Jill Carnes, Two Birds Talking About The Old Days, Punch Needle, 12 x 16

Jill Carnes: Attention, Animals, and Ways of Knowing

Jill Carnes’s work often begins in conversation and unfolds through sustained attention. An early exchange with Jeremy Ayers around a white on black drawing became the seed for a larger, shared idea: an alphabet structured around animals, one for each letter. Jeremy proposed the formal constraint of white drawings on black paper, organized as a system, while Jill insisted that the definition of animal remain expansive. For her, animals are not limited by species. They are defined by presence, sound, and behavior.

Jill speaks often about her love of animals and her belief that they understand more about how to move through the world than humans tend to recognize. Animals respond to change without abstraction. They register shifts in their environments before those shifts are named. That belief shaped the alphabet project. Instruments, she suggested, could function as animals because they have voices. A saxophone breathes and vibrates. A typewriter speaks through rhythm and impact. Jeremy agreed, and the drawings that followed treated objects as living entities, less illustrations than translations of sound, character, and insistence.

That same way of thinking carries into Jill’s embroidery practice. In Secrets in the Garden, stitched freehand in white thread on a black ground, the image emerges slowly and intuitively, without a pattern. At the center is a triangular form, part lens, part creature, dense with marks and surrounded by looping lines, leaves, flowers, and hybrid shapes that recall both botany and sea life. The composition feels less like a depiction of nature than an ecosystem unfolding through touch and observation.

Across Jill’s work, animals and animal like forms are not symbols. They are guides. They model attentiveness, patience, and a different kind of intelligence, one rooted in listening and response rather than cont