It wasn’t creating the artwork that challenged fiber artist Phượng-Duyên Hải Nguyễn as she prepared for New City Arts’ January 2024 SOUP competition. It was the audience.
“I’m terrified of public speaking,” she says. “I’m terrified of being perceived by others in general, and ideally I’d like to stay in a corner and make things in relative peace and quiet.”
In the process of competing at SOUP, a semi-annual community dinner series to create a crowdfunded grant for a Charlottesville-area artist, Nguyễn faced her public-speaking fears. With the support of friends and speaking coaches, and lots of practice, she delivered her pitch—for a new installation, her largest yet—and took home $4,235, SOUP’s biggest grant to date.
“Nowhere” by Phượng-Duyên Hải Nguyễn. Image courtesy of the artist.
The common thread throughout Nguyễn’s fiber constructions is a geometry that lends structure and evokes resilience in the pieces. Some are gauzy, drapey nets of thread and cloth, both fragile and strong, and other collections, like “Constructions,” displayed at the Welcome Gallery in 2020, provoke the mind with fuzzy abstract sculptures that pop with imaginative colors, objects, and textures.
A 2015 UVA graduate, Nguyễn started out pre-med, but left with a B.A. in studio arts and art history. “I walked into my first chem class, eyes glazed over the syllabus, and realized I’d rather go outside and draw,” she says.
Art provided Nguyễn a sense of place and familiarity, something that was sometimes hard to find as an immigrant from Vietnam who arrived in the United States as a teenager. Wanting to fit in, but finding herself stuck between cultures, she says she turned to art to carve out her own space and find comfort.
Her fiber installations are a road map to solace, and finding it, whether in a physical place or inside ourselves. “My work is ultimately about home—what it takes to build/rebuild a home, to process the loss of and longing for a homeland, to build a life while yearning to belong,” she says. “As much as my work speaks to loss and longing, I want it to also convey hope and healing. And that’s why I sew because I think of sewing as a tender and healing act.”
