kelsey merreck wagner, arachne, 2026. Photo credit: Emma Wannie.
Interview by Adi Berardini
kelsey merreck wagner is a textile artist, environmental activist, and visual anthropologist based in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. She focuses on textiles that reuse and reinvent abandoned materials such as plastic bags, used clothing, and even remains of celebrations, like tinsel. With an eco-feminist focus, wagner is interested in exploring life cycles and human-environment relationships, especially our connections to animals, the impacts of climate change, and the influx of trash in local ecosystems. She received her PhD from Michigan State University, where she studied environmental activism and community-engaged art in Thailand.
Recently, wagner took part in Olivia Rodrigo’s Daisy Chain Fields Festival in Great Park, Irvine, California, which raised 20 million dollars for 10 non-profits that support women and girls, such as Planned Parenthood, Baby2Baby, Black Mamas Matter Alliance, and the Centre for Reproductive Rights. The festival was founded with the principle that “joy, community, and creativity can create meaningful change.” Daisy Chain Fields featured a stacked lineup of musical artists including Olivia Rodrigo herself, Chappell Roan, Doechii, Garbage, Bikini Kill, and more. Notably, the festival also displayed installations by an incredible caliber of visual artists, such as the Guerrilla Girls, Jenny Holzer, Rachel Hayes, and Yoko Ono. The historic event truly demonstrated that together women could make a meaningful change, and as Rodrigo describes, “Daisies are wild and beautiful. As a chain, they are strong and unbreakable.”
In the following discussion, wagner discusses her art practice and inspirations, and the once-in-a-lifetime experience of taking part in Olivia Rodrigo’s all-women music festival, largely inspired by Sarah McLachlan’s Lilith Fair, creating ripples of change through the power of music, art, and togetherness in an increasingly divided society.
kelsey merreck wagner, arachne, 2026. Photo credit: Emma Wannie.
Can you explain more about your artistic process of weaving abandoned mediums such as plastic bags and recycled materials to address the complex web of ecology that we live in?
I have been working in weaving and textiles since about 2017, and my work has always been about environmental issues. During my undergrad, I was trained in printmaking and ceramics and used my work to talk about endangered species and animals, specifically human-elephant relationships, and had some success with it. I also wanted to try new things, and my undergrad didn’t have a Fibres program, so it took me a while to get into it. When I lived in Boone, North Carolina, I went to a community fair festival, and there was the Blue Ridge Fiber Guild there that had a tent, and some of the women were out there with a spinning wheel and a small loom and told me they had free classes at the community center. I was super excited, got hooked on weaving right away, and definitely loved being around all these women who were mostly 60, 70, 80 years old and had been working in fibre for a long time. It was such a cool environment to be welcomed into, and have community, and sisterhood, and grandmas that wanted to teach me things.
I got hooked on weaving, but at first I didn’t really see the environmental connection to my work. I’ve always really wanted to focus on destruction, especially by humans. Then, during COVID, I started running out of yarn, and all the good local yarn supply stores were closed. Then I got the idea to start using plarn, which is just a combo of the words plastic and yarn, from people who crochet mats and things for unhoused folks. I loved that history, and how I could incorporate that into weaving and transform my work to talk about pollution and the effects it has on environments and humans, branching off and different from my other work. I started collecting plastic bags and slowly incorporating them into my weavings. I just take a plastic bag and scissors and cut it into a really long strip, essentially, and that becomes my yarn. I started doing weavings that were half and half and slowly started doing some medium-sized ones and [showing those in] exhibits.
There’s a gallery there called Warin Lab Contemporary, and they only do exhibits about environmental issues. They offered me a solo, and I really wanted to make something different and not just have the wall pieces that I’d been doing, and to get a little bit more experimental. I decided I would make massive weavings that were going to be suspended from the ceiling in the colors of red, orange, and yellow. They were hung in a loop to look like heat maps and connected to climate change. However, because they were so big, I had to get way more than plastic bags because I don’t dye any of my materials. It’s just whatever colors and things that they come in. Because those weavings for that exhibit were so large-scale, I started to also collect clothing and wires and old fabric or housewares, tinsel and Christmas garland and decorations. That really expanded my reach in terms of materials I was sourcing. I lead lots of different environmental cleanups and do a lot of community engagement artwork with that.
I also have partnerships with some different organizations. I work with Goodwill Industries and get their reject materials, and I work with a tinsel company in LA called Corrie in Color that gives me huge, massive mounds of tinsel. All of that has been incorporated in my work over the years, and just thinking about kind of confronting people with how much waste we have. It’s like this record of capitalism and this endless consumerism. That decision to use plastic and recycled materials was me referencing the idea that weaving’s been around for like 500 to 100,000 years. It’s a very place-based activity. It’s very much a women’s activity of raising animals for wool or growing cotton. It’s very place-based and social or relationship-based.
