Fiber Artist Sienna Martz

Artist Sienna Martz with Nebulous (2024), 39″H x 39″W x 4″D, sustainable mixed-media fibers on birch panel. Photography by Joy Masi

Woodland Swell (2019), 9’H x 15’W x 1.5″D, sustainable mixed-media fibers on birch panel. Photography by Ricki Snyder

Echoes of Earth I (2024), 46″H x 35″W x 3.5″D, sustainable mixed-media fibers on birch panel. Photography by Soapbox Arts.

Blossom (2018), 33″ in diameter x 7″D, sustainable mixed-media fibers on birch panel.

Solace of the Sea (2025), 9’H x 6.5’W x 4″D, sustainable mixed-media fibers. Photography by Carpet Diem.

Cerulean Flora (2024), 24″H x 16.5″W x 1.5″D, sustainable mixed-media fibers on birch panel

Intrinsic (2020), 49″H x 26″W x 5″D, sustainable mixed-media fibers.

When Sienna Martz was a sophomore in art school, she felt frustrated and lost. She knew she wanted to be a sculpture major, but the standard sculptural media of wood, glass, ceramic, and steel seemed “unfriendly”: too hard, rigid, and unforgiving. If she made a mistake, she’d have to start over. She didn’t like beginning with an intellectual concept and a plan, either. She couldn’t make what she saw in her mind, and what she could make she didn’t like. “I felt like I was falling behind,” she says. “It was very discouraging.”

Then she took a class in “soft sculpture,” worked with fiber, and all of a sudden, everything felt right.

Fiber and textile work, Martz points out, have for too long been viewed as craft, not serious art. This proved liberating for her, though: she didn’t feel burdened by the intellectualism and expectations common in other art forms. If she made a mistake, she could repair it, and that repair might become a feature. She could follow her emotions. “I’ve always been very sensitive to softness and texture,” she says, “and I’m really drawn to it.” At age nineteen, her work already felt elevated and elegant. Fiber became what she calls her portal. “It allowed me to make the work I wanted to make.”

Martz grew up in an artistic family, drawn to nature, art, stuffed animals, and particularly soft socks. When she was six, one of her paintings was selected for an all-ages gallery show in Los Angeles. Today she is based in southern Vermont, where she mostly uses recycled fabric, much of it found in thrift stores. She tufts it or fills it with natural stuffings like kapok to make sculptures with a remarkably wide range of look, color, and technique, inspired by her love of everything from the spines of cacti to the way moss and lichen overwhelm human-made structures and poke through walls. “I want to keep discovering new methods and materials,” she says, “and endlessly adapting—the way nature does.”

What emerges from Martz’s intuitive process is warm, soft, comforting, playful, and completely unique. “A lot of my sculptures,” she says, “I view as world-building. It’s like I’m making new species that come from a different dimension and peek through into ours.”

Editor’s Note: Sienna Martz is represented by Soapbox Arts, Burlington, Vt., soapboxarts.com. To see more of her work, visit siennamartz.com.