Jodi Colella

Interview with Katie Bonadies, April 2025

Pictured: Jodi Colella. Image courtesy of the artist.

Jodi Colella is a sculptor of objects and large installations that have an overlapping discourse in craft, domesticity, politics, and feminism. She uses mostly soft materials, fibers, and recycled textiles. A couple of years ago she got into clay and started making hybrid sculptures with clay and fiber. She also works with metals and fibers and teaches fiber technique. She loves to learn the process of things and then apply it. Jodi creates art because it makes her feel heard. She has been a member of Running With Scissors for two years.

Her interest in fiber arts stems from childhood, growing up in a family of knitters and seamstresses. One of Jodi’s favorite memories is spending summers at her family beach cottage. They would swim all day until they were freezing and sit on the rocks to warm up. Boys and girls alike would take out their Wonder Bread bags containing their knitting and pencils used as knitting needles. Jodi feels histories in craft are important. She loves the stories of humanity that come with these histories, “During the Irish famine women supported their families by learning to crochet lace from missionaries and created their own cottage industry.” Stories like how overboard sailors were identified by the family gansey sweater patterns knit into the yoke.

Colella, Jodi. Herman Ray. (Front.) Fiber and clay.

Despite her family history, Jodi came to be a fiber artist circuitously. She had earned a degree in biology and started in research. Her art at the time looked globular and organic because she was interested in cellular biology and the systems of life. Then she got a certificate in graphic design and had a business for 20 years. When she quit, she went back to school for fine art. She learned painting and printmaking and had a painting show at a museum in Massachusetts but didn’t enjoy the experience. Afterward, Jodi decided to take a break to play with her materials and see what happened. That’s when she started to make her fiber sculptures. 

Her work has evolved to include the polemic, social tensions, and feminist themes like in her headwear collection that hides faces and speaks to the invisibility and visibility of women. She also made a series of figurines bound and wrapped with fibers called 'Mary Janes' that speaks to her mid-century girlhood. She likes to use her foundational knowledge to subvert traditional methods and use nontraditional materials to create her objects. She is led by curiosity, and the work is the result of the material and her knowledge of technique, "Give me a material and I will nudge around with it until I get something that is resonating with whatever is going on in here." She'll have a feeling and a concept that she's going for, but she doesn't sketch how her installations will look. She starts with curiosity and lets the material develop in ways she cannot predict.

Jodi never planned to work in clay. She says she wasn't one of those artists who generated a whole new body of work during the pandemic. She felt like she was flailing, and clay gave her an avenue to try new things. She took a class and as soon as she got her hands on the clay, she knew the tactile qualities and started thinking through the hands’ transfer of ideas. “It was all there for me, I was able to tap into all my previous sculptural experience. But don’t ask me to make a mug or a bowl; I’ve tried.” Being able to mold things and let it happen organically is conducive to her process. She’s fascinated by how clay is a hard material that can look soft in their rounded and bulbous forms.

Colella, Jodi. OVA sculptures. Clay and fiber. Image credit: Bret Woodard.

Colella, Jodi. OVA sculptures. Clay and fiber. Image credit: Bret Woodard.

Then she begins incorporating fiber. Jodi's process is very improvisational. She will pinch the clay until she finds the form it wants to be. It isn't until the clay part is finished that she will then start to think about the fiber aspect. "The fiber has to work in a way to finish the sentence, not as a separate entity. They have to work together, and I had to figure out what the meaning was. Material has a lot to do with that." She is able to do this because she is so familiar with her materials and techniques. The result was a series of hybrid sculptures called "But It Doesn't Hold Water", a comingling of soft and hard that creates confusion. People looking at them couldn't tell what was soft and what was hard unless they touched them. The show was a personal, internal retrospection.

In 2020 Jodi started teaching herself how to weave by watching YouTube videos. Last year she added a large upright two-harness weaving loom from the 70s to her collection of looms. Once she put it together, she created her first ‘Word Weave’, a series of tapestries with different woven inscriptions. The first one she made, which is still in process, is 20 feet long and says “Overturned”. It’s going to be a rug that you stomp on. Other word weaves read “Corpulent Clam” or “Large Blister”. Her works feel simultaneously humorous and threatening, which creates a sense of uneasiness.

The ‘word weaves’ were inspired by a 1920s card game similar to Mad Libs. “I started looking at the phrases on the cards and realized they have really snarky connotations for what’s going on right now.” She didn’t know why weaving was the medium at the time. Sometimes she has to make a few pieces in a series before she knows what she’s doing. “It’s an uncomfortable phase of the process because I’m following my gut and having fun, and I have no idea if it’s relevant or if it matters.” Then the work comes together. When she started the word weaves, Jodi had been unearthing the history and stories of how women use craft to hide subversive language, to find their voice in places where they are not given space.

Colella, Jodi. Stinger. Metal and fiber. Photo courtesy of the artist.

Jodi’s recent work includes her OVA installation of hybrid fiber and clay sculptures for an exhibition entitled “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction”, named for the essay by Ursula K. Le Guin. The installation mirrors Le Guin’s refocusing the story of human origin by redefining technology as a carrier bag rather than a weapon of domination. The installation shows the carrier bag and how artists respond to Le Guin’s essay. For Jodi, the OVA are holders of potential showing the interiority of roles traditionally assigned to women. The installation is part of a group show for the Gather Fiber Symposium in Boston this April, of which Jodi is an organizer.

Jodi Colella will be giving an artist talk during the opening reception for “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction" exhibit on April 11, 2025, at NAVE Gallery in Somerville, MA. Jodi’s work is also in a show entitled “Elemental” at Flinn Gallery in Greenwich, CT. Her work can be found locally in “Trace”, a show at the Maine Museum of Photographic Arts this April.  

To learn more, contact Jodi Colella by email, jodicolella@gmail.com, or through her website, jodicolella.com.