Half Hidden

Show Opening:
Saturday, October 25, 2025 · 1p—4p

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For millennia, women have expressed their creativity and skill in clothing their families and caring for their private spaces through textiles. Their innovative designs have often been overlooked as art, kept hidden in closets and cedar chests, but are now slowly being recognized for the innovative and insightful works that they are.

In this work, I join women’s handicrafts with landscape painting, a well-trodden genre in art, to introduce a new way of looking at both. These pieces begin as flat canvas studio paintings which I then fold and stitch to create dimensional smocked paintings. In the process of smocking the paintings, almost half of the painting is hidden, an apt metaphor for the hiddenness of much of women’s valuable work of caring.

I borrow a time-honored heirloom sewing technique traditionally employed by women to construct garments and translate it through scale into contemporary sculptural paintings. By presenting these works in a gallery setting in which fine art is viewed, the viewer is called to acknowledge women’s stitch-work as valuable expressions of the maker and to question their own attitudes about the common distinctions between art versus craft, skilled versus unskilled, conceptual versus decorative, and fine versus ordinary.

Michelle Berg Radford

Michelle Berg Radford is a multi-disciplinary artist working at the intersection of women’s craft and what is considered “fine art painting.” Michelle earned an MFA from the Savannah College of Art and Design where she studied landscape painting and fiber arts. Michelle is also an educator with 16 years of teaching experience in higher education.

There are overlapping glories in the world around us. God-given skies with dawns and sunsets and clouds every day. He doesn’t get bored with these repetitive glories. But that’s not all that he has given. God created a world full of glory and glorious potential, and then gave it to us to steward and glorify through our efforts. When I observe the world around me, I see the direct gift of the natural world and the stewarded glory of what man has made with what God gave us. The same sort of wonderful care given in a sunset as in a bridge.

We live in a world full of glory and meaning. God is sovereign, and therefore nothing is neutral. So when I look out from the hill by my home and see the sunset reflected bright from the skyscrapers, turning the bridges orange, that is a gift from God. The sunset, the buildings covered in mirrors, the bridge and the cars on it, the river below, the ground under my feet, and the sky above me. I painted these pieces with that overlapping glory sitting on my shoulder, glorifying paint and wood and canvas through my efforts.

Hannah Grose

Hannah Grose (b. 1997) is a painter and crafts artist who lives in Richmond, VA. She graduated VCUarts in 2015 with a BFA in Crafts and Material Studies, and is currently a Graduate Fellow at the Maker Institute of Studio Art and Theology.