As a nod to that, I was [thinking], “Okay, so as a Western woman in America, I don’t have family members with a textile history. What does my practice say about my connection to place?” I was thinking a lot about the major impact Americans have with everything we buy and our landscapes being covered in trash. That’s how it got started, and it was cool to focus on our impact on the environment in a way that makes people really think about it. And especially the fact that I source my materials from community members and friends and family and local businesses. It’s always an exchange, you know, of conversation being like, “Okay, well, why do you have all these plastic bags?” It becomes this way where we can talk about how big a problem it is.
It makes me excited to hear about your process. I think it’s interesting: the connection to the COVID-19 pandemic and having a lack of your typical materials, but then getting creative in that sense too. When you have limitations, that can affect creativity as well. I am working on a painting that I stretched canvas over a wooden drawer from Goodwill to repurpose it as a panel and save money. But it also has more interesting material value since it has a past life.
Yeah, exactly. It totally forced me to think of something new and being able to reuse it. And what you’re saying reminds me also of when I’m collecting all these materials from people and organizations. I always think about the memories that are embedded in them. People giving me their maternity jeans when they were pregnant, or all these different kinds of little things that tell stories. And the tinsel company that I work with, I love thinking about how they do these gorgeous art installation tinsel backdrops, and how these were there for birthdays and anniversary parties. All these things where I’m like, “Okay, I’m now collecting all of the good that was once in these and giving it a new life.” And of course, getting stuff from Goodwill, having free or cheap art supplies is a big deal as an artist.
kelsey merreck wagner, arachne, 2026. Photo credit: Emily Milton.
You recently took part in Olivia Rodrigo’s all-women charity festival, Daisy Chain Fields, which is so amazing. I was wondering, how did you get involved with the festival? Did she call you directly?
No, she was working with a production company called C3 Presents. They were producing the event, and they reached out to me via email and basically said, “There’s going to be a women’s empowerment festival in California that we’re interested in having your work for, and we can’t tell you more about it until you sign an NDA.” And so I was kind of like, “Okay, what is happening?” And then they sent the NDA, and it said that it was an event by Olivia Rodrigo. I worked really closely with C3 Presents to go through the design proposal. But Olivia and her team had found my work on Instagram and were interested in doing something. It was fun to go back and forth about the space and what they were interested in and make that happen. Getting to hear that Olivia Rodrigo had seen my work was crazy. I did that and sort of settled on the design and the exact location and then moved forward from there. I got to meet her after the concert, which was super cool, and hear from her about how excited she was and that she’s pulled something off so amazing at 23 years old.
That’s amazing. I’m a fan of Olivia Rodrigo’s music too.
It’s really good. It’s kind of pop-punk. And then, seeing all the different musicians she had for the festival, it was cool to see that she draws from all these different inspirations.
They also didn’t announce who the other artists were going to be until a week before we were all going to be there to install, so I had no idea. I knew that it was going to be all women artists. But I had no idea who they were. And then they announced it, and it was Jenny Holzer, and the Guerrilla Girls, Yoko Ono, and then Rachel Hayes, who’s a really cool fibre artist I’ve followed for a while. That was such a crazy thing to me, thinking about how when I was 20 years old and in art history classes, like, learning about those artists, I would’ve never thought that one day I would be exhibiting on the same stage with them.
You’re in good company!
I cried in my studio, being like, “How is this happening that these people that I’ve admired for so long, that I’ve now gotten to a point where I get to be around their work?”
I was wondering if you could discuss more about your featured immersive installation, arachne, as part of the Dasiy Chain Fields Festival, featuring eight colorful weavings hung within the trees. How was the installation set up for the event?
At my studio, I have eight different looms, and I worked to get all of those weavings done using recycled materials. They were all about 25 feet long. I did them in colours of the rainbow, which is something I also try to do with my projects as a little nod to things that are now being banned in America. Then I chose the name arachne, which is from Greek mythology about a weaver who challenged Athena. Athena heard of her weaving and her bragging about how much better she was at weaving than the gods. Then they had a weaving contest, and Arachne’s weaving was much better than Athena’s and displayed the gods doing embarrassing things in compromising positions. And Athena lost and then turned her into a spider so that she couldn’t do anything anymore. I really liked that narrative in terms of thinking about what happens when women call people out or call corporations or the government out. That you can be right and you can do better, and you’re still likely going to be silenced and not listened to.
