Coley’s textile books often examine how cultural memory is carried, fractured, and repaired through material form. Her work brings attention to overlooked histories and asks how physical, moral, and psychological struggle can be translated through cloth, stitch, and structure.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Coley continued developing socially engaged work. In addition to designing posters for Baltimore Center Stage’s 2020–21 season, she began Love Sonnets, from Shakespeare to Baltimore, a project inspired by conversations with Baltimore City Public School middle school students. The project responds to the exclusion of Shakespeare from many classrooms serving inner-city students, challenging the assumption that canonical literature belongs only to certain audiences.

Supported by a 2020 grant from the Robert W. Deutsch Foundation, Love Sonnets, from Shakespeare to Baltimore uses Shakespeare’s sonnets to create a dialogue between past and present. Through patchwork quilts, fragments of wedding dresses, and hand-bound textile books, Coley approaches Shakespeare’s language as a shared cultural inheritance rather than an elite possession. The books become both acts of interpretation and calls for greater educational equity.

Writings and essays: Coded Threads (Substack)

Love Sonnets from Shakespeare to Baltimore brings Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets into dialogue with recycled wedding dresses, historic quilts, and original printmaking to create contemporary couture textile books. The series is shaped by the sonnet’s 14-line structure, its balance of logic and emotion, and the cultural histories embedded in cloth.

By transforming wedding dresses from the 1930s through the 1970s into book pages, Coley explores how fabric holds memory, ritual, and social meaning. Through cutting, dyeing, painting, stitching, and collage, the textiles are deconstructed and recomposed into clean, intentional forms. Baltimore’s quilting and needlework traditions deepen the project’s connection to place and community.

Screen-printed sonnets, linocuts, and layered prints interact with these materials to create tactile readings of Shakespeare’s language. Each page becomes a dialogue between literature, textile history, and fashion, offering a contemporary and multi-sensory response to the sonnets.

Writings and Essays: Coded Threads (Substack)

All I Have is a textile book about memory, inheritance, and the emotional weight carried by cloth. In this work, fabric becomes more than material; it becomes evidence of what has been kept, altered, and passed forward.

The book brings together textile fragments, stitch, and hand-bound structure to consider how personal and cultural histories live inside ordinary materials. Each page holds traces of labor and care, suggesting that what we carry with us is not always grand or complete. Sometimes it is a fragment, a remnant, a pattern, a gesture, or a piece of cloth transformed by touch.

Through the intimacy of the handmade book, All I Have asks how memory survives through material form. The work treats fabric as a record of experience, and the book as a place where those records can be gathered, held, and read.

Writings and Essays: Coded Threads (Substack)

A work of art is a refined and intensified form of experience. In this book, I use African textiles from the National Museum of African Art Library as both material and narrative. These finely handwoven and hand-printed fabrics carry histories beyond decoration or wearability; they hold cultural memory, social meaning, and stories worth preserving.

By marrying the book form to textiles as page material, I argue that fabric can be read. The history of each textile becomes part of the structure of the book, adding layers of meaning that are cultural, personal, and tactile. Cloth becomes more than surface; it becomes evidence, archive, and voice.

This work grew out of a year-long project with African textiles from the National Museum of African Art. Conversations with scholars from Congo, Benin, and Nigeria deepened my understanding of how textiles carry knowledge across cultures, and how artists, historians, and readers may encounter fabric as a living form of storytelling.

Writings and Essays: Coded Threads (Substack)

Why make books? I love books. I am drawn to their history, intimacy, and authority as handmade objects. For centuries, books were precious, carefully crafted forms: held, read, collected, protected, and passed on.

In my own work, I continue that tradition through textile bookmaking. I have replaced handmade paper with handwoven, embroidered, and luxury textiles because cloth brings its own memory, texture, and dimensionality to the page. Fabric is never blank in the same way paper can be blank. It carries touch, pattern, labor, and history.

Each stitch adds surface and depth. Each page moves differently in the reader’s hands. Even people who rarely think about paper recognize fabric through lived experience: clothing, bedding, ceremony, inheritance, and home. For me, the textile book makes reading tactile, intimate, and embodied.

Writings and Essays: Coded Threads (Substack)

The fine vintage velvets and rare hand-loomed linens in See Us are innately tactile and relatable.   The fabrics move and mold themselves in the hands of the reader.  Even people who never or rarely work with paper will recognize the textures of fabric from their own experiences.  It was important to preserve the history and story behind each piece of fabric while creating new stories.  

Writings and Essays: Coded Threads (Substack)


 

Asymmetrical Zeal is part of a larger year-long project that was inspired by African textiles I received from the National Museum of African Art Library.  One of the textiles I was given was beautiful, but couldn't be printed on.  It resisted every paint, ink, stain, and dye.  I was amazed at its durability and strength.  During one of my visits  to the museum I explained that I couldn't really work with the fabric, and it was different than anything I had ever seen.  One of the curators told me that it had been woven with the thinnest strands of copper.   Copper gave it its beautiful shine and made it tough.  

With this in mind, I created Asymmetrical Zeal.  I wanted to show the strength of the textiles.  

Writings and Essays: Coded Threads (Substack)
 

This mixed media textile book project was inspired by African textiles I received from the National Museum of African Art Library.  Goats is an exploration of the inextricable ties between man and the environment. In desperate times, how do people find hope and inspiration? 

Writings and Essays: Coded Threads (Substack)