High Pastures

Whitingham, VT

Emily Carris-Duncan is a high regarded artist and founder of High Pastures formerly The Art Dept, an interdisciplinary textile and music studio and community retreat for marginalized creative practitioners. They create unique and vibrant textile work that plays with color, pattern, and texture using textile techniques like natural dyeing, quilting, knitting, yarn spinning, and embroidery to explore the materiality of joy and trauma from a black queer non binary femme transracial adoptee perspective.

With a keen eye for detail and a passion for experimentation, Carris has become known for their meticulous technique, inventive use of materials. They draw inspiration from nature and the work of artists like Alison Saar, Kara Walker, Lorna Simpson, Rosie Lee Tompkins, and the Gee’s Bend quilt collective.
Their work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally including at the Cooper Union in New York, Islington Art Factory in London, The Penn Museum and The Colored Girls Museum in Philadelphia, as well as EFA Project Space in New York and has been featured in numerous publications including Hyperallergic, Womanly Magazine and Past, Present, Projects.

In addition to her artistic practice, Carris is also committed to community engagement and education, and has taught workshops and classes on textile arts and other forms of creative expression. They have been a visiting artist at various institutions including Princeton University and Temple University. They were the 2022 Philadelphia Assembly fellow, as well as the 2021 Natural Dye Fellow at Stone Barnes in upstate NY, and 2020 visiting fellow at The Center For Experimental Ethnography at the University of Pennsylvania.