For as long as I can remember, I have felt the insidious message pressing in on me from all angles: Stay small. Forcing myself to stay small feels like what happens when a spring is compressed: the spring contracts and energizes to release with explosive power. That constant pressure has ultimately empowered me to push against it, armed with art as my avenue for release.
I identified as a painter for my whole life until 2017, when an artistic breakthrough came in an unlikely place: the weight room. At age 34, I developed a sudden passion for Olympic-style weightlifting. For the first time in my life, I felt my own physical power. I broke into textile sculpture naturally as a result of the physicality of my daily training and my new rapt attention to what it felt like in my body to use and strengthen my muscles. Suddenly, in my art practice, I yearned to manipulate materials with weight and volume into forms that I could hold and mold in my hands. I began to experiment with dimension and texture, building out from the canvas using fabric, needle, and thread. For six years now, I have been creating with fabric as my main material focus.
I am obsessed with hard and soft contrast. For a form to be more than one thing at once: That complexity is what I am after. Textiles naturally lend themselves to my expression. Their strength and structural integrity are balanced by their inherent softness and flexibility. Through both choice and manipulation of materials, my works celebrate textural dualities of hard and soft, dark and light, severe and gentle, tough and tender. Line, shape, volume, texture, and structural strength combine to give each piece a body and soul.
I torque, tie, stretch, and stitch my materials with the force that lives inside of me. Each piece holds my energy in the fibers of its folds. To create a sense of tension, I take a great volume of fabric and compress it by pleating, knotting, stitching, and shaping it into a tightly confined form. Some wall sculptures are complete in their raw fabric form, while others receive a hard, armor-like shell of layered paint on top of the soft core. Some wall sculptures showcase exposed hand-stitching, while others are held together with taut stitches that hide behind the folds. All the works are built to be sturdy, often with a metal or wood skeletal understructure to hold the soft body on its interior frame. Soft, strong, and tightly stitched, these pieces are physical manifestations of all I am and all I have lived.
ARTIST ALL THE WAY.
What’s new: MISS LOU
Visit MISS LOU — an art initiative by Annie. Reimagining the feminine to inspire intuitive power in present and future generations.
Creative experimentation and discovery with a huge variety of art materials and mark-making methods was an everyday occurrence throughout Annie Broderick’s childhood. Artmaking and sewing happened day in and day out when she was young, with Broderick’s mother as both teacher and facilitator. Broderick’s use of fabric and hand-stitching in her artwork honors the needlework tradition that runs through her maternal female ancestry.
Broderick attended The Taft School in Watertown, CT, during her high school years, where she developed her skills in painting, drawing, and sculpture. In 2001, she received The Mark Potter Award in Art at commencement. She then studied fine art with a focus on painting as a student at Davidson College, earning a B.A. in Studio Art in 2005. In the fall semester of her junior year, Broderick studied art abroad in Paris, where she fell in love with figure painting, crafted her own oil paint, and was a copyist at The Louvre. Broderick received the Douglas Houchens Studio Art Award at Davidson in Spring 2004.
After graduating from Davidson, Broderick moved to Washington, D.C., and pursued her M.A. in Community Counseling from George Washington University in 2009. Currently, Broderick lives and works as an artist outside of Washington, D.C., in northern Virginia. Broderick has shown work extensively in the Washington, D.C., area and beyond for the last seven years, with three different solo exhibitions of her work in three different galleries in 2022. Broderick’s many collectors house her work across the nation, in private collections and in elevated public-facing spaces. Broderick continues to produce her own body of work, balancing that practice with art commissions and with her new art initiative, Miss Lou, that reimagines the feminine to inspire intuitive power in present and future generations.