Also, thinking about my connection to the environment and the fact that they were going to be suspended from trees made me think about women and how we’re always bringing people together, and also so much of our relationships being grounded in the environment and how nature shapes us. That was sort of the backstory or inspiration, especially once I found out that we were going to hang them from the trees. I got there and had two awesome helpers from C3 Presents who helped me get them in the trees. We had super tall ladders and laid out all the weavings on the ground, and then just decided which trees we wanted to have them hanging from, what colours we wanted to have interacting, and how they would be placed. It went really smoothly.
kelsey merreck wagner, arachne, 2026 (from installation day). Photo credit: Emily Milton.
That’s such a fascinating story about the Greek mythology weaving competition. That’s one thing that really stood out about Daisy Chain Fields is the idea of women coming together to empower each other, because that’s not always the case. Sometimes women have that competition over community mentality. That seems like one of the magical things about the festival—We can achieve more by standing together.
Do you have a memorable experience from the event that you’d like to discuss?
Part of the most memorable thing is that attendees were probably 90% women or feminine-presenting, and then the rest were gays, theys, and girl dads who were there. It felt so safe and chill and just peaceful. Everyone was just nice and complimenting each other. You weren’t worried about men harassing you or being unsafe.
One of the memorable things I would say is seeing the Guerrilla Girls installation. They had this little pop-up where it had lots of their reproductions of the posters, some of their most famous things, like the “Do women have to be naked to get into the MET Museum?” They’re tracking how many museums show women or give retrospectives to women, and then at the same time, these things that they were critiquing were now in a space where all of the artists were women, all of the musicians were women, all of the food and drink vendors were women-owned businesses, all of the crafts and things you could buy were all women-owned. It was crazy to think of the things that they were critiquing, and of course still are in other settings. But ironic that it was in a space where it was totally flipped.
Another thing that I thought was interesting is they had such a stacked lineup of amazing musicians, and there were 45,000 attendees. I have to assume a fair amount of those people were there because they wanted to see Chappell Roan or Olivia Rodrigo, and maybe some wouldn’t consider themselves feminists or are the kind of people that would say, “Oh, I’m not political,” or, “I don’t get involved.” But I felt like the energy and having the non-profits there and just all the girl power vibes, surely some of those people that only came for the music left a little bit radicalized. We saw what happens when we have solidarity and alliances, and that solidarity doesn’t just mean that you care about the people that look like you, or you care about people that are going through the same problems as you. It created a broadening of our understanding of what feminism needs to be, having more intersectionality. I felt like that was something that I really hope had a big effect on people that came and saw all the cool things.
There were 10 different charities that the money went to, and it was all different organizations that are supporting women and girls and all kinds of things, from healthcare to helping moms to justice with labour. They had all the charities do the introduction for the different artists. They got to come up on stage, talk about what their organization does, and then introduce the artist that came on.
There were two stages, and the venue was massive. I was in the middle of them at this point. I wasn’t super close to the stage; they were getting ready for the next musician. And one of my favorites was when Planned Parenthood came on and did their introduction, and you could hear cheers everywhere. I was so far away from that stage, and people were just screaming. Here’s the organization that so many of us in America have relied on for all kinds of healthcare, not just abortion care, but being there for women when they need affordable ways to be healthy and safe. And knowing that that’s so under threat in America and then seeing the joy or support of hearing everyone cheer for that as if they were cheering for the musician was super cool.
It really felt like the past, present, and future all at once. And there’s a saying I really like: “Revolutions take lifetimes.” And I think that’s so true that we’re always working to make things better, especially for the next generations. But it was so cool to have all of these different generations that have worked so hard to advocate for us. Olivia, who’s 23 years old, put this festival together and raised $10 million, and she brought this together with her amazing team. Then Melinda French Gates came out on the stage and announced that she was doing another $10 million and doubling it.
Then, Olivia had Sarah McLachlan come on stage, who was the founder of Lilith Fair, which this festival was modeled after, the first female music fair. And so it was like such a callback to other generations. And then Sarah McLachlan and her did a couple of songs together. The second one they did was “Angel,” and Sarah McLachlan, and she said that the song was in honour of Dolly Parton, who was a huge philanthropist and advocated for communities and for women. It was all these steps. And then Stevie Nicks came on and was like, “Hey, we’re passing the torch.” And it was so cool to see everyone honouring each other.
This is so great. I feel like I’m living secondhand.
Yay! It was so cool. Then the Guerrilla Girls-I was so inspired by them as a young art student and how much they’ve advocated for the inclusion of women and later non-binary people, like all these voices that haven’t historically been in museums. It was just so cool to be like, “We are moving it forward. There are always people in past generations, women and allies, that have made it better for us, and now it’s our turn to pass that on.” That was such a cool, empowering kind of thing to see. That there is change, and even though everything seems so shitty right now, you’ve got to keep doing the work and making it better.
