JILL CARNES: FIBER, FABLE, AND THE SOUTHERN IMAGINATION
Jill Carnes is a multidisciplinary artist whose career began in the mid-1980s and spans more than four decades, with work rooted in drawing, music, and, increasingly, in fiber art. Based in Athens, Georgia, Carnes has developed a personal and instantly recognizable visual language: playful, symbolic, emotionally charged, and deeply connected to memory and myth. Whether through black-ink drawings, album cover illustrations, or punch needle tapestries, Carnes’s art tells stories—some intimate, some surreal, some seemingly pulled from the margins of Southern folklore. In recent years, her fiber-based work has emerged as a particularly powerful mode for this storytelling, blending domestic materials with expansive visual invention.
Jeremy Ayers by Jill Carnes
Carnes’s artistic career began in Athens’s DIY art and music scene in the mid-1980s. She became known locally for her vividly colored paintings and whimsical, anthropomorphic characters—owls, cats, birds, and elephants—that populated her dreamlike compositions. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, she showed work in galleries and alternative venues across the Southeast, including Asheville, Atlanta, and Austin. Her drawings also reached a national audience through her contributions to the Elephant Six musical collective, with her artwork appearing on album covers for Neutral Milk Hotel, the Olivia Tremor Control, and of Montreal. Carnes’s visual art thus became a defining component of that era’s experimental Southern indie culture.
Two Birds Talking About The Old Days, Punch Needle
While best known for her drawings and ink work, Carnes has long explored tactile and material-based practices. In the 2010s, she began experimenting more seriously with textiles, particularly punch needle embroidery—a technique she describes as meditative, rhythmic, and deeply satisfying. Working with monk’s cloth and wool yarn, she began creating densely textured scenes that expand on the figures and symbols in her drawings. Pieces like Two Birds Talking About the Old Days exemplify her fiber work: layered, whimsical, and emotionally resonant, with crowned birds and ornamental shapes rendered in vibrant, looping thread.
She has also returned to hand embroidery in recent years, creating works like the mid-century modern-inspired Rooster and the richly detailed Red Rooster These pieces demonstrate her sensitivity to line and texture in a slower, more stitched rhythm—each one rendered with careful attention to both form and pattern. Hand embroidery allows her to develop finer details and draw on the illustrative instincts of her earlier pen-and-ink work, bridging her graphic sensibility with the tactile world of thread.
Jill Carnes, Midnight Owl, Print, Red Rooster, Embroidery and Untitled, Embroidery
Her exploration of abstraction—both in punch needle and hand embroidery—has become one of the most compelling aspects of her practice. These abstract works replace recognizable figures with intuitive forms, shifting stitches, and rhythmic density. Dense stitching, interrupted lines, and layered threads animate the surface with unexpected tension and release. Some feel like maps of an emotional terrain; others resemble topographies of motion or meditative diagrams of thought. These embroideries open up a space for contemplation, extending her visual language into a more open field, but one still grounded in her longstanding attention to material, memory, and meaning. Over the past decade, Carnes has embraced abstraction more fully. This direction has unfolded not only through her punch needle work but also through her growing series of abstract hand embroideries, which explore line, density, and form without relying on recognizable imagery. These pieces feel less like traditional compositions and more like meditations—where stitches shift between control and spontaneity, and the surface becomes a field of tension, rhythm, and intuitive logic. Whether using punch needle or hand stitching, her abstract works maintain the same sensitivity to color and texture that defines her figurative practice.
Carnes does not typically create detailed studies for her fiber pieces. Instead, she works directly on the stretched cloth, allowing intuition to guide the composition. Her approach is immersive, grounded in rhythm and color. She often speaks about colors as having their own “decibel”—a kind of volume or vibration that must be carefully balanced across the work. In this way, her fiber compositions become something akin to visual music: orchestrated not through melody, but through chromatic harmony, texture, and movement.
Untitled, Embroidery
Snow Bird, Embroidery and Mid-Century Modern Rooster, Embroidery
Carnes’s textile practice, while distinctive, connects strongly to Southern fiber art traditions. Her work echoes the storytelling impulse of 19th-century quiltmakers like Harriet Powers—also from Athens, Georgia—who used hand-stitched panels to convey Biblical tales and lived experience. Similarly, Carnes’s fiber pieces often feel like dream-diaries or memory quilts, filled with birds, crowns, keys, and other recurring symbols that carry emotional charge. Like the improvisational quilts of Gee’s Bend, her fiber works exhibit a freedom from academic composition, favoring rhythm, intuition, and personal resonance.
