Patrick Carroll • Water

Patrick Carroll
Water, 2025 
Silk, linen, wood, staples 
13 x 11 in 
33 x 27.9 cm

Patrick Carroll weaves language, mourning, and materiality into his work. Using a vintage hand-operated knitting machine, he creates text-based garments and wall-hung “picture-poem-paintings” that explore the tension between words and tactile form, reflecting on personal loss and cultural memory.

“A piece like this feels like a culmination of one portion of my practice. It names/illustrates/gives onto/instantiates/'pictures'/'figures' a concept, in this case an elemental one. It does so by materials arranged unto visual pleasure. The main yarn is a lustrous silk; the 'window' and the text are both linen. These are the fibers I turn to most these days.” –Patrick Carroll

Patrick Carroll is an artist, writer, and clothes-maker. Working with a kind of radical softness, Carroll uses fabric and thread to slow language down until it becomes something tactile, vulnerable, and almost bodily. His stitched texts—deliberate, hand-sewn, and patient—strip words of their easy circulation and insist on their weight, their fragility, and their capacity to wound or soothe. What emerges is a practice that feels both austere and deeply intimate: minimal in surface, but saturated with care, repetition, and the politics of making by hand. In Carroll’s work, text ceases to be transparent and instead becomes an object of attention, charged with quiet defiance and the resonance of lived experience.