34.7998° N, 87.6773° W
ABOUT
Natalie Chanin is an artist, designer, author, and researcher whose work explores encounter through material, labor, memory, and place. For more than twenty-six years, her practice has been centered in Florence, Alabama, and The Shoals, where she grew up and where her most significant work has emerged.
After studying Environmental Design at North Carolina State University and working for more than a decade in styling, art direction, film, design, and writing, Chanin began The Self-Portrait Project in New York City in 2000. Living at the Hotel Chelsea, she made and wore a hand-sewn T-shirt each day, documenting the practice in automated photo booths and placing small photographic stickers throughout the city. The work led her home to Alabama, where she created Project Alabama, a collaborative body of hand-sewn garments developed alongside local women and documented in the film Stitch.
That encounter became the foundation for an ongoing investigation into making in place: the relationships among handwork and labor, material and memory, design and community, local economies and global systems. The work evolved through Alabama Chanin, The School of Making, writing, film, installation, oral history, and collaborative projects including The Cotton Project, which expanded Chanin’s inquiry from cloth into land, agriculture, and the systems surrounding cotton.
In 2019, she founded Project Threadways to deepen the material culture, oral history, archival, and public humanities work that had become inseparable from the artistic practice.
Her current project, Mapping Cotton: Land, Labor, and the Making of America, extends this decades-long inquiry into the landscape itself. Through textiles, photography, drawing, mapping, archival research, and installation, the work examines how people, materials, labor, and place shape one another.
What began with the body and cloth has become a way of reading the landscape.
After studying Environmental Design at North Carolina State University and working for more than a decade in styling, art direction, film, design, and writing, Chanin began The Self-Portrait Project in New York City in 2000. Living at the Hotel Chelsea, she made and wore a hand-sewn T-shirt each day, documenting the practice in automated photo booths and placing small photographic stickers throughout the city. The work led her home to Alabama, where she created Project Alabama, a collaborative body of hand-sewn garments developed alongside local women and documented in the film Stitch.
That encounter became the foundation for an ongoing investigation into making in place: the relationships among handwork and labor, material and memory, design and community, local economies and global systems. The work evolved through Alabama Chanin, The School of Making, writing, film, installation, oral history, and collaborative projects including The Cotton Project, which expanded Chanin’s inquiry from cloth into land, agriculture, and the systems surrounding cotton.
In 2019, she founded Project Threadways to deepen the material culture, oral history, archival, and public humanities work that had become inseparable from the artistic practice.
Her current project, Mapping Cotton: Land, Labor, and the Making of America, extends this decades-long inquiry into the landscape itself. Through textiles, photography, drawing, mapping, archival research, and installation, the work examines how people, materials, labor, and place shape one another.
What began with the body and cloth has become a way of reading the landscape.
Inquiries: thelab@projectthreadways.org
NATALIE CHANIN
Artist, designer, author, and researcher
Florence, Alabama
Artist, designer, author, and researcher
Florence, Alabama