Maya Skylark

Maya Skylark (Critchfield) (she/her) 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 and mending 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.”

Cover image: Maya Skylark, Abandoned laundry line, thrifted clothing, gold paint. 2014. (Photo by Dru Colbert)