Growing up in Dalton, Georgia—the “carpet capital of the world”—Trish Andersen never thought she would do anything with carpet, until a friend sent her a video of people making rugs with a tufting gun in India.
“It was like a Kismet moment,” she says. Trish packed up a truck with yarn, left her Brooklyn studio in the middle of a snowstorm, and drove to Savannah to pursue her textile fine art.
Trish experiments with flow states in “Ebb and Flow,” shown in Laney Contemporary in 2020. She now sells this piece as a digitally printed floor mat to make her work more accessible. Photo courtesy of Trish Andersen
“I felt a little batshit crazy,” she says.
Then, while riding down Interstate 95 in New Jersey, she got a call: Coca-Cola wanted to commission a Georgia artist for a large piece inspired by the company’s hometown.
“It felt like it was the universe saying, ‘Do it, take the risk,’” she says.
Trish Andersen makes hand-tufted fine art in her Georgia studio where she lives and works. Photo courtesy of Trish Andersen
Today Trish creates hand-tufted fine art in her studio where she lives and works. The space is filled with thousands of rolls of yarn organized by color and style. She jumps behind the fabric backing—essentially her canvas—with a variety of tufting guns to juxtapose textures and create flowing, three-dimensional layers.
Tufting has opened up stories about who Trish is and where she’s from. She used to hate using latex—a coated backing for her pieces—but then she learned her grandfather actually moved to Dalton as a latex salesman. “It’s this idea, can something be in your blood?”
This article originally appeared in Issue06 of Sixtysix with the headline “Trish Andersen: Textile Artist, Savannah, Georgia” Subscribe today.