Another thing was that it reminded me of the power that art has to transform culture. Whether it’s music, performance, literature, or visual art, what we do and what we make impacts the way that non-artistic humans experience the world. Art can both show us what things are and talk about difficult issues, but it can also be used to talk about a future where things are different. That transformative thing where you have all of these creative women coming to the festival to put on this magical experience was like, “Okay, so art is doing something. It is what we need to change the needle.” It was super memorable to have gotten to play a small role in that.
kelsey merreck wagner. arachne, 2026. Photo credit: Alive Coverage.
Did you have a favorite musical artist from the lineup that stood out to you?
I really like Rachel Chinouriri, and she is from the UK. I was introduced to her music by finding out about this festival. Getting to see her live after learning her songs recently was killer. She just had an amazing stage presence and so much joy.
She did an unreleased song and stuff from her new album that’s coming out, and so it just felt like this intimate sharing. That one was my favorite.
Seeing The Breeders was also really cool. Knowing again, all these generations that have been feminist and brought that to music coming together was special. And then definitely Olivia’s performance, and having Sarah McLachlan, and then Alanis Morissette came on as a surprise, and then closed out with Stevie Nicks doing “Landslide.” It was just awesome. I cried so many times.
Then Olivia’s band is all women and non-binary musicians, and they were all wearing T-shirts of women-led bands or their favourite women performers. And I thought that was just such a cool nod. That again, it’s these histories of women that have made it possible for us, and now we’re on the stage, or we’re exhibiting. It was cool to think about that phrase, “You have to see it to be it.” And being like, “Okay, it’s there,” was super cool, and getting introduced to new music that I didn’t know before, and younger musicians.
Your work addresses themes of community engagement and environmental art and activism. Can you explain a bit more about your research and how craft and textiles can also connect to social change?
My PhD research at Michigan State is focused on Thailand with environmental artist-activists, and that led to some different opportunities. During my PhD, and also a bit during my Master’s, I was thinking about how communities can be part of artwork, in terms of making it and thinking about it, and that it doesn’t have to be this separate thing between the artist and the art consumer. Over time, a lot of my work has switched into more of a public art practice, where I do show in galleries and museums, but I really prioritize public art that is free for anyone to enjoy and not just something that you have to be in a museum for. It can just be something that you’re walking by on the way to work, and that it’s accessible and can bring joy to anyone. Over time, prioritizing that, I’ve started to do projects where I have communities help make the work that’s going to be exhibited. In the past, I was doing complementary or supplementary activities with weaving, but the artwork would be my own. And now I’ve been starting a series of public art projects in DC and North Carolina.
For my dissertation research, part of it was with environmental art and activists, so artivism. In Thailand, you are not allowed to critique the government or the monarchy or even corporations that they like. As a result, art has become a powerful way to talk about issues but also to have some plausible deniability or messages that are encoded. That’s really inspiring to me, thinking about, again, how art can transform things. In another kind of smaller side project within my dissertation for one of my chapters, I was working with a women’s weaving cooperative along the Mekong River in Thailand. We were focusing on the ways that they tell stories through weaving, and how it talks about or connects to their relationship with the environment in ways that weaving is always denigrated as women’s work, or it’s a craft or a hobby or something, without understanding what an economic impact it is. Additionally, what it means to have these stories or histories embedded within the fabric that women make, particularly amongst Indigenous textiles and symbols that indicate a particular location or context.
Thinking about textiles as something very political and then also the ways that textiles have been talked about as being craft, or not seen as the same as other mediums, I think is really complicated and troubling. Anni Albers is one of my favorite weavers, who was at the Bauhaus and then taught at Black Mountain College. She was just this absolutely amazing powerhouse weaver who broke the boundaries between art and craft. And yet still, when I go to exhibits at sometimes major museums or even books that have come out recently, she’s always described as Josef Albers’ wife. I’m so sick of women being described based on their proximity to men rather than recognized for the things that they excel at.
Another Guerrilla Girls connection is how, as a group, they taught me to go into museums and count how many white men are in an exhibit, and how many “others” are in it. I feel like textiles, being a fibre artist, has also taught me that when I go into exhibits, I’m like, “Okay, there are seventeen paintings in here. There are eight sculptures, and there’s one weaving or one piece of fibre art.”
Especially being mostly women, we’ve had to fight so hard. First, being women artists, but then second, because our medium or our discipline is not seen the same as other mediums. I think it’s interesting watching the ways that textiles of any kind – quilting, embroidery, weaving – are slowly being accepted more as their own art form. I think that’s powerful because women have been basically holding up humanity for forever through their textile practices. The roofs on houses were first made from fibre, and clothing and functional objects for our homes.
I like getting to be a part of that and showing the power textiles have, especially related to the history of it. A lot of fibre and textile artists that I admire focus on community, memory, and engagement. It’s been fun to be a part of that.
You can view more of kelsey merreck wagner’s work on her website and Instagram, @trash_weaver.