Stuff Your Fears with Artist Jen Clay

Inspired by the themes in her installation “Soft Night, Watching,” artist Jen Clay is hosting a drop-in art-activity to create stuffie versions of your fears and anxieties. The Ackland Art Museum will provide supplies to decorate your own stuffie. Clay will be available to answer questions about how she uses soft textures and also encourages touch in her artworks to soothe dreads and worries about the world.

Participation is free and at your pace, but RSVPs are encouraged to guarantee a stuffie is available for your use. Please register at the Ackland’s event webpage (https://events.ackland.org/event/stuff-your-fears-with-artist-jen-clay/) for your free individual ticket. Otherwise, they will be available first come, first served.

About the Exhibition (https://ackland.org/exhibition/jen-clay-soft-night-watching/):

“Soft Night, Watching,” is an interactive quilted installation that invites viewers to experience an evening forest scene filled with uncanny forms and figures. Artist Jen Clay utilizes the tactile properties of her hand-dyed cotton, satin, velvet, and polyester minky fabric to create art that welcomes physical handling.

Clay uses the strangeness of an archetypal forest as a metaphor for the sense of unfamiliarity and disorientation that can accompany mental health experiences such as hallucinations. The artist derives her inspiration from the literary genres of horror and science fiction, especially the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century field of “weird fiction.” Soft Night, Watching especially reacts to tales like the 1927 short story “The Colour out of Space” by H.P. Lovecraft and the 1907 novella The Willows by Algernon Blackwood. Both tales feature landscapes that are visited by inexplicable phenomena that animate the local flora and terrify visitors.

Image Credit: Self-Portrait of Jen Clay, 2024