Girls From Mars (36x36 inches)

Hand-sewn fiber artwork: silk on silk, metallic, cotton,
and hemp floss with cotton and metallic thread.

Reproduced here with artist’s permission from
Joyful Art Quilting on Facebook (7 June 2019).

The Colors of a 12-String Guitar (34x48 inches)

Hand-sewn fiber artwork: silk and cotton on linen with
hemp, cotton, and metallic thread and floss.

Reproduced here with artist’s permission from
her website, Living Out Loud (21 June 2019).

Girls Just Want to have Fun, With a Nod to Cindy Lauper, Miriam Shapiro,
Judy Chicago, Ariel Pink and the 140,000,000 Women
with Genital Mutilation (16.5 x 20.25 inches)

Hand-sewn fiber artwork: linen, silk, polyester, cotton,
metallic thread and floss, cotton thread and floss.

Reproduced here with artist’s permission from
her website, Living Out Loud (15 November 2018).

Geri Hahn, Fiber Artist

Image appears here with permission.

Geri Hahn

As a self-taught fiber artist, Geri Hahn is a synesthete* whose cross-neural wiring compels her to “see” and “taste” visual patterns in her emotional responses to physical pain and pleasures, science, or political news, written language and grammar, and all noises and music. The strongest patterns she sees are sound-inspired. All sounds are composed of timbres, pitches, and volumes that have shape, texture, color, and exist in her visual mental landscape over time; thus, she never lacks inspiration. Imagine this as a natural, omnipresent high, similar to the way those who take psychedelic drugs talk about their experience.

In her world of over-stimulation, the act of producing art, the physical connection with materials, provides Hahn with focus and comfort, an escape, a personal place, or zone, of lovely quiet. Because what she “sees” are super-saturated colors, her work is brightly colored. When hand sewing fabric, she prefers the textures of silk and linen with elements of shiny metallic floss and thread. The tactility, structure, and sheen of the fabric and thread form an integral part of how she engages with her senses and emotions. Geri hopes that viewers can experience some of the joy that her artmaking provides to her.

Her art has been exhibited in various art galleries and public spaces in the metro Tri-State Region (NY, NJ, and CT), including the New Britain Museum of American Art, Trenton City Museum, the Montclair Art Museum, Stockton University Noyes Museum, New Jersey Institute of Technology, Ramapo College of New Jersey, Seton Hall University, and Lafayette College; as well as internationally at The Museum of Moscow (Moscow, Russia) and at the University of Granada (Granada, Spain).

Artist’s website:
Living Out Loud: The Art of Geri Hahn

* What It’s Like to See Sound: 10 Questions answered by Geri Hahn for Vice Media on YouTube (28 May 2022)