FELIX BEAUDRY’S STITCH FIGURES

Felix Beaudry estimates that he’s got over 300 pounds of wool in his studio waiting to go through his industrial Stoll knitting machine, the kind usually used by massive corporations to make things like those knit sneaker uppers that have become trendy in recent years. Beaudry uses his machine, however, to make massive soft sculptures, collapsing the entire process –— design to production — into a solo operation in his studio, resulting in fabric that’s 50 inches wide but can be any length and can take anywhere between 22 minutes and four-plus hours to knit. Beaudry stitches these massive pieces of fabric together and then stuffs them with polyfillor foam, creating figures of gargantuan proportions — all wonky heads and long, spindly limbs — which he showcases alongside intricate tapestries that look like they’re telling stories from lost epic poems. He installs these figures in ways that approximate motion, positioning arms, legs, heads, and hands around the space to create a certain narrative. Take the figures of The Glob Mother and Lazy Boy, shown at Tony Cox’s mini-biennial at Club Rhubarb last year — their reclined forms twist and intertwine, evoking intimacy and inertia — or the dynamic feet, heads, and hand-tufted torsos recently shown at Salon 94. “I was even making heads in high school. There’s something about using the textile, which is basically just skin, to approximate everything that’s underneath that’s a metaphor that I feel like I need to keep working on,” Beaudry says. “It feels like the boundary between how you encounter the world and your body, or how your identity shows up,” he says.