about
Maya Critchfield is a writer, textile artist, and educator living and working in Southern Maine, USA. She works with found and damaged clothing and textiles to explore care, repair, and material value. Her written work combines the rich imagery and metaphors of both textiles and the natural world to explore transformation, death, grief, and renewal.
Maya has been teaching sewing, mending, and zine making workshops throughout New England since 2017. To book a workshop, please send a note through the contact page.
To stay up to date with her work and writing you can subscribe to her newsletter here.
artist statement
“My work with textiles often feels like a conversation with grief and joy. I find myself treasuring fraying fabrics with unknown origins and watching them slowly decay as I wear them or use them in my home. I have lived with a chronic illness for half of my life, and over the years I have felt so much grief and shame surrounding the limitations I come up against because of it. But when I take the time to repair my clothes in the face of decay, I embrace the fragility and ephemerality of their existence, and by doing so, confront, reflect upon, and accept the fragility of my own life. Caring for clothes is one of the most potent ways I take care of myself. This soft work is a way of holding space for hard things.”
NEWS
My new poetry book Little Death Poems is available for order here on my shop.
“Little Death Poems is a my poetical diary from 2020-2022. While the title is a stab at levity, many of the poems do deal directly with death, loss, and transformation. Organized into 3 parts, the collection is grounded in the rich and sensual landscapes (both physical and emotional) that I inhabited during a 3-year period. Each part is introduced with an essay written in the corresponding year, and the narrative weaves in and out of linearity like a spiral, using memories and recurring seasonal phenomena as waypoints. Both deadly serious and lighthearted, I explore mundane moments with gravity and approach difficult topics with playfulness as a means of catharsis.”
solo exhibitions
Artist Curated Book Display, Book Display and Solo Exhibition, Portsmouth Public Library, Portsmouth, NH 10/18
Make/Wear/Mend, Solo Exhibition, Blum Gallery College of the Atlantic | 4/16
Art of the Book, Solo Exhibition, College of the Atlantic, Bar Harbor, ME | 3/14
group exhibitions
Home Warming, Group Exhibition, 82Parris, Portland, ME 4/23
Senescence, Group Exhibition, Hopkins Wharf Gallery, North Haven, ME 9/22
Trash and Textiles, Runway and Group Exhibition, Wrong Brain, Dover, NH 3/20
A Woman’s Place, Group Exhibition, Chocolate Church Arts Center, Bath, ME 5/18
Senior Project Group Exhibition, Blum Gallery, College of the Atlantic, Bar Harbor, ME | 5/16
Advanced Projects, Group Exhibition, College of the Atlantic, Bar Harbor, Maine 11/14
Activating Spaces, Group Exhibition, Artemis Gallery, Northeast Harbor, Maine 11/14
Carnet de Voyage, Group Exhibition, Pôle Universitaire, Vichy, FR | 4/14
publication + talks
Oysters, Maine Sunday Telegram 9/26
Artist Talk at Elm City Small Press Fest 11/24
An Ode to Hunter’s Orange, Maine Sunday Telegram, 11/22
Blueberry Denim, Wovenutopia, Spring/Summer Issue 5, 2022
Unearthed, Wovenutopia, Spring/Summer Issue 5, 2022
Heartmender, Sewing Tutorial, PomPom Quarterly, Issue 34, Autumn 2020
Dandelions, Maine Sunday Telegram, 5/18
awards + press
2026 Creative Fellow at Maine Women Writers Collection
Maine Women Magazine, “Darn It”, 9/19
Maya teaching a darning workshop at Misha & Puff, 2022.