Throughout her fiber work, Carnes shifts fluently between figuration and abstraction, with each mode offering a different emotional register. Her figurative pieces often portray animals, hybrid creatures, and objects from domestic or inner worlds—imbued with personality, narrative potential, and a sense of mystery. These works feel intimate, at times playful or allegorical, like scenes from a private mythology. The wool loops in her punch needle technique lend a tactile warmth to these characters, heightening their presence and familiarity.
Detail from an abstract work
In contrast, her abstract compositions explore form, repetition, and color relationships without the need for a narrative anchor. In these works, Carnes focuses on shape and gesture—circles, arches, bursts, and spirals—creating a sense of movement across a static plane. The same color sensibility and compositional rhythm that animates her figurative work carries through here, but with a different emotional tone: more spacious, contemplative, even musical. These abstract pieces feel less like fables and more like maps of internal states or visual poems rendered in thread.
Red Rooster, Embroidery
What connects both modes—figurative and abstract—is Carnes’s strong sense of balance and intuition. Her process remains consistent across both approaches: no pre-sketches, no rigid plans, only a responsive, sensory relationship to material. The figurative works tend to externalize emotion through character and scene, while the abstract works offer a more internalized, open-ended experience for the viewer. One could say that in her hands, abstraction becomes a kind of lyricism, while figuration becomes a form of storytelling—and both feel deeply rooted in the domestic, tactile, and Southern traditions from which her practice springs.
While her earlier works—whether in fiber, paint, or ink—were largely figurative and narrative, her newer compositions often explore pure shape, pattern, and visual motion. Yet even in these non-figurative pieces, her sense of storytelling remains intact. Color and form shift and spiral like characters in a fable; lines dart and spin with a kind of sonic energy, evoking dance or spoken rhythm.
Shoe Sale, 1966, Drawing and Jeff, Punch Needle
This evolution in her work has coincided with wider institutional recognition. In 2014–2015, Carnes’s visual art was included in The Art of E6, a major exhibition at the Georgia Museum of Art that explored the impact of the Elephant Six collective on both music and visual culture. Carnes’s contributions—album covers, posters, and drawings—were presented alongside those of W. Cullen Hart, Jeff Mangum, and other contemporaries, cementing her role in the visual history of Southern experimental music. More recently, her fiber pieces have been exhibited at the Linda Matney Gallery in Williamsburg, Virginia, in group exhibitions such as The Portrait: Myths, Histories, and Allegories. These shows have positioned her fiber-based works within a broader conversation about Southern identity, visionary art, and craft-based storytelling. Her pieces have also been shown alongside celebrated self-taught artists like Lonnie Holley, Howard Finster, and Clementine Hunter—figures whose influence is felt in Carnes’s own blend of fine art, folk tradition, and personal mythology.
At the core of Carnes’s practice is a reverence for process and play. Her studio methods mirror domestic rituals: repetition, attention to material, an embrace of imperfection. She often recalls sitting beside her mother as a child, watching her sew—a memory that infuses her textile work with both personal and cultural continuity. The tools she uses—needle, cloth, thread—are historically tied to home and family, but under her hand, they become instruments for expansive storytelling. As Carnes herself has said, making art is spiritual. It’s a way of being present, of connecting with something larger—be it familial memory, place, or emotion.
She also continues to make music, often under the moniker Thimble Circus, blending toy instruments, piano, and voice into playful, dreamlike compositions. Music and visual art are not separate for Carnes; they are parallel tracks of the same creative life. Just as her drawings and textiles build symbolic worlds, her songs evoke intimate narratives with texture and feeling.
Jill working and Spring Bird, Embroidery
Jill Carnes’s fiber art—whether abstract or figurative, narrative or improvised—is part of a larger Southern lineage of artists who blur boundaries between craft and art, past and present, home and studio. Her work invites viewers into a world that is imaginative, personal, and richly textured—where thread and color carry stories, and where every stitch hums with memory, humor, and heart.
