As creative origin stories go, Janelle Pietrzak’s is a good one. About a decade ago, for a few post-college years, she was toiling away at a denim company in New York and looking for some kind of escape. So she started knitting, took a yarn spinning class, and eventually entered a competition at the New York Sheep and Wool Festival — which was more “farmers and grandmas” than hipsters and makers. “I won for the State, which was not hard. I was competing against eight-year-olds; it was mean of me to even compete.” Still, she says, that was her entree into the fiber world, and she hasn’t looked back.
Pietrzak has since made a name for herself as a Los Angeles-based textile artist and one half of All Roads Design, the creative studio she runs with boyfriend Robert Dougherty. It’s fair to say her thickly textured woven wall hangings helped usher in the trend; in Pietrzak’s distinctive work, abstract fields of color and looping yarns meet shaggy, silky fringe in pieces that are warm and fuzzy yet elegant. Lately she’s been incorporating ceramic tiles into her designs, as well as materials like rope, hemp, and raffia grass.
Her interest in textile work in fact predates the upstate wool festival. She learned weaving while studying fashion design at Virginia Commonwealth University, and after graduating in 2003, she eventually landed in Philadelphia with a job at Anthropologie, doing fabric sourcing, then accessory and concept design. She also met Dougherty in Philly, and the pair relocated to Los Angeles in 2012. “That move was pivotal,” she says. In LA, the demands of a new job made it vital for her to have a creative outlet. So she started weaving on a loom Dougherty built for her — initially to make “something for my house” — and soon became taken with it. She wasn’t the only one. At a pop-up residency at a local shop, her weavings sold well, made the social media rounds, and quickly led to opportunities that have allowed her to make All Roads a full-time endeavor. In addition to private commissions, Pietrzak has collaborated with clothing and accessories labels like Suno, and Clare V. handbags. She’s licensed designs to Anthropologie and worked with Ace & Jig on their spring 2016 collection.
When we spoke with Pietrzak, she’d just returned from a trip to Japan, for the opening of CPCM, a lifestyle concept store in Tokyo featuring some of her pieces. And she would soon be headed to Arcosanti in Arizona. We can’t wait to see how her travels affect her future work, but we also loved the getting the chance to explore her home studio in LA for a sense of where she’s at right now.
Pietrzak says she’s mostly inspired by nature, for color as well as materials — and that moving to California definitely influenced her aesthetic. “The nature that I’m around, it’s all pretty new to me still.” While driving to San Francisco for the first time and passing though “these golden rolling mountains and hills,” she became “obsessed with this golden color, using these golden silks.” The woven part in the back of these pieces is hemp, with gold leaf on it, and ceramic pieces attached to the top.
Unfinished pieces made of hemp fiber and cotton rope dyed pink. Ultimately, there will be a whole half-circle of ceramic pieces on the top.
This piece, shown here in progress, was commissioned by a client in Silver Lake. It’s six feet wide and made of rope and silk yarns. Pietrzak works on a variety of looms, depending on the project. She still uses the loom Dougherty initially made for her. In addition, she has one that’s eight feet tall and she also floor looms.
Pietrzak made this one for Kim Hastreiter, founder of Paper magazine.
Pietrzak sources materials from all over. These baskets store some of what she’s currently working with.
Pietrzak buys most of her materials online and is especially interested in “more utilitarian materials, or even rustic things, like using hemp fiber. It literally smells like a farm, it has grass in it. I like using that because it’s super rustic and then I’ll contrast it with gold leaf or ceramic that has a shiny glaze. I like that play.” On the right, a bunch of yucca leaves she collected on a hike near her house.
The quote posted at left is something “my friend and my former boss at Anthropologie used to say it to me all the time. ‘Life shrinks or expands according to one’s courage.’ He told me that his mom used to say it to him. It’s completely true. It’s scary to do risky things. After having a stable job for ten years and then quitting when I’m just getting good at my career? It was super scary.”
Pietrzak has intuitive approach to using color. But she gets “obsessed with certain colors. Like I’ve been obsessed with blue, and then that kind of French bright blue. My whole living room is blue. A vintage blue velvet couch. All my pillows are blue.”
