irladen is the design studio of artist, educator, and aspiring Master Gardener, Chloe Irla. Inspired by the awe and abundance of each growing season, irladen produces limited edition collections of designs including paintings, books, clothing, accessories, games, and home goods. Each piece in the collection documents a story of irladen's home or garden. As the seasons change, fresh inspiration blooms and new designs will be released.

This body of work is about maternal exhaustion, both my own and the broader experience of mothers and parents during the pandemic. But parental exhaustion was around before the pandemic thanks in part to the total market failure that is affordable child care and the expectation of women and mothers to “do it all” in both their home and work life. The early days of the pandemic, when everything shut down, suddenly made parents realize how important teachers are to caring for their children. But that appreciation for parents hasn’t been reciprocated, as parents such as myself were forced to juggle full time work with full time caregiving, all the while stressing about protecting our kids from a novel, deadly virus. I was fortunate to have the option of teaching from home and am fortunate to have a partner, unlike many others who dropped out of the workforce to care for their children or who don’t have a partner to help them. I simply don’t know how they did it. I began to track my time teaching and working from home, time spent monitoring my daughter’s virtual kindergarten, time doing chores and attending to matters at home.  I began collecting newspaper headlines that related to my own experience. The work in this show includes some of those headlines. For the first time in my life, I was so exhausted of using a computer after the spring 2021 semester that I returned to knitting as a medium that could occupy my hands. While creating this work, I imagined—although this isn’t so much of a stretch—a mother largely confined to her home, creating works of protest out of objects and materials around the house, such as bed sheets and blankets. She installs these works both inside and outside of the home as a call to action for change, help, flexibility, anything to make her feel seen. Then, she begins wearing these messages on her body. She translates her lived experiences into clothing—physical manifestations of the invisible weight and stress of her experience. 

Home Work is a multidisciplinary design project that presents the overwhelming nature of the invisible labor of trying to maintain both professional and personal obligations during a global pandemic. Since fall 2020, I've been creating design projects about my time teaching, working, and parenting from home. My worlds merged more than I would have liked them to during that time. I’ve created data visualizations that illustrate the overlap of my work time, time spent with my daughter, time spent making dinner and doing laundry, work meeting times, and my daughter’s virtual kindergarten time. I began knitting newspaper headlines that I bookmarked about the struggles of working mothers throughout the pandemic. Knitting is often associated with "women's work" and due to my own computer fatigue, I embraced the medium to begin creating large, wall-mounted pieces. I began creating typographic wearables like necklaces, scarves, and shawls that use terms that entered into our daily vernacular over the past year like VIP PARENT, WFHM (work from home mom), FACE-TO-FACE, LANGUISHING, and ZOOM. I designed posters and bumper stickers that simultaneously celebrate and remind working parents of their home, work, and life struggles. I was inspired by Joseph Beuys' Suit, fashion design brand Naomi Nomi, and Icelandic textile designer Yruari. My design choices were influenced by the typography in my neighborhood (which I got to know very well through multiple daily walks throughout the pandemic) and posts on Instagram from advertisers who, thanks to Instagram's powerful algorithms, identified me as a mother and thus promoted kitschy products to my demographic. With my wearables, I'm responding to the stereotype and "celebration" of tired, alcohol-dependent mothers through merchandise such as wine glasses or keychains in an attempt to make visible the trauma of trying to "do it all" while stuck at home. 

Acrylic paintings based on photographs taken of snowball stands throughout the Baltimore-metro area. This is an ongoing series that started in spring 2020.

From January 18, 2015 to January 18, 2016, I collected data about my daughter's first year of life and created digital, timeline-like drawings about her daily schedule. I tracked the times of each nursing session, pumping session, nightly sleep and morning wake-up, daytime nap, diaper, bath, bottle, and solid food acceptance. I began the project with hand-dyeing samples of wool, scanning the samples and adjusting them into digital files, and then arranging the “tiles” into blanket-like digital compositions.

Irene on Fridays is an in-progress series of paintings based on a photograph of myself and my late grandmother. More to come...

Pizza Party Twister occurred during the Field Day exhibition at Artscape 2014 in Baltimore, MD and has also been included in the group exhibition, "Subversive Play: Artists Challenging Mechanisms of Control," at Structura Gallery in Sofia, Bulgaria.

The official Twister rules state that Twister is “the perfect fun starter for every party.” I agree with this statement but believe that playing Twister on a giant, delicious looking pizza is a more effective way of beginning what one hopes will be a fun, friendly gathering.

The object of the game is simple: to outmaneuver all other opponents in placing one’s hands and feet on different types of pizza toppings (mushrooms, pepperoni, basil, and olives) as directed by the spinner. Players may participate as individuals or as teams. If one person on a team falls or touches an elbow or a knee to the pizza surface, the entire team loses–this is serious pizza stuff. The referee will use a spinner to determine on which topping participants should place their hands or feet. Players must remove their shoes to participate. Whenever one player falls or allows an elbow or knee to touch the pizza, that player is out and the game continues until only one participant stands victorious. The winner is awarded a handmade ceramic golden pizza slice and is dubbed a Pizza Twisting Legend.

The set­-up of the game includes a large circular vinyl mat resembling a pizza that rests on top of Astroturf carpeting to give the game an authentic backyard feel. This is also known as the Pizzarena. Signage includes information about the game’s schedule.

Pizza Party Twister is a means of bringing out the competitive spirit of participants, allowing one to flex their yoga and Pilates muscles while simultaneously inducing the urge to satisfy a craving for hot, delicious pizza.

This chapter of my Blaze Breakers series began with an exploration of the semiotics of hunting textiles, particularly camouflage patterns. The somewhat moronic juxtaposition of invisibility (camouflage) and visibility (blaze orange) within hunting textiles is fascinating to me: the hunter must wear blaze orange to communicate their presence to other hunters (I’m not a bear.), yet also wear camouflage as a cloaking device to blend in with their surrounding landscape. “The hunter” and “the hunted” in these works can be interpreted metaphorically to communicate general themes such as in/visibility, dis/appearance, and honesty: camouflage is an illusion, a visible lie, so is blaze orange truthful?

The Hunter and The Hunted: Made to Measure presents a lexicon of essential elements and principles that establish the foundation of The Hunter and The Hunted series. The elements and principles of The Hunter and The Hunted are light, warmth, surface, measurement, visibility, organization, transformation, honesty, history, and time. Most of the projects included in the exhibition at McDaniel College were created specifically for the Rice Gallery and are grounded in both institutional and personal memories: I was a McDaniel College student from 2005–2007 and am currently a full-time faculty member. The space that is now the Rice Gallery served as the College’s library from 1909–1961, and for the duration of this exhibition, serves as a library for this body of work. I felt it important to present the building blocks of The Hunter and The Hunted series in an academic setting instilled with its own foundational elements: the seven liberal arts.