Statement
Bio
Allyce Wood is a visual artist and weaver based in Seattle, WA. She earned a BFA from Cornish College of the Arts and an MA in Medium and Material-Based Art from Kunshøgskolen i Oslo. She has received grants from 4Culture, Bildende Kunstneres Hjelpefond, Arts Council Norway, Artist Trust, and the Seattle Office of Arts & Cultural Affairs. Wood has participated in residencies in the USA and Scandinavia, including at the Peters Valley School of Craft, the Mary Olson Farm, the Praxis Fiber Workshop, and the Icelandic Textile Center. She has completed public projects with institutions such as Sound Transit, Seattle Restored, the City of Edmonds, and the City of Burien. Her work has been exhibited at Gallery 4Culture, Ortega y Gasset Projects, Common Area Maintenance, the Tacoma Art Museum, and many others. Look for her work in exhibitions at SOIL Artist Run Gallery, the Postmark Center for the Arts, SNAG, the Howard County Art Council and other institutions in 2026.
From 2015 - 2019, Allyce lived in Oslo, Norway. Here she had the opportunity to learn digital jacquard tapestry, a mechanized process based on pixel binary. Through this medium, she was able to merge her digital and physical life together into soft, familiar material. This experience led to factory-scale projects, working with fabricators and industrial machines, as well as hand-driven weaving projects in Iceland and Scandinavia.
Allyce considers public engagement a vital part of her practice and is always seeking ways to share and connect. The opportunity for community involvement, information sharing, and connection drives her to pursue exhibitions, public projects, and publications into which others may enter.
I explore the feminist history of craft and perception through the medium of weaving. Images of skies, portals, and ribbons recur in my work to depict fluidity, timelessness, and interconnection. Motifs of interlocking loops or layered coins reference the golden chain of knowledge each weaver adds to craft tradition through their determination and experimentation.
I use a range of weaving techniques, historic thread patterns, hand-dying, and inlay to create pieces that are imbued with coded repetition and watery imagery. I weave as women have throughout history, but with my artist's hand interrupting the rigid choreography of the process to build image and ephemera into the soft, pliable grid.
An avid collector of tools and threads, I alternate between using wooden self-powered floor-looms and computerized digital jacquard looms to create my pieces. I hand-draw thread patterns or create detailed digital drafts. Both allow for different levels of complexity, which I use to create artworks composed of alternating layers, shifting patterns, and purposeful colorways. Weaving is a process of building structure, and once the stable web is established, I control the matrix of fibers that create both the ground of the piece and my images. A length of shining cotton, trapped between a few select vertical warps, is formed into a glyph, a symbol. I am fascinated to see how yarns and patterns give way to language and icon.