Christy Gast

Christy Gast (b. 1976, Ohio) is a New York-based artist whose interdisciplinary practice spans sculpture, performance, video, and textiles. Her work is rooted in field research and collaborative practices, as well as complex textile constructions. Gast was a founding member of the research collective Ensayos, through which she spent 15 years working on issues of ecological storytelling in Tierra del Fuego and other archipelagos.

Gast has exhibited internationally, both solo and with Ensayos, in New York at the New Museum, MoMA/P.S.1, Performa, Artists Space and the River Valley Arts Collective; in Miami at Pérez Art Museum Miami, Bass Museum of Art, Nina Johnson Gallery, Locust Projects; and at American University Museum (DC), Galería Patricia Ready (Santiago), Kadist (Paris), MABA and Le19 (France), the University of Queensland Art Museum (Australia), Estonian Contemporary Art Museum, and the Chilean Pavilion of the 59th Venice Biennale (with Ensayos), among others. Her work is held in the collections of the Pérez Art Museum Miami, the Museum of Art, Fort Lauderdale, the Ohio State University, and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami. She has received support from NYSCA, the Art Matters Foundation, Tigertail, South Florida Cultural Consortium, and the American Austrian Foundation. She holds an MFA in Visual Art from Columbia University and dual BFA/BA degrees in Sculpture and Women’s Studies from The Ohio State University. She also studied with Valie Export at the Internationale Sommerakademie für Bildende Kunst in Salzburg and at the University of Brighton in Critical Fine Art Practices.

In Conversation with Friday Arts

Friday Arts

Tell us about your practice and process.

Christy Gast

My practice usually begins with a drawing of an impossible form, a knot with no beginning or end or a garment that behaves like a body, and then moves into material exploration. I work primarily with textiles, combining industrial sewing, plant dyes, salvaged clothing, and twisted cordage.

Process is where the thinking happens: dyeing with plants feels like equal parts chemistry and chance, and I’m interested in the histories twisted and embedded in materials. I push scale and structure until the object feels slightly improbable, holding technical rigor alongside play and material joy.

What themes/ideas do you find yourself continuing to return to over time?

I keep returning to twist, both literally and metaphorically. The structural logic of textiles (ply, warp, weft, drape) becomes a way to think about bodies, interdependence, and strength through entanglement. I’m also drawn to deep time and preservation, how materials carry memory and outlast us.

How do you think about place in relation to your work?

Place is never neutral for me. It’s charged, specific, and usually a little unruly. Places, like artworks are always in conversation with deep time. That goes for peat bogs, art history (I'm obsessed with depictions of draped fabric at the moment), and the patch of sumac in the swale at the edge of my yard. I like to understand the material intelligence of a place, where climate, trade and ecology meet, and let that knowledge work its way into process.

How you approach the natural world in this moment of climate disruption?

There's both a systems level / advocacy approach and a drippy, grimy immersive approach, wet and feral and itchy. I serve on my town's Conservation Advisory Council, collaborate on art and advocacy projects around peatland protection, and I also consulting for art and culture nonprofits to get funding to decarbonize their facilities. So I'm learning about state regulations, MEP planning, scaled advocacy ... and I also try to spend a decent amount of time mucking about in swamps and mangroves.

Tell us about Bog Skirt and how it aligns with your larger practice.

Bog Skirt feels very aligned with my larger practice because it brings together research, textile structure, deep time, and scale in one object. It began with an archeological drawing of an ancient string skirt and my curiosity about twist, the foundational gesture of textile making. I recreated and enlarged the form using plied cordage made from salvaged knitwear, then dyed it in a tannic walnut bath to bring the acid dye colors into conversation. I was thinking about preservation, decay, and what survives in the archeological record. Like much of my work, it moves between body and landscape, garment and sculpture, past and present. It’s materially rigorous but also a little excessive.

Are there artists who you think your work is in conversation with?

I have scale ambitions, and in that sense I think about Sheila Hicks and Decly Morelos. In terms of material, form and ways of looking, I think about Barbara Hammer and Harmony Hammond. Thinking about how art is stronger in collaboration, across disciplines and cultures, I was fortunate to work with Ensayos for 15 years, and to continue thinking and collaborating with Camila Marmabio, Ariel Bustamante, Rosario Ureta and Antonia Peon-Vega on a bog opera that will be on view at Mass MoCA in 2027.

What are your thoughts on the role of art and artists today, at this particular moment in time?

Art must be done, on all scales and in every format. Take it to the streets and into the bedroom. Dress flashy. Make a banner, a poem, a joke, a monumental snowman. I think art helps us metabolize being alive right now. It makes space for us to be OK as individuals and as people in relation to each other. At its most intimate, it tunes us back to the body and the handmade. At its most public–satire, protest songs, absurdity—it keeps culture scaled to the human voice. In a moment that feels accelerated and outsized, art insists on texture, presence, and the possibility of speaking back. It's somatic therapy.

More conversation in the Vernal exhibition roundtable