"...hitched to everything..."
Sherry Tseng Hill
Thursday, April 9, 2026
- Sunday, July 5, 2026
Central Library - 710 W. César Chávez St.
Gallery (2nd Floor Southwest)
About the Exhibit
"When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe." ~ John Muir
In this exhibition "...hitched to everything...", Sherry Tseng Hill explores the intricate connections within our natural environment by highlighting the tiny things that often go unnoticed, discarded, or even feared, yet play a crucial role in sustaining our world, such as fungi, slime molds, insects, and decaying leaves.
These small decomposers, pollinators, and food sources help maintain soil health, nutrient cycles, and the overall balance of our ecosystems. As we become more aware of the environmental degradation caused by human activities, we also recognize the urgent need to protect our planet. While these small creatures may seem insignificant, they have a significant impact on our world.
Using translucent mulberry paper as the structural foundation for her work, Tseng Hill considers the delicate balances of nature. Through hand stitching, she layers diverse materials as metaphors for the complexities and interconnectedness of our environment, and contemplate and reflect on the beauty and richness that exist beneath our feet, in the air, in water, soil, and the unseen spaces around us.
About the Artist
Sherry Tseng Hill makes mixed-media artworks that blur the line between the abstract and the representational. Her works incorporate both 2D and 3D elements to explore the texture of connections, as well as the interactions and rhythms of communities, including humans and the More-Than-Human World, while examining borders and edges as sites of friction and violence.
Born and raised in Taiwan, she moved to the US at 14. Part of two cultures yet fully belonging to neither, she lives in the gray area between two states of being: the immediacy of the present and a lingering sense of the distant. Her own experiences with the tensions between two cultures, threatening, violent yet also exciting, vital, and often unavoidable, drive her to think about migration and colonization in the context of climate change and what it means to make a home. Turning over rocks and peeling back tree barks, she looks for traces and crevices, thinks about how they can serve as metaphors for other things- erasure, loss, the passage of time, and what is seen/not seen- to tell stories about our impact on each other and reflect on the art of living together.
Through generations of family tradition in craft-making, she explores her past and re-presents new narratives. Using mulberry paper (a nod to her culture of origin) as structural foundations with materials from everyday surroundings- twigs, palm bark fiber, bamboo grass from a broom, and threads, she layers, felts, weaves, and stitches to explore environmental degradation from the entanglements and legacies of relations.
Tseng Hill received a Bachelor of Architecture (1982) and a Bachelor of Arts in Architecture and Art History (1980) from Rice University, Houston, Texas. After practicing architecture and raising two sons, she completed the BLOCK Program at The Glassell School of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (2021-2023), where she currently teaches. Her work is in the public collections of Rice University, Houston Endowment, and the City of Houston, where she was commissioned to create a Public Artwork. Tseng Hill has exhibited at The Glassell School of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Rice University, Moody Gallery, Fort Worth Community Arts Center, the San Antonio Art League and Museum, Discovery Green, and The Jung Center. She is represented by Moody Gallery in Houston, Texas.