Ming Pao: Hong Kong

Fanny Allié: A Modern Scavenger

By Lin QiQing

June 20, 2025

Fanny Allié is a mixed-media artist from Montpellier, France, who has lived in New York for nearly two decades. She primarily works with recycled fabrics, using a sewing machine to create collaged compositions. Unlike traditional quilt-making, which emphasizes geometric design and clean lines, her approach to cutting and stitching is free and spontaneous, preserving the frayed edges and rough textures of the cloth. Her work features figures in various poses and textures, with layered compositions and delicate stitching that create connections and tensions between the characters.

Over the past few years, I’ve come across Fanny’s work in many exhibitions around New York. This year, I participated in a program for supporting immigrant artists organized by the New York Foundation for the Arts, where Fanny happened to be one of the mentors. That gave me the chance to visit her studio and learn more about her creative process up close.

Her studio is located in Midtown Manhattan, filled with all kinds of fabric, with a Singer sewing machine sitting on the table. Fanny is slender, wearing a simple dark-colored T-shirt. In addition to her own artistic practice, she currently also works as a French teacher. She told me that her first encounter with art began when she was a teenager, as she fell in love with photography and often took photos of her sisters. She later studied videography in college. But after moving to New York, she shifted to working with fabric and sewing machine, developing her techniques entirely through self-teaching and experimentation.

This spring, she held a solo exhibition titled A Longing at Kaliner Gallery in New York. One of the pieces in the show was not mounted on the wall but suspended in the space, allowing viewers to walk around and clearly see the irregular stitching left on the back by the sewing machine. The piece was built on a base of plastic mesh, collaged with distorted, struggling, and stretching human figures: one figure bent like a shrimp; another contorted magician-like into a small black rectangle, leaving only two legs sticking out. In other works, she uses similar techniques— cutting out elongated figures, crisscrossing legs, scattered stones and vases—where the expressions of the characters are often elusive. These figures are only loosely connected. Many scenes and spaces seem compressed onto a single piece of fabric, like a stage set, where no clear boundary exists between space and figure—they merge into one another.

Fanny mostly chooses soft, natural earth tones for her fabrics, rarely using bright colors. Many of her materials come from Materials for the Arts, a New York nonprofit that provides donated secondhand supplies to artists and cultural organizations. New York is indeed a scavenger’s paradise. In this city and country of overproduction and overconsumption, secondhand materials alone are enough for artistic creation.

Creating meaning from these limited, discarded materials is the artist’s game. Fanny doesn’t sketch beforehand; she starts directly by composing with whatever fabrics are at hand, improvising intuitively, adjusting as she goes. She says that she sees herself as a modern scavenger, collecting fragments left behind by herself and others, and exploring their connections to the body, the sense of belonging, and passage.

Lin Qiqing is a textile artist based in New York City.