Craft Around the Country

Chaos Contemporary Craft Brings Fresh Takes on Familiar Materials to Ohio's Capital City

Stepping out from behind the scenes of the art business, owner and founder Margaret Wunderlich represents a wide swath of craft artists at her downtown Columbus gallery.

By Jon Spayde
September 11, 2026

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Photo by Al Laus

Margaret Wunderlich outside Chaos Contemporary Craft, her gallery on High Street in Columbus, Ohio.

Chaos Contemporary Craft, on High Street in downtown Columbus, Ohio, is an orderly, artfully arranged, white-walled space for artworks with a craft-focused sensibility.

So why the disorderly name?

“I wanted something a little bit edgy,” says founder-owner-director Margaret Wunderlich. “I wanted my branding to be different, to be mysterious and to stop people in their tracks. And I had a baby just a few months before the gallery opened. As a single mom with a newborn trying to get a business off the ground, I felt I was experiencing my very own creative chaos, like when artists are in a flow state and there’s a mess, but they’re creating something beautiful.”

Edginess, mystery, surprise, and beauty are on full display in the gallery, in artworks that push the boundaries of craft—while also celebrating craft’s focus on materials and technical mastery.

Photo by Al Laus

Wunderlich stands in front of works from Columbus quilter Chris Mercerhill's exhibition Thread Code.

Take Chaos’s current exhibition, Bradley Parsons: Treasure Trove. The Brooklyn-based artist’s riotous, intricate collages on paper are saturated with super-sweet imagery—flower bouquets, happy children, cakes, and pies, and pets—culled from print, seemingly meant to induce a sort of satirical sugar-shock.

Parsons has created three-dimensional “collages” as well, using clay and slip to fuse together found ceramic objects both elegant and kitschy, including figurines, dishware, shards, and more, mostly culled from trash heaps or picked up in thrift stores or from friends and family.

“And they’re all getting fired together, in the kiln, into one piece,” says Wunderlich. “Everywhere you look, there are different elements that you’ll recognize. A goose, the Virgin Mary, a little child angel. Little stories throughout the whole thing. They’re unlike anything I’ve ever seen. I didn’t think this was physically possible in ceramics, but he’s done it.”

Photo by Spencer Ruiz

Bradley Parsons, Pink Rabbit Blush (Courting a Crush), 2026, found and cast ceramic and glaze, 12 x 9 x 9 in.

“It's a very personal thing to start a business and to put your curatorial ideas out there for the venture to sink or swim, right?”

— Margaret Wunderlich

Among the gallery’s roster of 21 local, regional, and national artists, there’s also Teresa Audet, who works in wood and rattan. A furniture maker by trade, Audet has created minimalist basket forms, bud vases, and wall-mounted art for Chaos. “Her style is very airy and fun and happy, and she is able to say a lot with a minimal amount of material, which I like,” Wunderlich says.

Stacey Lee Webber repurposes money into jewelry—by carving away parts of coins so that they become delicate, intricate earrings, lapel pins, or necklace elements. “There’s a sense of wonder about all this imagery that’s coming from all these different coins from all over the world, and what Stacey is able to do with them,” says Wunderlich.

As for Wunderlich herself, the gallery to which she gave birth right after the birth of her child is the culmination of a 20-year engagement with art and the business of art.

With a BFA in photography from Brigham Young University, she was accepted by the MFA program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago—and turned it down. “I didn’t feel good about going into that much debt,” she says. She returned to her hometown of Columbus and took a job at one of the city’s most prominent showcases for art, Sherrie Riley Hawke’s Sherrie Gallerie, formerly located in the city’s arts-focused Short North district (and now selling online only).

Photo by Stacey Lee Webber

A detail shot of Stacey Lee Webber's Loose Change, hand-cut foreign and US coins, soldered brass nails, painted wood backing, wood and acrylic frame, 36 x 36 x 3 in.

“I started working there and seeing the back end of the art business,” says Wunderlich. “I worked events, then I was working there full time, and then I became the assistant director. I just fell in love with the gallery business, the business of art. It brought me a lot of joy to be working with collectors and artists. I liked doing the financials, the sales. Every day it was something different; some install work, and then some accounting, and then website development. It was just so much fun.” She followed up her gallery experience with five years in an auction house—an experience that turned her into a qualified (and certified) appraiser, a service she continues to offer.

Besides bringing delight, launching Chaos has introduced her, she says, to the challenging aspects of running a small business.

“There’s a lot of parallels to parenting in this,” she says. “I never expected it to be so hard. And I also never expected it to be so fulfilling—like having my personal artwork out here on display. It’s a very personal thing to start a business and to put your curatorial ideas out there for the venture to sink or swim, right?”

Photo courtesy of Chaos Contemporary Craft

Teresa Audet, Box with Loops, walnut, natural reed, 14 x 17.5 x 2 in.

Despite her two decades in the art world, she’s found herself constantly surprised by the demands of solo entrepreneurship. “Every day it seems like there’s something I didn’t realize I needed for the gallery,” she says. “You think that a gallery is just a plain white box that you put art in? That’s not true!”

One of the major challenges—and biggest advantages—for Chaos is its location. As the Short North, Columbus’s established gallery district, undergoes a transition away from its traditional focus on art-related businesses, local property developer Jeff Edwards has been working to turn the once-desolate area around the intersection of Gay and High streets, a mile or so south of the Short North, into a new arts district. This means plenty of new construction around the gallery.

“I tell people that our neighborhood is in the caterpillar phase,” Wunderlich says. “We’re not a butterfly yet. We are actively making this the best neighborhood in the city to live, eat, drink, and explore. We’ve got amazing public art, we’ve got beautiful local boutiques, and six galleries in one block. They’re doing street construction projects and new landscaping and spots for even more public art. And I’m looking forward to when visitors can navigate our neighborhood without any orange traffic barrels!”

Photo by Al Laus

Visitors look at Stacey Lee Webber's work at the opening of her exhibition at Chaos Contemporary Craft.

Jon Spayde is a writer and editor in Saint Paul, Minnesota. A former contributing editor to American Craft, he writes on art, psychology, education, and personal growth for a number of regional and national publications.

Learn more about Chaos Contemporary Craft online.

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