Jessie Coles: Distilled Affections
Jessie Coles, Another Rhizome, Found Fabric (leather, synthetic, wool)on wood 24 × 18 in About the Artist
Jessie Coles explores the emotional possibilities of color, texture, and form through salvaged textiles and geometric wooden structures. Her work transforms materials such as velvet, corduroy, silk, nylon, and leather into layered compositions that shift between painting, sculpture, and textile abstraction.
Coles’ textile-based practice developed from her background in observational painting. Following severe health issues related to painting materials, she began exploring fabric as an alternative means of working with color and composition. What began as a practical shift became an evolving artistic language centered on material, touch, and the expressive possibilities of color.
The Work
Coles constructs each piece by wrapping and arranging salvaged fabrics around wooden forms. Rather than beginning with a fixed composition, she allows the work to develop through an ongoing process of changing scraps, colors, shapes, and textures.
The distinct qualities of each material—its surface, weight, reflectivity, and response to light—become part of the composition. Fabric folds, overlaps, stretches, and wraps around the geometric forms, creating works that invite viewers to move between two-dimensional abstraction and sculptural space.
Distilled Affections
In Distilled Affections, Coles brings together works that consider color as both visual experience and emotional language. Salvaged materials become vehicles for exploring memory, sensation, and attachment, while the physical construction of each work emphasizes the relationship between color, shape, and material.
The exhibition invites viewers to look closely—to notice the differences in surface and texture, follow the movement of color, and experience how familiar materials can be transformed into something unexpected.
View Distilled Affections upstairs at PAAL Gallery through November 7, 2026.