Crafting Interiors: A Conversation with Textile Artist Hannah Goff

Usually we think of artworks as accents to our living environment — something ‘to brighten the room’ or spark conversation. 

Stepping into artist Hannah Goff’s home flips this notion on its head; it seems her living space has been carefully curated in service of the wall works and ceramics she creates in her studio practice.

But speak to her even briefly and you realize it’s actually neither of these—in Goff’s world, there is no distinction, no line in the sand.

Jaunty juxtapositions present in her fabric-based wall works are echoed in furniture pairings, as is her joyful use of color and commitment to buying secondhand, thrifted, and vintage. Like a funhouse mirror there are still lifes within still lifes—a ceramic vase of her own making, alongside a heritage-craft style vessel holding a freshly cut flowering branch, in front of one of her fabric wall works depicting a vase with flowers.

Goff’s work has range—it’s both blissfully ‘easy’ to take in, enjoy from across the room, and also rewards careful and close consideration.

I had the pleasure of hearing more about her background and studio practice: what it’s like to make work that people live with every day, how she thinks about her materials and process, and what it means to have her work carried by a gallery like Visual Index.

Let’s dig in…

AS: Tell me a bit about where you’re from and how you got here.

HG: I was born here in Lexington, NC. I studied textiles at NC State, then went to SCAD—the Savannah location—for fashion design. After school I moved to New York and lived there for about ten years, working as a textile designer mainly for the apparel industry. Large corporate companies.

I liked the work, but New York is expensive, you felt like you were living on top of people, and I was there during COVID. At some point I just knew I needed more space—physically and mentally. The job was using up all my creative energy and I always knew I wanted to do more of my own work. So I made the decision to move back.

AS: What was your own work at that point? Had you always been making things?

HG: I always have. Right after school I made a lot of clothes—that’s what I’d studied—but I knew pretty early I wasn’t going to be a clothing designer doing my own line. Too much money, too complicated. For a while I made lights—plaster-based lamps—because I’d done some freelance work for a lighting designer and got really into the material. But I always wanted to do something more 2D. I just couldn’t quite put it together in my head yet.

I collect fabric—I’ve been collecting scraps and saving remnants for years. When I moved back to North Carolina I had these massive IKEA bags full of fabric I’d been hauling around for a decade. I started making these quilted flower designs out of all those scraps, and that’s really where the textile work began.

AS: So you came back to Lexington and things opened up creatively?

HG: Yeah. I bought a house—it’ll be two years in April, I had to renovate it first—and I’ve been working out of my second bedroom for the textiles. Before that I was staying with my parents for a bit, and my dad was taking ceramics classes at Sawtooth. He was making work in the basement, so I got really into going down there and making work, too. For like a year I made a ton of ceramics, just because I finally had the space and could be messy. That’s the thing about hand building—you can do it at home, and then I’d take it to Sawtooth to fire.

Creatively, I feel like my practice has exploded since I moved back. It’s been four years last month.

AS: Let’s talk about the textile pieces—how do you think of them? Are they quilts?

HG: Not exactly. It’s not actually layered the way a quilt is. It’s one layer of fabric pieces, but the shapes and the techniques are influenced by traditional quilt blocks—I really like that history and wanted to bring it into something new. I think of them more as fabric collages or fabric paintings.

I paint a lot of my fabric, actually—if the color isn’t quite what I want, I’ll paint over it, or dye it. And I do a lot of appliqué on top after I’ve stretched it over the canvas. You can see the little stitches, the threads that aren’t perfectly straight. I like that. I like that you can tell a person made it.

AS: That last part seems important; with your technical background you could make it much more precise.

HG: I could. But I don’t want to. I’m not a type-A brain, and I don’t want my work to look like it came from one. The imperfection is part of it—the handmade quality, the evidence of the process. That’s also why I like adding paint. It keeps it from looking too clean or manufactured.

AS: Walk me through the process from the beginning.

HG: I start with a sketch—just pencil, the general composition. Then I treat it almost like pattern making. I cut the shapes out of paper, add seam allowance for the pieces I’m going to sew together. If you don’t do that it won’t lie flat—it’ll curve. So there is that fashion knowledge underneath it, even if it’s not obvious in the final piece.

