Christine & Mariah Nielson

May 3-June 7, 2025

Blunk Space is pleased to present Soft Rock, an exhibition of handwoven naturally-dyed cushions by Christine Nielson and new stone furniture by Mariah Nielson. Christine, a prolific artist and founder of Coyuchi, was the partner of JB Blunk and is Mariah’s mother. The exhibition began as a mother-daughter design challenge. Christine’s return to weaving after decades of nonprofit and entrepreneurial work inspired Mariah, now the Director of the JB Blunk Estate and Blunk Space, to propose an exhibition of her mother’s work at Blunk Space; Christine, having always encouraged Mariah’s artistic endeavors, asked Mariah to create all of the surfaces on which to display her cushions.

Christine’s work and art practice were always interwoven: she started weaving when she moved into the Blunk House with JB in 1969. At first she made naturally-dyed wool cushions, then rugs and then tapestries. In the 1980s and 1990s, after decades of weaving and natural dying, she started several textile-related nonprofits in and around Oaxaca, Mexico, and in 1991 she founded Coyuchi, Inc., the first US company to manufacture and sell high-quality bedding and bath textiles made from organic cotton. It was the move to Palm Desert, CA, in 2018 that inspired Christine to start weaving again. A friend gifted her a loom, so she decided she would make a few for herself.

Mariah was raised in a creative household, surrounded by artists and their works: her mother’s weavings, her father’s sculpture and ceramics, her brothers’ paintings and sculptures. Even the Blunk House itself – handbuilt by her father between 1959 and 1962 – was a locus of creative production, every light pull, cup, and pillow lovingly made by her family from salvaged wood and local clay and hand-dyed wool. After leaving home as a teenager to live in Japan, she was drawn towards architecture and design history. Now, in maintaining the JB Blunk Estate and running Blunk Space, she combines her professional training with the holistic legacy of her father and family, working across the disciplines of visual art, design, and architecture and blending her capacities for curating, writing, researching, and collaboration.

In November 2023, Mariah completed an apprenticeship with the stone sculptor Roger Hopkins, learning to cut and polish stone in Desert Hot Springs, CA. On a serendipitous drive by his stoneyard a year earlier while visiting her mother, Mariah spotted beautiful finished pieces but also piles of offcuts, and was envisioning furniture and sculptures. For Soft Rock, Mariah has cut, polished and assembled six new works from granite and basalt: two tables, two benches, a stool and pedestal – all surfaces made to display her mother’s cushions. The largest of the tables is made from granite – the slab top, leveled and polished, rests on a large block embedded with marks from the extraction process in the quarry. For Mariah, these “core traces” are starting points for the work. The lines help direct how she should assemble and carve the stone. The smaller table and the two benches are also defined by the deep grooves and lines created by the extraction process, highlighting the contrast between the polished and raw surfaces of the stone. 

“The process of working with these offcuts reminds me of model-making when I was an architect. It involves combining distinct shapes to create a new form,” says Mariah. “The work I’ve made for this show is my attempt to reveal an inherent form and bring new life to an otherwise discarded material. Because I’ve been working in my father’s studio and carving stone, the last material he introduced into his practice, this exhibition is a collaboration with both my parents in an especially meaningful way.” 

Christine’s new cushions are inspired by Navajo & Cherokee chief blankets, Northwestern Iranian Mazandaran kilim, and Peruvian forms. Sourcing from lovingly-raised sheep, mainly from the Barinaga Ranch in Marshall, Christine overdyes the wool using cutch, indigo, madder, cochineal, and fustic, to create shades from the palest almost-white to the darkest almost-black and every tone of red, gold, orange, pink, rusty browns and blues in between. One cushion recalls Bauhaus precision, with interlocking geometric forms of natural and dyed wools. Another plays with the viewer’s expectations, with stark black and white stripes that subtly shift in width across the surface, creating an optical illusion.

“My pieces at times astonish me. Where do they come from? What a joy to discover new creativity at 80,” says Christine. “It has been another wondrous part of this collaboration that very nearly at the same time I returned to my loom, Mariah discovered stone carving. So now we have her dense tables and my soft cushions.”

Mariah’s salvaged stone works and Christine’s cushions point to the two extreme ends of several spectrums: of feather-light and massively heavy, of soft and rough-hewn, of pliable and hard. The challenge has spurred both mother and daughter to a level of sustained creative production that is a return for one and a new beginning for the other.