Back Heirloom's From my Mother, Gina Gilbert, 2025, fiber art, 8 x 9 in. / 20.32 x 22.86 cm.

Ancestral Threads: Sculpture and Cloth by Gina Gilbert

January 14, 2026 Gavin Coates

Featured image: Back Heirloom's From my Mother, Gina Gilbert, 2025, fiber art, 8 x 9 in. / 20.32 x 22.86 cm.

Gina Gilbert’s works operate at the intersection of sculpture, textile, and cultural memory.

Gina Gilbert is a mixed-media artist working with textiles, clay, and dye processes to explore ritual, ancestry, and cultural memory through sculptural and functional forms.

Drawing from African diasporic traditions, inherited materials, and labor-intensive dye processes, Gilbert constructs objects that function as vessels, carriers of ritual, survival, and continuity. Rites of Passage (2021), Heirloom Fabric and “Abayomi” Doll (2025), and Velvet Dyed Shibori Bag (2025) move between figuration and function, blurring the line between artwork, artifact, and offering. Together, these works articulate how cloth and form preserve identity across time, displacement, and personal lineage.

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Rites of Passage, Gina Gilbert, 2021, clay and cloth, 25 x 7 x 7 in. / 63.5 x 17.78 x 17.78 cm.

In Rites of Passage, Gina Gilbert presents a hybrid figure that feels both ceremonial and otherworldly. The raku-fired clay head, elongated, textured, and intentionally imaginary, suggests a being formed from myth rather than biology. Its surface bears the scars and cracks of the firing process, emphasizing transformation through heat and vulnerability. The cloth body, dyed using Shibori techniques inspired by African tribal body painting as documented by Carol Beckwith and Angela Fisher, extends this language into textile. Vertical striations echo ritual markings, turning the figure into a site of passage: between human and animal, past and present, spirit and body. The sculpture stands not as a portrait, but as a witness, an embodiment of transition and endurance.

Heirloom Fabric and "Abayomi" Doll, Gina Gilbert, 2025, textiles, 9 x 6 in. / 22.86 x 15.24 cm.

This intimate textile work compresses generational and historical memory into a small, potent form. Gilbert sews antique embroidered wool and velvet, fabric inherited from her mother, into a purse, transforming domestic inheritance into a public object. At its center rests an antique “Abayomi” doll, a powerful symbol within African diasporic history. Traditionally knotted from scraps to comfort children during the Middle Passage, the doll carries the weight of care under unimaginable conditions. By integrating the Abayomi into a functional object, Gilbert collapses time: maternal inheritance, ancestral survival, and contemporary making converge. The visible stitching and layered fabrics reinforce the idea that history is not seamless, it is held together through acts of repair, remembrance, and intention.

Velvet Dyed Shibori Bag, Gina Gilbert, 2025, textile, 10 x 7 in. / 25.4 x 17.78 cm.

The Velvet Dyed Shibori Bag emphasizes process as meaning. Hand-dyed velvet silk, immersed in an indigo Shibori vat, bears organic, downward-flowing patterns that recall roots, shadows, or falling water. The dye penetrates unevenly, allowing chance to collaborate with control. Sewn into a pouch and lined with silk, then backed by cotton Shibori fabric, the object straddles utility and reverence. Indigo, historically tied to labor, trade, and spiritual symbolism, anchors the work within a global textile lineage. This bag does not merely hold objects; it holds evidence of time, touch, and transformation through making.

Across these three works, Gina Gilbert uses cloth, dye, and form as tools of cultural preservation. Whether through figurative sculpture or functional textile, each piece operates as a container for memory, personal, ancestral, and collective. Rites of Passage, Heirloom Fabric and “Abayomi” Doll, and Velvet Dyed Shibori Bag collectively assert that textiles are not passive materials; they are active carriers of history. In Gilbert’s practice, fabric remembers, objects speak, and making itself becomes an act of honoring what endures.

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