Baker—Hall is delighted to present I’ve seen a bird before, an immersive quilted textile installation by Jen Clay, on view October 17 through November 21, 2026, with a public reception on Saturday, October 17 from 6—9pm.
Developed during a residency at The Studios at MASS MoCA and timed to the autumn bird migration, the exhibition invites visitors into a seemingly friendly landscape of pink and purple trees inspired by invasive kudzu vines. Birds with puppet-like mouths inhabit the grove. Their bright colors and soft forms are playful at first glance, but their expressions suggest a different story. Clay holds the scene in a quiet pause, just before something might happen.
Embroidered messages give the individual birds their voices. They gather, circle, and talk to one another, carrying messages that move between tenderness, encouragement, and threat. One bird warns, “It’s going to bite you so hard,” while another simply responds, “So hard.” Their tiny tongues and soft fabric bodies make these exchanges both ridiculous and strangely convincing.
Clay creates sensory-inclusive textile works and installations with neurodivergent, visually impaired, and anxiety-sensitive audiences in mind. In I’ve seen a bird before, she uses the softness and domestic familiarity of quilting to make an unsettling world feel approachable. The trees and birds are carefully sewn, giving physical presence to creatures drawn from the language of cosmic horror. Visitors are invited to look closely and spend time with the scene, even as its comforting surfaces begin to feel less reassuring.
The installation takes inspiration from Daphne du Maurier’s The Birds, in which familiar creatures become a source of fear. Clay’s birds carry that possibility, while the kudzu-inspired trees suggest a natural world growing beyond human control. She does not show the catastrophe itself. Instead, she focuses on the uncertain moment when ordinary details start to look like warnings, and asks how our relationship to a place changes once we sense that something within it is wrong.
That question connects the exhibition’s ecological concerns to mental health. Clay considers what it feels like to notice signs of distress before others do, and to live with the anxiety of being unable to ignore them. Rather than treating this sensitivity as a personal failing, the work proposes that it can be a way of registering change. Gentle, absurd, and quietly ominous, I’ve seen a bird before invites visitors to trust their curiosity about the landscape—and to consider what its creatures might be telling us.
Born in 1985 in Mountain View, NC, Jen Clay earned a BFA from UNC Charlotte and an MFA from the University of Florida in 2014 with a minor in costume design and applied behavioral analysis. Now based in South Florida, Clay creates sensory-inclusive textile works and installations created to be inclusive to neurodivergent, visually impaired, and anxiety-sensitive audiences. Jen Clay’s early interactive works were presented at Girls Club Collection, the Norton Museum of Art, MOCA North Miami, and Miami Light Box, including Welcome to You&Me (2019), an installation created for neurodiverse children.
Clay has completed residencies at Oolite Arts, Atlantic Center for the Arts, Vermont Studio Center, and the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center. A short documentary about their work, The Texture of Anxiety, received a regional Emmy for its exploration of mental health through tactile art. In 2023, Clay received a Knight Arts New Work Award for a quilt-based video game and installation at Locust Projects that blended handmade textures with interactive storytelling. Their permanent public artwork, commissioned through Miami-Dade Art in Public Places, was installed at Brisas del Este Apartments in 2022.
Clay’s first solo exhibition at Emerson Dorsch, This World Doesn’t Belong to You (2023), featured quilted works with sewn messages created during the pandemic to address collective and personal anxiety, and visitors were allowed to discover the sewn messages. Their interactive quilt Soft Night Watching is currently on view at the Ackland Art Museum through June 2026, inviting visitors to discover hidden messages through touch.
Most recently, Clay was an artist-in-residence at the McColl Center (January–April 2025) tocreate a soft-theature-like set that was shown at the Girls’Club Collection with programming that included a talk with Annie Hoffman called “Strange Days: Sensory Worlds and Mental Weather” explores mental health, sensory experiences, and the eerie threads that shape Jen’s work. This talk invites you to sit with uncertainty and reflect on what it means to be human in a world that often feels overwhelming and mysterious.. Across their practice, Clay uses textiles, softness, and storytelling to create accessible environments that offer comfort, imagination, and emotional connection. They live and work in South Florida and is represented by Baker-Hall gallery.
Baker—Hall is a contemporary art gallery founded by Amanda Baker—Hall in 2024. It is the successor to her previous project, Club Gallery. The gallery aims to promote emerging and mid-career artists through a fresh curatorial approach, while also offering comprehensive art advisory services. Baker—Hall specializes in painting and sculpture across narrative and non-objective styles, with a focus on collaborating with private collectors and prominent corporate institutions. The gallery boasts a robust exhibition schedule, featuring a minimum of eight rotating exhibitions each year.
Baker—Hall is a proud member of NADA.
1294 NW 29th St.
Miami, FL 33142
914-787-9270 Mobile
[email protected]
