Statement

B. Jean Larson is an artist and researcher who questions value and visibility by exploring the intersections of utilitarian textile craft, posthumanism, and queer theory. Central to her practice is the metaphor of the bog: a queer space that shifts between the binaries of land and water and has been historically devalued.

She connects this metaphor to material form by working solely with secondhand textiles that have been discarded by their previous owners. Through meticulous hand braiding, B. Jean creates large-scale rag rugs that move between painting and sculpture, art and craft. Their modular, site responsive forms are fluid, continually shifting to adapt to the space they inhabit. She carries these works between the manmade and natural worlds, seeking visibility for not only the discarded textiles themselves, but the worlds they inhabit.

Through the lens of queer theory, B. Jean reappropriates utilitarian textile craft to create non-utilitarian objects that resist function as their defining value. She questions the cultural impulse to measure worth through use and equate existence with visibility. She seeks to honor the unseen, the in-between, and the discarded, whether these are spaces, materials, or identities, and make room for ways of being that resist containment within binary systems.