Volume Gallery announces Flowers and Leaves, Christy Matson’s fifth solo exhibition with the gallery, opening September 17th, from 5-8PM. This new work draws on a recently discovered box of nineteenth-century family textiles, including lace, tatted fragments, and woven cloth passed through generations, to consider inherited histories of labor, resistance, and ornament.
“Flowers and Leaves begins with a Jacquard-woven tea cloth found in a box of family heirlooms, accompanied by a handwritten note from my grandmother tracing its passage through generations. The cloth dates to the 1830s or 40s and belonged to Sarah Doty Arnold, my fifth great-grandmother, a Quaker woman living in Macedon, New York, within a community shaped by abolitionist networks and early feminist organizing, where radical thought moved through households in letters, meetings, and domestic exchange.”
-Christy Matson
Many of Matson’s ancestors were Quakers active in abolitionist, pacifist and early feminist movements. Macedon, New York, was a vital hub of the Underground Railroad, and these inherited objects would have circulated within households during moments of profound social and political change.
Alongside that history, the handmade lace and cloth also carry a parallel meaning: the long tradition of women’s textile work as a site of knowledge, cultural production, and embodied practice, often left out of written record, but preserved in the objects that remain as evidence of their presence. This tension is a throughline in Matson’s practice, a sustained attention to the time, intelligence, and material thinking embedded in domestic textiles, forms of labor that have long gone unrecognized.
This box of tatted doilies, scraps of lace with delicate floral motifs, and cloth bearing geometric patterns was passed down through generations. Unlike bulkier heirlooms that would have been left behind during displacement, these pieces endured. Cloth could be folded into trunks, sewn into coat linings and passed between hands across migration, upheaval, and inheritance.
Drawing from details found in the remnants, Matson creates geometric but irregular oil pastel drawings that serve as a ground for collage. From the textile fragments, she isolates motifs of flowers and leaves, photographing and extracting these details before integrating them into the drawn compositions. These layered works function as studies for the woven images that follow. Using a Jacquard loom, she translates the collages into meticulously constructed woven paintings, drafting each image thread by thread through a series of weave structures. The resulting works are both intimate and monumental. Colorful blocks of pattern evoke both quilt-making and Modernist painting. Vertical stripes intersect lace-like interventions that depict scraps and studies, including overshot florals, suns, and sunflowers, drawn from larger, now-lost textiles.
The exhibition’s title comes from the writings of Ada Lovelace (1815–1852), mathematician and the world’s first computer programmer. In the same decade that the Jacquard-woven tea cloth that inspired this body of work was made, Ada Lovelace described the loom as a system that “weaves algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard-loom weaves flowers and leaves.” She used weaving to describe a new kind of machine logic, one that operates on symbols according to rules rather than only calculating quantities. This idea sits within a longer history of textile practices as systems for encoding and transmitting pattern, structure, and notation, most often through women’s labor.
The binary logic of weaving (warp and weft, thread above and below) runs through all of Matson’s work, a reminder that these ancient systems of making were always a form of code and a form of communication. Textiles encode structures that outlive their origin; patterns carried across time.
Flowers and Leaves will be on view through October 24, 2026.
Christy Matson lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. Recent solo exhibitions include Philip Martin Gallery, Rebecca Camacho Presents, The Milwaukee Art Museum, Cranbrook Art Museum, which featured a special commission for the US Art in Embassies Program, and the Long Beach Museum of Art. Her work has been in dozens of group exhibitions, including the Bakersfield Museum of Art, the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian Museum, the Craft and Folk Art Museum, Los Angeles, the Asheville Art Museum, and the Knoxville Museum of Art. Matson’s work is in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Cranbrook Art Museum, the Milwaukee Art Museum, and the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.