Artist Interviews 2025

Oona Brangam-Snell  
By Johnny Otto





Oona Brangam-Snell’s Mischief in Thread

Oona Brangam-Snell’s tapestries bristle with mischief, staging scenes that are equal parts domestic comedy, surrealist theater, and medieval allegory. At first glance, her work seduces with its candy-colored palette and cartoonish figures: cats with oversized eyes, shadowy creatures tangled in leaves, or women who seem caught between daydream and nightmare. But the humor quickly gives way to unease. In these textiles, everyday spaces—the living room, the garden, the seaside—become settings for strange rituals and private dramas. Brangam-Snell revels in this tension, turning the familiar inside out until it feels uncanny.



What makes these works resonate is her command of narrative suggestion. She does not tell stories so much as scatter fragments of them: a yawning figure in a pink knit cap, a ladder descending into a void, a hand dangling rope from the sky. Each image feels like a freeze-frame from an allegorical film we cannot quite piece together, but desperately want to. This play with incompletion, where narrative is always deferred, gives her tapestries their charge. They hover in the in-between, alive with possibility.





The surfaces themselves are a crucial part of the experience. As a designer at Maharam, Brangam-Snell brings a deep fluency with fabric and pattern into her art practice. The works often fold layers of texture and decorative motif into their surreal vignettes, so that the background teems with eyes, scissors, and flowers. These repeating elements function almost like wallpaper or textile design, but their density builds a psychic atmosphere that underlines the strangeness of the figures. It is as if the very fabric of the world is conspiring with the characters, amplifying their theatrical gestures.





In reclaiming the tapestry as a contemporary medium, Brangam-Snell also reclaims its history of storytelling. Where medieval weavings broadcast tales of conquest and piety, her versions offer something slyer and more destabilizing: fractured myths, feminist playacting, surreal domestic rituals. She threads humor, anxiety, and absurdity into each panel, suggesting that our everyday dramas are no less worthy of grand tapestry treatment than any king’s battle. The result is a body of work that feels at once timeless and wholly of this moment, a reminder that fabric, with all its softness, can also cut deep.