A khaki bathing suit made Imperial Beach hometowner Denja Harris an artist, though she didn’t know it yet then.
As a middle schooler growing up in San Diego County, fiber artist Harris “had to wear uniforms,” she recalls. “I cut a pair of old Paul Frank uniform bottoms and made a swimsuit out of them. I think that’s where [I began] repurposing found materials. From there, I started embroidering. I started sewing handmade handbags when I was [around 20].”
You won’t find fashion, however, at Harris’ solo exhibition at the Oceanside Museum of Art (OMA), which opened June 28. “In 2018 or 2019, I discovered the tufting machine”—a handheld device used to make rugs—“and, during the pandemic, I was able to buy one, and I had lots of free time,” she says. “I started experimenting in a little corner of my living room. And here we are.”
Many of her large-scale works do, indeed, resemble rugs. Harris, however, refers to her process as “painting with yarn—or doodling.” She unfolds a few big pieces inside her small home studio in Lemon Grove, enveloping the space in a cozy riot of color. Draped near one wall is a cartoonishly oversized, spiked chain made of yellow yarn; a rippling orange lamp base sits in a corner. Harris calls these three-dimensional objets d’art “soft sculptures,” stuffing them with scrap materials. Through the studio’s doorway, a well-loved ottoman upholstered in Harris’ signature patchwork style is visible in the living room, where a nature documentary drones quietly on.
“It’s so visceral, the way she utilizes texture and yarn,” says Katie Dolgov, OMA’s director of exhibitions and collections. “I think she’s working through a lot of personal ideas in her work, and that ends up being very easy to connect with.” That resonant style has landed her exhibitions all over San Diego County and beyond, including solo shows and installations at local galleries like Sparks, Intervals Room, and Mortis Studio and spots in group exhibits at Ohio’s McDonough Museum of Art, North Park’s Art Produce, and OMA’s extension at The Seabird Resort in Oceanside.
The new OMA exhibition title, The Space Between: Texture Studies, reflects the rug-like works’ inconsistent surfaces. Portions of soft, high-pile yarn give way to smooth organic shapes. On one piece rendered mostly in soft and neutral shades—ivory, butter yellow, rose pink, a muted turquoise—the eye catches a thin scribble of cobalt.
“My process is really intuitive,” Harris says. “I choose a color palette that speaks to me—one that starts a conversation, where the colors interact with each other. Then I grab the yarn, I build compositions through line work, and I let each decision inform the next.” Sometimes she’ll tear out a portion and start again. “Sculptural, dimensional layering is really important,” she adds. “If it’s looking too flat or not activating my brain, then I don’t feel like it’s successful.”
Those shifts in hue and texture are also driven by pure necessity: Because Harris uses primarily deadstock and vintage yarn, she only has so much of each. The varying materials—synthetic and natural, wool and cotton and mohair—add to the visual interest of the work.
The OMA show arrives amid a larger resurgence of interest in fiber art. It’s possible that it’s a natural evolution of the way crafting exploded during the pandemic, creating talented hobbyists who, through exploration and self-instruction, became artists like Harris. Dolgov sees a more immediate motivation, though.
“I wonder if it’s inherently due to the nature of fabric,” she muses. “There is a softness there. Maybe we’re all feeling like we need to fall into something that’s comforting—not too hard, not too edgy, but still incredibly emotionally evocative. We still need and want to feel the feelings that we’re feeling in the world right now. We don’t need to run away from them, but we do need to be comforted in those feelings, and I feel like that’s what [Harris’] work is doing. It’s surrounding. It’s enveloping.”
And then there is fiber’s familiarity. Not everyone grew up with paintings or sculptures in their homes, but, from our early days, we’ve been wrapped in baby blankets, felt rugs under our feet once we started to walk. Suspended on gallery walls as arresting testaments to their maker’s wayfaring creative mind, the works are undeniable in their artness. Yet they look like home, too.
That’s part of Harris’ point. “I didn’t grow up in art spaces. I’m self-taught. I started doing this when I was 34 or 35, and this is my first time expressing myself through large-scale art. I just started calling myself an artist this year,” she says. “It’s important to me that people who come from a similar socioeconomic background as me or anyone that doesn’t see themselves as an artist can look at my work and see that it’s yarn and that’s familiar to them, and they feel inspired by it. [In my pieces,] I see softness and comfort and joyfulness, and those are all things that I want people to feel when they interact with my work.”
