Visual Art Portfolio
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Rex Cloud (2011; fabric, thread, ink, and paint; 50 × 96 inches)
Rex Cloud was part of Life Lasagna, the body of work I made for Prospect.2 New Orleans. Life Lasagna explored the cycle of life from birth to death, drawing from childhood memories, the landscape, the body, and the remains and traces we leave behind. I thought of the installation as layers of life between the sky and the earth. Rex Cloud occupied that upper realm of the installation.
The fabric came from vintage Rex Krewe Mardi Gras ball costumes that I cut apart and repurposed for the piece. I was interested in the history already embedded in the material, but also in letting it become something completely different. Rex Cloud feels one part underwater creature, one part spaceship, and one part cloud, hovering overhead as a strange presence within the larger landscape of Life Lasagna.
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Borrow Pit (2025; fabric and thread with acrylic underpainting on muslin; 111 × 106 in.)
This large landscape acts as a supporting character of sorts in this series. Speaking to the implied surface/subsurface content of the title of the exhibition. Things are not always as they seem. The landscape feels like a carved-out section of Delta region riverbank. The hollowed-out hole has been filled with the detritus of seeming generations of neighboring residents. This particular motif involving the dichotomy of surface/subsurface, above/below, is something I frequently return to in my work. Many of these objects depicted represent actual bits of objects I find anytime I dig a hole in my yard to plant a tree or put in a post. A testament to the rich lives of those who came before me on this land in my Lower Ninth ward home.
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Borrow Pit (detail)
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Bright, Dark, Dim, and Rogue (2026; fabric and thread on acrylic underpainting; 15’ x 15’)
The title of this installation comes from classifications of comets, how they’re described based on visibility and behavior. This behavior echoes the process in my work and a motif I return to often, building up, tearing down, erosion, and return. Things show up, burn bright, go quiet, fall off course, come back around again. This show moves across about fifteen years of work, but it doesn’t feel chronological to me. It feels more like layers, things building up, breaking down, and resurfacing in different forms. I keep coming back to the idea of above and below, what rises to the surface and what stays buried, and how those roles are always shifting.
Every piece starts the same way, with an underpainting on muslin. From there, I build the surface using reclaimed fabric, thread, and cording. I use a longarm quilting machine to draw into the work, almost like painting, but slower and more deliberate. I’ll stitch over an area, cover it up, bring it back, change it again. Nothing ever fully disappears. You can usually see traces of earlier decisions sitting just below the surface.
The materials matter. A lot of the fabric is salvaged or repurposed, so it already carries some kind of history before it gets to me. It’s not a blank slate. It’s more like I’m working with something that’s already lived a life and is willing to take on another one.
The teeth come from a similar place. They’re part of an ongoing body of work inspired by Holt Cemetery. It’s a pauper’s cemetery here in New Orleans, and I’ve spent a lot of time there over the years. The graves are reused. The ground gets opened up again and again. Bones make their way back to the surface. Teeth especially, they hold up. They’re like these small, stubborn markers of a body that’s otherwise gone. I think of them as exposed bones, little remnants that refuse to fully disappear. In this show, they’re laid out at ground level, almost like they’ve just surfaced, like newly bloomed spring wildflowers.
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Viale Dell’Uccelliera (2022; fabric and thread with acrylic underpainting; 56 × 85 inches)
Viale Dell’Uccelliera is based on photographs I took in Rome in 2018, along a tree-lined road in the Villa Borghese gardens.
I made the piece not long after finishing Shape-Memory, a body of work in which I had moved much further into abstraction, working with exaggerated color, simplified forms, and materials that were transformed, cut apart, recombined, charred, and reconfigured. When I returned to a recognizable landscape image with Viale Dell’Uccelliera, some of that freedom stayed with me.
The road, trees, and foliage remain grounded in a specific place, but I pushed the color well beyond what was present in the reference photographs. The greens became more acidic, the darks more intense, and the shifts between warm and cool color more pronounced. The textile surface also allowed me to treat the foliage and tree trunks as interlocking shapes and fields of texture rather than simply describing them literally.
In that sense, the piece sits between two parts of my practice: observation and abstraction. It begins with a real place I photographed, but the finished work is shaped just as much by color, material, and the physical act of constructing the image.
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Gina Phillips is a New Orleans-based mixed-media narrative artist. She grew up in rural Central Kentucky and has lived in New Orleans since 1995. The imagery, stories, characters, and landscapes of both places have long influenced her work. In 2004, Phillips bought a home in New Orleans' Lower Ninth Ward. One year later, the house was seriously damaged by Hurricane Katrina, forcing her to leave New Orleans for a year and beginning a two-year rebuilding process. The experience marked an epochal shift in her work, leading her to more closely explore time, place, and geography.
Originally trained as a painter, Phillips developed a textile-based practice combining acrylic underpainting with appliquéd fabric and thread. Using a longarm sewing machine as a drawing tool, she creates densely stitched surfaces that move between painting, drawing, and textile processes. Her work often brings the landscapes of Kentucky and Southeast Louisiana together, exploring home, memory, and histories embedded in the land.
Phillips received a BFA from the University of Kentucky and an MFA from Tulane University. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including in State of the Art: Discovering American Art Now at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and Prospect.2 New Orleans. She presented her Friends and Neighbors portraits at VOLTA8 during Art Basel in Basel, Switzerland. In 2026, the Ohr-O'Keefe Museum of Art presented her solo exhibition Bright, Dark, Dim, and Rogue, a survey spanning approximately fifteen years of her work, and the Alexandria Museum of Art featured her work in Now You See Me: Contemporary Portraiture in Louisiana. Other exhibitions have included the New Orleans Museum of Art, Ogden Museum of Southern Art, 21c Museum, Ballroom Marfa, and Pepperdine University. Her work is held in numerous public and private collections, including Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, New Orleans Museum of Art, Ogden Museum of Southern Art, and the Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation. For information about work available for exhibition or purchase, please contact Ferrara Showman Gallery.