Imaginal Stitching

Barbara Murak’s diverse body of work emerges from a dimension where dreams, memory, mysticism, and connections to ancestors intersect with physical human experience. This enables her to work intuitively, creating works held together by, and at times composed entirely of, sewing machine thread.

Her new exhibition, Imaginal Stitching: Creations in Thread by Barbara Murak, opens August 28, 2026, with a reception from 6–8 PM at Hunt Art Gallery. The exhibition will remain on view through October 14, 2026, concluding with an artist talk at 12 PM.

Through machine embroidery, discharged and painted textiles, quilts, natural silk cocoons, horsehair, raffia, knitted yarn, and water-soluble substrates that dissolve to reveal hardened networks of thread, Murak transforms her materials into richly textured landscapes, shadows, ruffles, rolls, and deeply personal compositions that awaken her spiritual awareness and personal insight.

“I don’t sketch; I just begin. It comes so fast, I don’t want to lose those thoughts. The sculptural possibility of the textile itself triggers the creation.”

For Murak, stitching is both language and structure: a form of drawing, writing, sculpting, and recording thoughts. Delicate threads become resilient surfaces, while fragile materials such as natural silk cocoon shells are hand-sewn with stiff upholstery thread, creating a dynamic tension between strength and vulnerability that highlights the fragility of nature and relationships. Invisible stitching accentuates watercolored surfaces; needle lace forms strong bonds across gaps in fabric; and “gazillions” of embroidered marks accumulate into intricate compositions, revealing a tension between what is visible and what is held together beneath the surface.

Murak’s playful titles—Hung Up on You, In the Garden, Dangling, and Flamenco—invite viewers into works that balance humor with reflection. Memories of family cottages, travels to Beijing, and inherited traditions of sewing intertwine with broader themes of healing, resilience, and human connection. Her journal pieces unfold as embroidered streams of consciousness, while works created in support of bipolar disorder awareness reflect her belief in art’s capacity to foster healing, empathy, and understanding.

In Murak’s hands, stitching becomes more than a method of construction—it is a way of holding memory, repairing absence, connecting disparate parts, and giving form to thoughts too fleeting for words.

She earned a BA in Art & Design from SUNY Empire State College (Buffalo, NY) in 2000 and an MS in Creative Art Therapy from Nazareth College (Rochester, NY) in 2008. Murak was Artist-in-Residence at Roswell Park Cancer Institute in 2013, creating artwork bedside with patients or in waiting areas with family and caregivers to help relieve their stress and anxiety. Many projects involve textile arts with several patient-made quilts currently hanging in the hospital.

Her prize-winning work has been featured in numerous national and international juried exhibitions and is represented in public, corporate, and private collections in the United States, Canada, China, South Korea, the Philippines, Germany, England, Australia, South Africa, and India.