By Page Leggett

Katrina Sánchez’s fiber art lures you in with its vibrant colors. Its highly tactile nature makes you want to touch it, hold it, handle it. It just looks playful.

But unless Sánchez has created a piece specifically labeled as “OK to touch” — as she often does for exhibitions since “the interactive piece is a core part of my work” — it’s better to hold it in your gaze instead of your hands.

“Fiber tends to show the amount of touch it receives,” she explains.

Sánchez makes each piece with a hand-operated knitting machine. “I like pointing that out,” she says, “because the average person might think it’s an easy, automated process — and it’s not. I’m feeding the yarn in and controlling the tension, the speed of the machine, the amount of knots happening in the yarn. It’s a dual process that includes made by hand and machine-made.”

The art world has taken notice. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including a recent showing at the VOLTA Art Fair in Basel, Switzerland. Corporate giants including Lowe’s, Credit Karma, and Truist have commissioned her, and she’s currently preparing for a solo exhibition at a Los Angeles gallery.

Sánchez’s soft sculptures will be on view at Mint Museum Randolph beginning in October as part of the Mint’s Interventions series. A limitless palate of color, Sánchez’s colors are rich, saturated, eye-popping and varied.

A maker since childhood

The Panama native, born to an American military father and a Panamanian mother, says that love for color is in her DNA. “When thinking about color, I always think back to my home country and how colorful it is.”

As a child, she would visit Panama every summer and be each visit she was struck by the contrast between the United States and Panama. “There’s a big cultural difference,” she says. “The houses there are neon yellow and pink and green. I’d come home and see gray and white houses and complain to my mom about how boring that was. I’ve always been extremely drawn to color and naturally incorporated it into my work.”

She loves all colors, but there’s one that pops up (and out!) often in her work. Although green dominates her wardrobe and home décor, she says, “There’s something about hot pink. You’ll almost always see it in my work. It can go well with everything, while also giving a pop. It’s almost like the way a lot of painters use red in their work as a focal point — something your eye gravitates toward.”

Sánchez, who goes by “The Fiberess” on social media, has always been a maker. But “artist” wasn’t her career ambition: “Growing up, I never knew anyone who was a working artist. It just didn’t seem within the realm of possibility.”

Sánchez comes from a long line of seamstresses, each of whom passed down needlework traditions to the next generation. Her mom, grandmother and great-grandmother all sewed. Her mom taught her to crochet when she was 10, and her first project was a blanket for the little brother her mom was expecting.

Art’s healing power

Professional recognition came early for Sánchez. While still in college at UNC Charlotte, she started exhibiting in local art shows. Soon after earning her bacherlor’s degree in fine art, she was selected for a residency at Goodyear Arts, which she says, “propelled me into being an active part of the Charlotte art scene. I got to be part of a community and meet professional artists, which gave me a foundation and a nudge to keep going once I no longer had the structure school provides.”

In the first couple of years after college, she had a series of creative roles — pastry chef, jewelry designer, seamstress — before devoting herself full-time to fiber art. Her studio is in the same place where her career began — at Goodyear Arts.

During that residency, she honed her unmistakable style. She’d developed what she calls the “knitted noodle” — oversized, plush linear forms that have become her signature. But she increased their scale and found new meaning in the work when, she “decided to look inward and create work about healing.”

She started by mending old clothing and creating tapestries in the process. She began pondering the reciprocal relationship between humans and the things, like clothing and our homes, that “shield and shelter us,” she says.

A message woven into her art

There’s almost always more to a work of art than meets the eye. Sánchez’s colorful, playful work belies the deeper meaning behind it. Even she didn’t immediately realize why she felt compelled to explore healing.

“I’ve always been empathetic and sensitive,” she says. “And I’ve always been prone to anxiety and stress. I think there’s been a need to self-soothe through the process of making.

That’s been my form of therapy. But if I think about what occurred right before my Goodyear residency, that’s when the shooting happened at UNCC.”

It was April 2019 when a former Charlotte student walked into a classroom and opened fire. Sánchez was on campus at the time. A professor led her and other students into the clay studio where they sheltered together “with no idea what was going on, no idea where the [shooter] could be,” she says.

The fear, the hiding, the uncertainty — it “was really traumatizing, of course, for everybody,” but she didn’t deal with it immediately. Delayed trauma response is common.

“I thought what I was feeling around that time was the stress of having to create a body of work for my residency,” says Sánchez. “I’m a perfectionist, and I put a lot of pressure on myself. It wasn’t until a year or so ago that I made the connection that it deeply affected me and my peers.”

Her soft, puffy, tactile work — often in the colors she recalls from childhood summers in Panama — looks almost child-like. There’s a playfulness to it, but also innocence. No adult can fully hold onto the sweet naivete of childhood, but we can work toward healing the wounds life deals all of us.

That is what Sánchez’s artmaking does for her. Her finished pieces bear no trace of pain, fear, or trauma. They simply exude joy. 

Page Leggett is a Charlotte-based freelance writer. Her stories have appeared in The Charlotte Observer, The Biscuit, Charlotte magazine and many other regional publications.