More blue: fabric from Pietrzak’s friend, textile artist and designer Cathy Callahan. Pietrzak made this as a trim and gave it to another friend who has a hat company. “I like the group of people that I’ve come to be part of,” she says of the creative community she’s found in LA.
Some of Pietrzak’s materials, including wooden shuttles for weaving yarn.
“I’ve been taking a ceramics studio class for about a year because I was getting a little burned out on weaving. I needed to think creatively in a different way. I don’t know what these things are that I make, they’re just these weird boxes.” She glazed part of this one white, added the blue rope, and then dyed the whole thing indigo.
Thinking sculpturally has given her “another tool” to work with, she says. It’s added another depth to her weavings.
A little guy made from leftover scrap clay.
Getting into ceramics has had a direct effect on Pietrzak’s weaving work. She started making these ceramic boxes and then began producing the tile pieces that she puts on her fabric works. “It brought me to that, back to weaving.”
On the evolution of her practice: “I think when I started the weavings, they were more like a pattern and I think now they’re more abstract, combinations of different textures. It’s less about being graphic.”
“Those are weird ceramic things that I made for a tiki-themed show. I don’t really do representational things so this was my take on bamboo,” she laughs.
Though Pietrzak got disillusioned with the business, she still loves fashion “as an art form. I get inspired by the runway shows every season, I love looking at an outfit as areas of color.”
Pietrzak has been in her home studio for over two years now. “I live in Sunland, in the foothills of the San Gabriel mountains. We’re like 20 minutes from Silver Lake. We’re not far. It’s still LA. But LA’s huge. We just really wanted to be close to the mountains. We like hiking up here and camping.”
A wall plaque Pietrzak made from clay pieces — “in a way, it’s a wall hanging but all out of ceramics and hemp rope. It’s similar to my weaving work in that it’s just different textures on clay.”
The arrows are made by Robert, who welds and does carpentry. On the left, some pendants Pietrzak has been making, mostly out of clay, for fun. She has ideas for creating off-off items like clutches, totes, and scarves. Right now, she says, “I like the idea of keeping it open.
“An in-progress shot” of the blue ceramic tiles Pietrzak is attaching to hemp fiber. Pietrzak fires all of her ceramic pieces at the studio where she takes classes.
Pietrzak’s living room, featuring one of Laure Joliet’s black and white posters above the fireplace, and to the left, a wall lamp by artist Chris Vorhees. “It makes me really happy. Like sunshine.” Pietrzak’s friend Summer, a vintage furniture dealer who runs ModernHaus, found her the swinging chair.
Pietrzak often uses this wall in her living room for staging and test hangs. This big blue piece has since sold. The stoneware cacti (on the credenza) she found at a local thrift store.
Pietrzak in the studio.
Because they spend their lives under car hoods, or between walls, or tucked inside backpacks, most industrial or utilitarian materials are purpose-built without any consideration for aesthetics. The people who engineer these materials get paid to make them perform well, not look pretty; when one of them gains crossover appeal, it's usually either by happy accident or a general shift in perception — the pendulum of culture swinging back, as it has recently, to a fervor for all things mundane and overlooked. Yet if climbing rope suddenly feels just as relevant in galleries and high-end fashion boutiques as it does strapped to a harness, enforcing the border between life and death, the reasons are obvious: it's cheap, it's durable, it has built-in visual interest, and the same vibrant color combinations that assure its visibility on a mountainside render it irresistible to designers and artists. When we first noticed how many of them were making climbing rope a core part of their practice — from Proenza Schouler to Stephen Burks to the artist Orly Genger, who often use it to play with notions of high art vs. low — we decided to launch a new column called "Material" that quite simply tracks an unconventional material's appearances throughout multiple disciplines in the visual arts.
Le Gens Heureux, a three-year-old Copenhagen art gallery founded by Sanne Frank and Anneli Häkkinen, has two major selling points — its setting, and its knack for perfectly curated group shows. Now on view is a roundup of textile wall hangings by some of the best names in the business — Mimi Jung, Confettisystem, Amateurs, and Clarisse Demory — that are all entirely different, yet totally complementary, connected by tiny common threads of color and composition.
