Artist Bio
Greta Coalier’s practice operates at the intersection of memory, material, and contemporary femininity. Her work—primarily painting and textile-based—embodies a quiet rigor: intuitive, honest, and deliberately constructed. Each piece is rooted in a politics of care—for the body, for history, and for the often-invisible labor carried by women. Without resorting to sentimentality, Coalier transforms domestic materials into vessels of protection, resilience, and resistance—building armor from thread, softness from structure, and presence from what is often overlooked.
Born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri, she grew up with access to public museums and libraries that nurtured her early fascination with both visual art and the natural world. She began sewing in childhood and developed an expansive studio practice integrating painting, handwork, and sculptural forms. Coalier received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1999. She currently lives and works in St. Louis, where her work continues to explore the aesthetics and politics of care, containment, and survival.
Artist Statement
From an early age, handwork became a tool of survival in spaces that demanded silence, obedience, and vigilance. I use cloth, color, and form to map internal landscapes and external systems—how we absorb control, survive it, and resist. Domestic materials and patterns, often dismissed as decorative, become in my hands a language of refusal and repair. I incorporate fabrics from my own life alongside salvaged textiles—ghost traces of unpaid, gendered labor—combined with plaster, watercolor, and mixed media to create surfaces that record submission, adaptation, and pushback. I explore fugitive colors—those that fade or shift—as a metaphor for memory, trauma, and impermanence; their instability reflects the hidden and resurfacing nature of pain. My sculptural series Obedience Units, built through repetitive gestures like stitching and knotting, began in stillness and now resist containment. What once complied now asserts itself—material intelligence over spectacle, emotional labor made visible.
You can also find my work at Union Studio
