Lauren Januhowski - Paris, Sewn Monotypes and Embroidery

Fabric here is not background. It holds figures, female, layered, sometimes solid and sometimes nearly gone, against patchwork fields assembled from printed and treated cloth. What Lauren Januhowski builds through sewing and embroidery is a surface that records and transmits at once.

The transparency is structural. Organza layers over satin. The layers of transparent fabric suggest physical as well as emotional depth, what lies beneath is not hidden but held. This is what ritual does in fabric: it makes the present moment permeable to what came before.

Each stitch is a decision made by hand. What the hand decides, the hand can pass on.

Passage of Transfer (2024) carries this argument in its title. Built from bead and sequin embroidery with satin and organza appliqué, it holds layered female figures against a geometric patchwork interior, two bodies in the same space at different distances from the surface. The embroidery techniques entered Januhowski's practice during a residency at the Kalhath Foundation in Lucknow in late 2024, where she worked directly with local artisans. The work that emerged from that exchange is not documentation of a process but a record of what passed between hands.

The patchwork background is not decoration. Quilt logic, blocks of color joined at seams, each patch carrying its own print and opacity, runs through all of Januhowski's work as both formal strategy and inherited vocabulary. The quilt was the thing American women made to say something without being heard.

The fabrics in these works carry images absorbed into cloth, gestures and surfaces that belong to print but have become structural to the textile. Supported Submersion, Tangled Webs, Collecting Cards, each extends the same premise, the sewn surface as a place where a body and its history can occupy the same plane.

Continuity of Presence (2025), shown at the Abbaye de Maubuisson, takes this to architectural scale. Female figures, reading, wrap around the full circumference of a tall cylinder installed in a medieval room. They do not stop at any edge. They continue.

Januhowski trained at Cooper Union in New York, graduating in 2015, then at the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, earning her Masters in the Printed Image track with highest honors in 2020.

Based in Paris, her recent solo at Galerie Bim Bam and her inclusion in Mandorla, Les Métamorphoses du Sacré at the Abbaye de Maubuisson, on view through March 2026, trace a practice that keeps expanding its scale without letting go of the intimacy a single stitch requires.

What the quilt holds, the stitch decides.

Lauren Januhowski on Instagram

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