Makers

The Queue: Liam Lee

Liam Lee’s carefully cultivated tapestries and furniture practically burst with life. In The Queue, the New York City–based textile artist shares about taking inspiration from the natural world, the olfactory perils of acid dyes, and cracking the New York design scene.

By Shivaun Watchorn
February 12, 2025

Digital Only

The Queue

Free To Read

Photo courtesy of Carvalho Park Gallery

Liam Lee's OOO oxidation, 2021, mohair and merino wool, 91 x 97 in.

Liam Lee’s hypnotic textile creations run the gamut from fuzzy wool-covered chairs resembling vegetables to tapestries that look like an abstracted version of Richard Scarry’s Busytown.

Lee was born and raised in New York City and grew up in an apartment that housed his painter father’s studio. He was working for Mary Howard, a renowned set and production designer in the fashion industry, when he started experimenting with wool fiber in his own apartment. Taking inspiration from nature and working “from the microscopic to the topographic,” Lee’s work probes the relationship between the interior and the exterior, the natural and the manmade. He was a finalist for the prestigious Loewe Craft Prize in 2023. Paola Singer wrote about Lee, Ariana Heinzman, and Sasha Koozel Reibstein, three artists whose work bursts with vitality, color, and texture, in “Vivacious” in the Spring 2025 issue of American Craft, which also features Lee’s work on the cover. Become a member now to receive the new issue in your mailbox.

How do you describe your work or practice in 50 words or less?

My practice centers on domestic objects and draws inspiration from forms in the natural world that range in scale from the microscopic to the topographic. I work with a variety of materials including textiles, ceramics, wire, and merino wool. Rooted in craft techniques, my work is concerned with the dissolution of the boundary between interior and exterior space and between manmade objects and the natural environment.

Photo courtesy of the artist

Liam Lee.

Your hypnotic tapestry It’s Not Easy appears on the cover of the Spring 2025 issue of American Craft. What does the title of this piece refer to?

The Kermit the Frog song “It’s Not Easy Being Green.” I’ve always had a soft spot for this song, which is on the one hand about self-acceptance and on the other hand a way of viewing how that which is small, commonplace, or overlooked can also be “big like an ocean, important like a mountain, and tall like a tree.” How can I take a mossy, muddy forest floor—something you might walk all over—and properly acknowledge it as something that is expansive, breathing?

What are your favorite tools for working with textiles, and why?

I’m not sure if this is my favorite tool, but certainly my most-used tools are felting needles, which I use in my fiber work. What is fascinating about needle felting is that it is an additive process that enables me to achieve variations in density of the felted wool within the same surface, and allows for a high level of precision and control when sculpting a form. The wool—which we think of as being a really soft, malleable material—can also be rigid and structural.

Tell us about sourcing materials for your works. Where do you procure wool and mohair? What about the dyes?

The mohair panels I work with are woven by two different mills—one in Spain and the other in Ireland—while I source merino wool from the US. As for the dyes, I use acid dyes from Jacquard mixed with citric acid, which provides consistent and vibrant color and can be mixed relatively easily (with some trial and error) to get a desired color. You can also mix the acid dyes with white vinegar instead of citric acid, but the wet-wool-and-vinegar smell is pretty brutal.

Photo courtesy of Carvalho Park Gallery

Liam Lee's It's Not Easy, 2024, mohair and merino wool, 88.75 x 90.75 in.

“How can I take a mossy, muddy forest floor—something you might walk all over—and properly acknowledge it as something that is expansive, breathing?”

— Liam Lee

Photo courtesy of Carvalho Park Gallery

Fata Morgana, 2024, mohair and merino wool, 63 x 51 in.
Photo courtesy of Carvalho Park Gallery

Snowdrift, 2024, mohair and merino wool, 63 x 51 in.
Photo courtesy of Carvalho Park Gallery

O rivulet, O wanderer, 2021, mohair and merino wool, 91 x 97 in.

As a native New Yorker working in your hometown, how do you find and cultivate an artistic/craft community?

I think the way I’ve met people in the design and craft community has been fairly organic: either through following their work on social media or by going to openings, talks, et cetera. I don’t have a degree from an art or design school, so I didn’t have a ready-made group of peers to navigate the New York design scene. I studied English in college and it actually took a long time to feel brave enough to start making art again, which is something I did constantly as a kid and, I have realized, is central to the way I make sense of the world. Because it’s much smaller, the New York design scene feels in a lot of ways much more accessible and much less amorphous and intimidating than the art world, but of course there are a lot of ways these spaces overlap.

To us, your tapestries look like aerial shots of the forest floor or a biology microscope slide. Tell us about specific landscapes and tableaux that inspire you.

My tapestries play with the tradition of textiles—more specifically, Persian carpets—as representations of the space of the garden (gardens themselves being microcosms of a well-ordered universe, like in Xenophon’s description of the Garden of Cyrus in Oeconomicus).

As for more specific landscapes, I went to Kyoto for the first time in 2019 and was really fascinated by garden design there, particularly around many of the temples, where moss is cultivated carefully to create these expansive carpets that at first glance appear fairly uniform but, upon closer inspection, have quite a bit of variation. I was drawn to the way the moss would grow over objects to completely engulf stones and branches, and you had a sense of the volumes underneath as well as the amount of time that it must have taken to reach that point. I was also interested in the way that these gardens required constant human intervention to achieve scenes that appeared effortless or rugged but actually involved a high level of artifice. Framed by the architecture of the buildings, they are meant to be viewed and traversed primarily through mental projection, rather than by a physical journey through the landscape. In my tapestries, I try to achieve a similar quality that allows viewers to mentally enter into and through them. In my sculptural work, I similarly aim, through a lot of artifice and time, at creating work that feels organic, as if you’re simply encountering it at a given moment in its growth trajectory.

Photo courtesy of the artist

Liam Lee felted merino wool onto a poplar plywood chair to create his cactus-like Chair 16, 2023, 44 x 31 x 24 in.

If you were going to design a dream room in your house, which craftspeople’s work would you include?

I would probably have to include a ceramic mural by Sunshine Thacker, a cabinet by Christopher Kurtz, and a crazy glass menagerie tower by Nienke Sikkema and Bernard Heesen.

Which craft artists, exhibitions, or projects do you think the world should know about, and why?

An exhibition that I am particularly proud to be participating in alongside the artist Tommy Mishima is the Smithsonian Design Triennial at the Cooper Hewitt, which runs through August 10.

In terms of artists, there are many, but to name a few: Paris-based artist Laurent Nicolas, who had a fantastic solo show at Dobrinka Salzman Gallery this winter; Brooklyn-based sculptor Nifemi Ogunro; ceramist Miwa Neishi; Paris-based designer Etienne Marc, who makes fantastical furniture and lighting out of metal and ceramic; Netherlands-based designers Kurina Sohn, Anna Aagaard Jensen, and Sho Ota; Brooklyn-based silversmith Heath Wagoner; and the metal-weavers Sean Dougall and Andrew Paulson.

Photo courtesy of the artist

Chair 11, merino wool, poplar plywood, 24.0 x 21 x 42 in.

Shivaun Watchorn is the associate editor of American Craft.

See more of Liam's work on his website and on Instagram.

Website Instagram

This article was made possible with support from the Windgate Foundation.

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