Patrick Carroll • What Hanne Darboven Gives You, per Lucy Ives

Patrick Carroll 
What Hanne Darboven Gives You, per Lucy Ives, 2023 
Linen, silk, wood staples 
32 x 34 in 
81.3 x 86.4 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.

“I read this phrase in an interview with Lucy Ives, a writer I deeply admire, and immediately took to it. It articulates what a lot of my favorite art is doing (and what I'm trying to do): give a portal onto dimensions of knowledge otherwise unglimpseable.” –Patrick Carroll

*Hanne Darboven (1941–2009) was a German conceptual artist celebrated for her complex, large-scale installations that explored themes of time, history, and existence through a unique language of number systems, repetitive handwritten text, and collaged elements.

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.