BIOGRAPHY
Nora Croft is a Brooklyn-based fiber artist and haircutting specialist whose practice connects hair and textiles as related sculptural languages. After two decades of shaping hair through movement, texture, tension, and touch, she began a self-directed practice in rug tufting and textile sculpture in 2022.
Using industrial rug-tufting tools, Croft combines conventional yarn with unconventional and discarded fibers to create tactile works that move between painting, sculpture, and functional object. Her approach is informed by aphantasia, sensory perception, her Pacific Northwest upbringing, and the histories carried by everyday materials.
CV
Selected exhibitions and presentations:
Chicago Art Fair with Galeria Azur, Chicago (2026, forthcoming)
Super Secret Projects, Beacon, New York
Hyperbole, Beacon, New York
Myrtle Wombat, Brooklyn, New York.
Croft’s work is held in private collections.
STATEMENT
I have aphantasia, the inability to picture things internally. A near-death experience and coma at age five forever changed me. It’s impossible to know whether the seizures preceding it nuked my “mind’s eye” or whether I was born without one. It still blows my mind that most people can visualize.
Without internal imagery, I navigate life using spatial, tactile, and emotional intuition. I eavesdrop on the conversations between my body, my surroundings, and the senses that connect them. Together, these exchanges filter the optical illusion we collectively agree is “reality” into something I can comprehend and recall. I also use AI as a conversational medium to interrogate my interior world in relation to the collective human consciousness embedded in language and art.
I design in 2D, then tuft through a fabric membrane, creating a 3D painting in various piles and heights…which I later sculpt. I have tremendous fun moving ideas between dimensions with my hands. I work with traditional yarn and any unconventional “fiber” that can survive passing through the eye of my gun. I am drawn to the drama created when it spits out an unfamiliar material, each with its own history and associations. The result is equal parts natural, unnatural, and supernatural.
Like a haircut, my work is meant to be touched, lived with, and experienced through a different compositional filter every day. It morphs with light, shadow, movement, time, and the hands that encounter it.
