robin haller

soul tired

opening reception nov 6

5-8pm

Join us for an artist talk

Friday Nov 6

6:30pm

Soul Tired is a body of work that investigates materiality as grief and loss and is a reflection on the death of my mother in 2022. Majority of the handwoven pieces were created during my residencies at Praxis Fiber Workshop in February and May 2025 and at the Icelandic Textile Center in June 2025.

How do you use material/a substance to express a loss/an absence? How do you create something about nothing?

Fiber is the first thing that touches our bodies at birth and the last at death. There is a memory embedded in its weave. A dichotomy of materials represents both the tangible/physical and the psychological aspects associated with the experience of loss. There is loss of history, tradition, everyday routines, and the loss of everything that did not get to continue. The life of the dead is placed in the memory of the living. Memory can be fragmented, not complete. But a photograph is a whole memory caught in a single moment. The abstraction ofphotographic imagery through color and woven structure symbolizes the distorting effects of grief.

Grief is complex and layered. Grief is not linear; there is a spectrum of feelings that changes minute to minute; day to day. Hand-dyeing the materials and weaving on the TC2 hand-jacquard loom examines these relationships and conveys the passage of time through layers of complex imagery and pattern.

Grief Ebbs and Flows. It waves and shifts. It is time and pause. It screams and whispers. The process involved in the creation of these weavings is as significant as the finished work andrelates to the stages of grief as well as the catharsis of making. Creating this body of work did not relieve the pain but let it exist.

Bio

Robin Haller is an artist who specializes in digital design and weaving. She is Professor and Area Coordinator of the Textile Design Program at East Carolina University, School of Art and Design, in Greenville, NC, where she teaches weaving and feltmaking. She has received multiple grants to pursue her research in digital design and weaving, including the North Carolina Regional Artist Support Grant which assisted in her Artist in Residence at the Icelandic Textile Center in July 2022 and 2025 and the DWL Residency at Praxis Fiber Workshop in 2025. Robin’s artwork has been exhibited both nationally and internationally and recently has been the recipient of the Best in Show Award in both Handcrafted 2024 at the Maria V. Howard Arts Center, Rocky Mount, NC and Traveling the World exhibition at the InArt Gallery. Her work has been featured in Fiber Art Now, Surface Design Journal, Complex Weavers Journal, and HGA’s Shuttle Spindle and Dyepot. She currently resides between her hometown of Cleveland, OH and her place of employment in Greenville, NC.