Elizabeth Whelan

For the month of August, the library will be showing the art of Elizabeth Whelan, a designer and inventor of woven fabrics. Her fourteen-year collaboration with industrial designed Niels Diffrient required her to create textiles that give equal weight to performance, function, and aesthetics. The textiles that she created were an integral part of his successful ergonomic seating line for Humanscale. This approach has led her to more forward-thinking textiles and to clients across industries, including Nike, Tumi, and Knoll. When she returned to Maine in 2014, she found like minded creators at AFFOA (Cambridge, MA), where she received awards to create a fabric women with LED fiber that enables it to be a communication device.

Experimentation is an essential tool. All the work displayed here, with the exception of Leatherweave and Luminesce are created by hand. They are prototypes or studies for fabric that will go into production, and show the process she employs in the studio: drawing, painting, weaving, dyeing and spinning yarns by hand and then preparing a prototype for production. Whelan’s fabrics are in production on four continents and sold worldwide.

Her national and international awards, fellowships, and grants, include the 2023-24 Rome Prize fellow in Design at the American Academy in Rome and the 2024 Helen Metcalf Visionary Award from the Rhode Island School of Design. She holds utility patents in the US and Europe, she lectures, teachers, and critiques worldwide. Her work is in the permanent collection of the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum.

Elizabeth lives and works in Brooklin, Maine

For more information, please visit elizabethwhelandesign.com or send her an email.