Overview
Mary Little makes sculptural forms from cloth. Working with unbleached canvas, she uses tailoring and upholstery techniques—cutting, sewing, shaping—to create quiet, curved reliefs that sit somewhere between painting, textile, and sculpture. Her forms are soft but structured, intimate but architectural. They invite close attention. They hold space.
Trained at London’s Royal College of Art and a former professor at California College of the Arts, Little’s career began in furniture design, where her pieces stood out for their sculptural clarity and emotional weight. In 2015, she made a deliberate shift away from function, turning her focus toward wall-based works and immersive installations. What stayed was her material: cloth. What deepened was her approach: minimalist, meditative, and rooted in repetition.
Though her work has affinities with textile-based abstraction, Little does not position herself as a fiber artist. She doesn’t weave, knit, or dye. Her practice is about precision, rhythm, and the body’s interaction with form. Influenced by the Irish landscape of her childhood and inspired by artists like Ellsworth Kelly, or Martin Puryear, her pieces reflect a lifelong interest in flow—how one line moves into another, how gravity touches cloth, how form makes space feel.
She describes her approach as whole body design—a way of working that prioritizes how a space feels as much as how it looks. Her installations are not just visual experiences; they are emotional environments that speak through material, rhythm, and scale.
Little’s works appear as soft topographies—undulating, curved forms that rise gently from the wall, stitched from unbleached canvas with the precision of a seasoned hand. They seem to hover between presence and absence, casting delicate shadows that shift with the light. At once spare and tactile, her reliefs evoke the subtle contours of landscape or the folds of the human body, without ever becoming representational. They are quiet, but never passive. Instead, they hold a kind of internal rhythm—structured yet supple, serene yet charged. The surfaces feel both deliberate and open, inviting not just the eye but the whole body into a slower, more contemplative way of seeing.
The process is both intuitive and controlled. She plans her forms carefully, then works with her hands until structure meets sensation. For Little, making is a kind of quiet rebellion against rationalism—particularly the rigid, male-dominated design language she first encountered as a student. “Art should go before rationality,” she says. And her work does just that.
Little’s works have been shown at the Craft Contemporary Museum and Craft in America Center in Los Angeles, and are held in public and private collections including the Victoria & Albert Museum, London; the Vitra Design Museum, Basel; and Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris. In 2019, she was awarded the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant.
Mary Little now lives and works in Los Angeles, where she continues to deepen a practice defined by precision, quiet experimentation, and a lifelong devotion to form.
By Carrie Scott