With the exhibit scheduled for April 3 quickly approaching, Hannah Genevieve Lawrence worked long hours to get her macramé pieces completed.
It was an exciting opportunity to collaborate with another local artist, Chris Swasta, and show their combined work at the Thea Foundation. Then the pandemic hit.
She creates under Strands Textiles, and she describes textiles as any form of fabric. She mostly uses ropes in her art but also uses materials like wool roving. “I work a lot with repeat patterns and different things like that,” she explained. “And then too, with the macramé knot, you can knot different things into them. So the show that I had planned on doing at Thea, I was collaborating with Chris Swasta, a local potter. He made a bunch of pieces, a bunch of ceramic pieces that I was going to macramé into wall hangings and different stuff.”
Hannah earned her degree in textile art and moved to Little Rock with her husband, Corbin, and cat, Purrscilla Presley, in 2018. She started working at Electric Ghost in the plant section. “You can only water the plants so many times,” she said. “So I started making plant hangers while I was there because I wanted more plants in me and my husband’s apartment and he was just like, ‘Well, just make some more plant hangers, because we don’t have any more room.’ … It was a ‘challenged accepted’ situation.”
She started making them at the store and the owners liked her work, letting her sell the pieces. She ended up also teaching a class there. And then Valerie at South Main Creative started asking her to offer classes. “I was very nervous about it,” Hannah explained. “And she bugged me for months. And I finally caved.”
Classes started selling out, and Hannah found that she enjoyed the experience. “They’ve been really fun,” she said.
She had her largest class yet, with Bodd Camp, a women’s retreat organized by Nicole Boddington. “I actually had never taught a class that big before with about 20 people,” Hannah shared. “That was really cool because you were in this gorgeous cabin in the Ozarks and doing macramé by these big windows and it was so nice.”
Hannah continued to create and then five months ago, Amanda Seevers, the Director of Communications at Thea Foundation, approached Hannah and Chris about doing the collaborative exhibition. “Thea Foundation is an amazing local nonprofit and they raise money and assist with furthering art education,” Hannah explained. “Whether that’s in schools, for students or for teachers, and they do scholarships for aspiring artists and they also do writing scholarships, so it’s not just visual art. It’s writing and dance and fashion design.”
Chris had previously mentioned possibly collaborating, but Amanda set everything in motion. “I love Chris’s pottery,” Hannah said. “I’ve bought some of his pieces.”
Chris owns Rolling Hills Pottery and can complete a ton of pieces in a short amount of time. “It was honestly a little bit intimidating at first,” Hannah said. “I was like, ‘I am not as prolific as he is. I will try my best. I can’t keep up with that pace.’ It actually pushed me to make more work and everything.”
When Amanda had originally asked, Hannah was in a difficult spot. “I wasn’t in the best headspace when she first asked us, and I recently have been feeling a lot better,” Hannah shared. “I have very bad anxiety and depression and I was finally feeling good and making stuff I felt at like a better pace. I was like, ‘It’ll be cutting it close but I can do it.’”
And then COVID-19 hit the United States. “A few weeks beforehand, my boss was telling me, ‘No one’s gonna, with all the stuff going on, no one’s gonna go to your show,’” Hannah said. “I was like, ‘It’s not gonna be a big deal. It’s gonna be fine.’”
Ultimately, the exhibition was postponed until February 2021. “Then it just all gets taken away,” Hannah said. “I taught a lot of extra classes to have money to buy art supplies. I missed out on things with friends to stay home and make stuff. One of my friends recently moved away, and one of the last dinners they had before they left, I didn’t go to because I was like, ‘I really need to stay home and make stuff. I’ve already been out too much this week.’ It makes me a little bit sad that I missed stuff like that.”
The change left both Hannah and Chris with a lot of pieces that have nowhere to go. “We’re still going to try to do something,” Hannah said. “I think we’re going to do an online sale. We’re trying to figure that out and navigate how we’re going to do that. It’s just a strange time.”
Hannah has started listing her work. Reach out to her on Instagram for available pieces and commissions. When we spoke, she was still going to work at M2 Gallery.
As of the time of our interview, Hannah was continuing her work at M2 Gallery as their assistant gallery director. She’d noticed the impact that COVID-19 had on the artists featured at the gallery. “That’s a big chunk of their income that they’re also missing out on,” she said.
The gallery is accessible by appointment only, and staff has been able to keep busy with a backlog of framing orders. Contact the gallery to view available art through FaceTime. Also, framing orders and gift cards are options. “I know a lot of people are buying gift cards right now,” Hannah said. “That’s a huge help.”
Follow Hannah on Instagram to see her work. To avoid the cat pictures, use her #strandtextiles hashtag. Plus, Hannah and Corbin recently brought home Fuzz Aldrin, Hannah’s new studio dog. She hopes, on the other side of everything that’s happening at the moment, to spend more time with those she loves. “You know, just working on my show, I realized how much I had been isolating myself, and I just really want to connect with friends and family more,” she shared. “That’s honestly what I’m looking forward to the most.”
Season three of Sustaining Craft will explore how those with creative businesses have been impacted with the world-wide pandemic hitting the United States.