal” or “universal”. The subjectivity of those views only becomes apparent to us when we are amongst those who don’t share them. I’ve pulled that thread through the lenses of cognitive bias, and cultural differences. I’ll keep looking for ways to pull it even further.