Then I start pulling fabric and putting things together, trying combinations. I can usually see the color in my head before I start, because I’ve been looking at this fabric for so long—I know what I have.

AS: Do you use the same fabrics across multiple pieces?

HG: Oh yes. I definitely get on kicks with certain ones. I have my favorites and I ration them, honestly—there’s only so much of any one piece. There’s this pair of cargo shorts I’ve been slowly cutting into for years. Really good greens and khakis, some great checkered prints. There’s just a tiny square of it left.

Right now I’m working on a large moon and a large star as separate pieces, and I had this idea a couple days ago to make smaller versions of the star in shirting fabric—I found a bunch of great men’s shirts at Goodwill recently. Keep the same pattern but make different versions, like a series. The motif repeats, but the fabric makes each one totally its own.

AS: And where does the ceramics work fit in relation to the textiles?

HG: It’s a different kind of brain. The ceramics are meditative—hand building, very physical and repetitive. The textiles are more like puzzle-solving; you’re constantly looking at them, thinking about what goes where. I’ve been focused on textiles lately because I have all these ideas I’m trying to get out. But I always feel that pull: okay, do I need to make more ceramics right now, or do I stay in this phase? They influence each other even when I’m only doing one. Flowers are the through-line.

The ceramics are pretty much all flower vases, all monotone. I’ve kept them simple color-wise; factoring in color would take the process to a whole new level that I’m not ready for. But they’re highly textured with surface tooling. So there’s warmth there, even without color.

AS: Using only secondhand materials in the textile works—is that a deliberate philosophy or did it just evolve?

HG: Both, I think. I’ve always bought vintage and secondhand—clothes, furniture, pretty much everything. It’s important to me. And coming from fashion, I saw firsthand [how wasteful the industry can be]. So there’s that awareness.

But with the textile work specifically, there’s also just something I love about going into Goodwill and discovering fabric. Rather than going to a fabric store where everything is there waiting for you, you’re on a treasure hunt. There’s a serendipity to finding the right thing. And I like the idea that these materials have had a previous life—someone wore this shirt, someone owned these shorts—and now they’re part of something new. All those layers of meaning coming together in one piece.

AS: Do you think about who’s going to live with the work when you’re making it?

HG: I think about rooms more than people. My Instagram is probably half interior designers—I follow a lot of them. Lots of English country cottage style. And I think that’s in the work: the quilting influence, the floral motifs, the heritage-craft feeling. My pieces probably wouldn’t work in a very minimal, clean black-and-white space. They belong somewhere with warmth and texture and some personality.

More than anything I want someone to feel happy looking at it. Or a little nostalgic—like it reminds them of a quilt their grandmother made. Something that just feels good to have around.

AS: How did you end up showing with Visual Index?

HG: Toni has an artist and maker application on the website, so I just reached out. I’d been back in North Carolina for a while and knew of the store on Trade Street. We met up and talked, and at some point we figured out we had a mutual friend—a jewelry designer I’d met in Raleigh who also sells her work there. It felt like a sign.

Toni is genuinely good at connecting people. She’s introduced me to a few other artists and makers since then. And the Art Crush Fridays she does—being part of a shop community where someone actually cares about getting your work in front of people—that matters. Especially living in Lexington, where I don’t have a lot of creative friends nearby. Visual Index has really been my main vehicle for getting the work out there.

AS: What are you working toward from here?

HG: I want to make bigger work. Mostly I’ve been working 36 inches and under because I’m in a home studio and scale is just harder to manage. But I keep feeling drawn toward larger pieces. I’m trying to alternate—make some small ones, which I love for their own reasons (they have this intimate, quilt-block quality, almost like something you’d crochet), and push toward bigger work too. And the star series I mentioned—I’m excited about that. Seeing how the same form reads completely differently depending on the fabric. There’s a lot to explore there.

Hannah Goff’s textile paintings and ceramic vessels are available at Visual Index here. You can follow her work on Instagram @hannah_goff_.