Join us for the opening celebration of Ansley Givhan: Woolgathering on Friday, January 9 from 5-8pm!
Ansley Givhan and I first met through her paintings, years ago. They drew me in—on view at a local gallery, in a friend’s home, at an event space. The language Givhan has developed in her practice— tempered color palettes, abstract symbols, organic shapes, and multiple materials—makes each of her paintings feel like a chapter of one story, all in conversation but distinct. Over the years, our exchanges as artists revolved around texture, symbols, found objects, and, many times, over how to surrender to the process of creation. Givhan’s work is punctuated by dualities: bold / soft, structured / inhibited, intricate / impressionistic, leaving you holding a depiction of reality within a dream. This exhibition, Woolgathering, is the fruit of her keen observations, playfulness with materiality, and wonder to create structural meaning while releasing to time’s natural rhythm.
—Flora Cabili
ANSLEY GIVHAN x FLORA CABILI
Flora Cabili (CB): As we sit here in your studio, I’m noticing a wide range of textures and materials—hard and soft, organic and industrial—intermingling throughout your work. How do you decide which materials to use, and why?
Ansley Givhan (AG): Oh yes, I’m enamored with texture and its ability to ignite curiosity and evoke feeling. I’m particularly drawn to materials that contrast with one another—soft, sheer fabrics and organic elements paired with found metal, hard surfaces, or nails. The contradiction speaks to my interest in duality: the experience of holding opposing emotions, thoughts, or perspectives at the same time.
FC: That sense of duality also feels present compositionally. There’s almost a signature in the way organic lines and materials are interrupted or enmeshed with contrasting structures.
AG: I’m always trying to impose some sort of structure—placing a picture within a picture, using a grid, or creating a frame or window within the picture plane. It’s a way of making sense of things, an attempt to maintain order, and an opportunity to represent inside / outside or dual narratives. Structural parameters are dependable and allow me to trust my intuition and make decisions without overthinking. Organic line or form abruptly interrupted by a harsh edge, like those of a rectangle, reminds me of the constraints we put on our intuitive selves, like a plant grown in a pot.
I’m also interested in another duality: perception versus reality, or the perception of time and how time moves. Even though it is constant, the way that we experience time as individual beings doesn’t feel constant. And I think that when I’m in the process of creating it’s a way to kind of escape time. I also think about how perception and reality are other facets of a dream state and awakeness, and how sometimes you can be in dream state even when you’re awake, perceiving something or indulging in fantasy that’s outside of the reality of what is actually happening.
FC: There’s a line from one of Mary Oliver’s essays, “Neither is it possible to control or regulate the machinery of creativity.” We’ve spoken about how Oliver has been an influence for you. How do you think about structure versus intuition, or control versus embracing the unexpected, in your process?
AG: I’m thinking back to a pivotal moment in my creative practice, when I took a plein air class. It was an intensive two-week, eight-to-five daily course and we would make little plein air paintings from direct observation. This is when I really started to understand where spirit and feeling and response is involved in painting, and how I can change things. I can paint this scene, but I don’t have to paint this lake brown. I can add a pull that creates movement in the composition that’s not there in reality. This is when invention and response really came to the forefront of my practice, and when I started to understand how exciting creating is for me—not just feeling like I am making a successful picture but having an intense connection with the things around me. And then I started moving into abstraction.
I am always practicing accepting that there are things I can’t control. And I think I like working with materials that have their own autonomy and agency because of this. Rebuilding, rethinking, and repairing are always subject to acts of chance and potential disruption or failure. Working responsively, I submit to the will of the materials and direction of my hand. I like to be in playful conversation with the process of making as opposed to having authority over it. I’m not going to force something that is set on resistance. Balancing my urge to control and affinity for chaos is key.
FC: You often incorporate found objects into your work. How do you choose them, and where do they come from?
AG: They come from all over, I don’t intentionally seek them out. I’m open to intrigue when I’m present with my surroundings and thoughts. Collecting, for me, is about noticing what’s overlooked, and the value of something deemed by others as unworthy or useless. Once I bring these objects into my possession they generate new paths of artistic exploration. I hope to honor and memorialize their service to my creative mind by placing them in situations designed for contemplation, a resurrection in a way.
FC: And can you talk a little bit about your color palette in this newest body of work?
AG: I have a distinctive color palette that is muted, the “in-between colors,” as the Surrealist and Abstract Expressionist painter William Baziotes said. "When you look at nature, the colors are in-between, and when you add psychology, they are even more in-between."
FC: Listening to you, it feels clear that observation is central to your practice—noticing small moments and changes, both in your work and in daily life.
AG: Yes. Observation is a grounding experience for me. My observations of growth, decay, and change are inseparable from my own body, emotional landscape, and way of making art. I think often about nature’s dual impulses—to destroy, regenerate, and heal—and how those processes mirror human experience.
During the early days of the pandemic, I witnessed some beautiful things in my surroundings. There was a caterpillar on a lemon tree that I watched from my back porch form a chrysalis. And I happened to be outside when the butterfly came out of the chrysalis and dropped. And it was a big, beautiful yellow butterfly. And it sat on the edge of the pot, kind of drying off for a couple hours until it flew away. Internally, I move through my own seasons: periods of turmoil, depression, anxiety, growth, contentment, and peace. Those shifts naturally affect my relationship to making art, creating periods of dormancy and activity. Aging, experiencing the passing of time, brings about suffering and loss. Moving through difficulties changes you, how you feel about yourself and others, how you feel about existence.
I think that’s why I resonate so deeply with cyclical events in nature. Bearing witness to a plant slowly put out new growth after a harsh freeze is a comforting reminder that I, too, move through seasons—that I will bloom again, die again, a cycle that will repeat over a lifetime. In every “death,” or period of depression or dormancy, there is a shedding: of a relationship, a habit, a thought, of naïveté. As I move through my own internal cycle of life, death, and rebirth, I emerge more hardened but also softer—more attuned, more empathetic, and more forgiving toward the earlier versions of myself that once occupied my body.
Ansley Givhan is a visual artist based in New Orleans, Louisiana. Her practice is grounded in painting while expanding through material experimentation and surface-building, incorporating texture, fibers, metal, and organic materials. Givhan’s work reflects an ongoing process of self-discovery and transformation, informed by daily observations of change and the cyclical rhythms of the world around her.
Givhan earned her BFA in painting from the University of Mississippi in 2016 and her MFA in painting from Tulane University in 2021, and has participated in residencies at the Benaco Arte Residency in Sirmione, Italy (2017) and the Joan Mitchell Center (2025).
Flora Cabili is an educator and a community-taught interdisciplinary artist who uses installations, movement, and mixed-media works to explore themes of origin, assembly, and dislocation. She creates patterned metaphysical environments to investigate the collective relationship to our natural environment and ourselves. This vocabulary is rooted in past work contemplating the nature and composition of material, specifically non disposable petroleum byproduct materials. Cabili was born in Lyon, France and has lived in New Orleans for ten years. She is a member of the Antenna collective.
A printed version of this interview was published in conjunction with Givhan's exhibition, Woolgathering, at Other Plans in January 2026. Email info@otherplans.gallery to request a copy.