“Magical” and “otherworldly” best describe the sensation experienced when entering fiber artist Trish Andersen’s San Luis Obispo Museum of Art (SLOMA) installation Little by Little. Made up of 35 miles of yarn and 35,000 knots, the immersive artwork takes up the museum’s entire Gray Wing, with 100 circular ceiling-mounted elements and 100 floor elements. If you want to experience it, you best hurry. It departs the museum after Saturday, Oct. 4.
Experience it before it’s gone
Fiber artist Trish Andersen’s installation, Little by Little, at the San Luis Obispo Museum of Art (SLOMA), leaves on Oct. 4. The museum is located at 1010 Broad St., admission is free, and the hours are Thursday through Monday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. For more information, call (805) 543-8562.
Little by Little is the first fine art museum installation for an artist who’s well-versed in commercial site-specific installations for clients such as Coca-Cola, Google, Ulla Johnson, and many others. She’s created commissioned artworks worldwide. What stands out when looking at her career is the realization that she’s always ready to say “yes.” She attributes her readiness to try anything to an early fight with leukemia, diagnosed as a 20-month-old infant.
“I went through all these treatments, but the things I remember are the good things, right? Like, that’s my first memory of making art,” she said during a recent Zoom call from her home in Savannah, Georgia, where she lives with her artist husband, Michael Porten. “I feel like it made me a risk-taker. I’m not somebody who’s jumping off mountains or anything, but that was ingrained in me from that experience. I was also just raised that way. If you dream it, you can do it. I’ve just sort of figured it out as I’ve gone, you know? I don’t overthink things.”
In her artist’s talk, which you can watch on the sloma.org website, Andersen spoke of being intimidated by the art world and not knowing her place was in it. Now that she’s got her first museum installation under her belt, that’s no doubt dissipated, right?
“No!” she laughed. “I have no clue what I’m doing! This [installation art] is a new thing for me. I’ve been working creatively for 20-plus years, but this fine art world is still very new for me. I have a lot of imposter syndrome. Coming to SLO and doing the museum thing, looking around and being like, ‘Whoa, people are here to see what I did,’ was very moving, you know? The more I meet people in the ‘art world’ that are just kind, wonderful people, I’m like, ‘Oh, yeah. I feel like I have a place here.’”
When Andersen was invited to create an installation, she was flooded with feelings.
“I get kind of freaked out, like, ‘What! What do I do?’ And then I’m like, ‘Wow, what an incredible opportunity.’ I think that working in the museum space—because a lot of times I’m working in more of a commercial space or I’m doing something like a gallery, which is a business—is such a gift because I’m not having to worry about, ‘Do I have to sell this thing?’ I mean, of course there’re expectations, but I just feel like it opened the door to an opportunity to really be playful and dream bigger.”
Designing a space to create a transformational experience sounds intimidating, but Andersen approached it practically. Her first consideration was the material she had to work with. Years ago, she learned about tufting, which is essentially using a tool—in her case an electric tufting gun—to force yarn through backing fabric. Think of it like a handmade shag rug. Over her years of tufting, she had amassed a lot of colorful yarn.
Then she asked herself, “What processes are interesting to me right now?”
As a new mother, her lifestyle has changed and the way she works has been changing. Instead of working on a large tufting frame, with a new baby, she needed work she could take with her. She turned to knotting the yarn, a slow process indeed and in part the inspiration for the show’s title, Little by Little.
“It’s this idea of ‘how can little things come together to add up to big things?’ It’s an idea I’m having to attach myself to in the current cultural climate. It’s just a much more hopeful outlook, and the process speaks to that because it’s thousands and thousands of knots, so as you’re doing it, it’s like, ‘Little by little we’ll get there.’ It’s just a mantra, a sort of thread throughout a lot of things in my life, so I just wanted this space to be an illustration of that.”
Luckily, she got some help with those 35,000 knots by enlisting people from her community. She called the knot-tying process “painful at times but also meditative in its own right.”
Now that the installation is coming down, what will become of it?
“It comes back to me, and I figure out what to do with it. It doesn’t have its next place. One of the things I thought of doing was, ‘What if it goes to a new place and it gets rearranged into a totally different thing?’ Because it could be installed in many different ways. And maybe then I add 100 new things and it becomes this kind of cumulative traveling experience. I don’t know if that will happen to it, but luckily it packs down pretty small.”
Eleven boxes, to be exact. Chances are good that Andersen might find her way back to SLO Town one day.
“My husband and I both loved being in SLO. I found the community so cool, so supportive, and I’m just really, really grateful for the opportunity that I had to be there, and I look forward to when we can come back because we still talk about it.” ∆
Contact Arts Editor Glen Starkey at gstarkey@newtimesslo.com.
This article appears in Autumn Arts Annual 2025.