Meet the Artist
Claire Pongonis
Artist Bio:
Claire Pongonis is a contemporary fiber artist based in Fayetteville, Arkansas, where she creates embroidered paintings inspired by memory, place, and the quiet rhythms of the natural world. Growing up in the Ozark Mountains continues to shape her relationship with landscape, not simply as scenery, but as an emotional space where personal history and lived experience intersect.
Working across embroidery, painting, cyanotype, and mixed media, Claire combines traditional handcraft with contemporary approaches to create luminous, layered works. Her practice is strongly driven by materials. Fiber acts as color, gesture, and atmosphere, while translucent fabrics and negative space allow light to become part of each composition. Her process is intentionally slow and repetitive, embracing stitching and layering as acts of attention that explore how memory accumulates, shifts, and transforms over time.
She is the co-founder of Women of the Ozarks, a traveling exhibition that celebrates women artists from the region while supporting arts education and community outreach. She co-created and curates pop-up exhibitions for A Bold Collab, an experiential show at the intersection of art, design, and collected spaces. Claire was selected for the Arkansas Committee National Museum of Women in the Arts 2025 – 2027 Artist Registry. Her work is included in the permanent collections of Walmart Inc., Ledger Bentonville, along with countless personal collections nationally and internationally. Whether creating intimate embroidered landscapes or large-scale fiber installations, Claire’s work invites viewers to slow down, reconnect with place, and consider the memories that shape how we experience the world.
When not in her studio or engaging with the arts community, Claire enjoys walks with her spouse and two dogs, cooking for friends and family, and traveling.
Artist Statement:
My work explores landscape as a vessel for memory, examining how they shape our emotional lives and the stories we carry within us. Through layered processes that combine embroidery, painting, cyanotype, and other hand-based techniques, I investigate how materials can hold, reveal, and transform memory over time.
I approach landscape not as a fixed location, but as an emotional and psychological space where personal history, subconscious experience, and connection to the natural world intersect. Layers of thread, pigment, and printed imagery create luminous surfaces where color, texture, and light are intertwined. Thread moves beyond its traditional role, becoming color-field, atmosphere, and gesture, while translucent materials invite light to complete the work.
My practice is rooted in slow, repetitive acts of making. Stitching, layering, and printing become rituals of attention that resist speed and prioritize presence. These processes allow me to explore how memory accumulates, how trauma becomes embedded, and how experience can hold vulnerability and renewal.
By expanding traditional craft through contemporary approaches to scale, subject, and technique, I create work that invites reflection on memory, connection, and the relationship between self, landscape, and time.