Artist Statement
My mission in life is to make visible the often-invisible, good realities around us. Through my tapestries, I highlight moments of beauty and hope that emerge in unexpected places—living details from daily life that are easily overlooked. It’s rare to find a stone wall without a small plant pushing through a crack, reaching for light and life. I grew up in a family of stone builders in Missouri, and my favorite childhood memories include playing on stacks of carved stone.
My series of tapestry stone walls was inspired by seeing sprouts poking through a split in a wall of rusted steel at a nearby park and by lyrics in Leonard Cohen’s song Anthem: “There is a crack in everything. That’s where the light comes in.” Often, those who see these tapestries later tell me about-- or show me a photo ---of a plant they would have never noticed, such as a sprout of plant growing out of a sewer lid.
The rough texture of these stones is intended to elicit a wish to touch them, as do stone walls. The color, size, shape and texture of each stone varies as do those in walls, yet together they create beauty and a background for hope. The plants are tiny but strong as they push through and out of the cracks to the light they need.
The tapestry of the beauty of clouds over beach snow is the first of a series.
Carroll Cradock 2025
Guiding Themes of My Work
PERSISTENCE • HOPE • NATURE • MAKING INVISIBLE VISIBLE •
About Carroll
Carroll Cradock began teaching herself to weave shortly after completing graduate school in psychology. Working first on a four-harness table loom and a rigid heddle loom, she was drawn from the outset not to functional textiles but to creating original tapestries. She designed both the images and the weaving structures herself, motivated by a desire to make something entirely her own after the limited creative freedom she experienced during graduate school. Over the past decade, she has expanded her skills through courses at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Chicago Weaving School. From the beginning, her work has featured multilayered compositions, often constructed from panels that interact visually to create depth and complexity.
Across the years, a consistent theme has guided Cradock’s weaving: revealing positive elements of the natural world that exist quietly within everyday life but are easily overlooked. Her tapestries aim to make visible small but meaningful signs of resilience, beauty, and hope. In earlier works, she created panels depicting the subtle beauty of fields glimpsed from train windows—passing landscapes that most people notice only briefly. More recently, she has explored the intricate texture and depth of tree bark, as seen in works such as Grove of Birch Tree Trunks, where close attention to surface, pattern, and variation reveals the quiet richness of the natural world.
This focus is especially evident in her series of tapestry stone walls. Inspired partly by childhood memories of growing up in a family of stone builders in Missouri and by Leonard Cohen’s lyric, “There is a crack in everything. That’s where the light comes in,” these works depict small plants pushing through cracks in stone—quiet symbols of persistence, renewal, and hope.