Caitlin Cary is a Raleigh, NC-based textile artist and musician known for her innovative and intricate sewn fabric collages, which she calls Needleprints. Cary crafts each Needleprint exclusively from repurposed fabrics, primarily cast-offs from the upholstery/interior design industry. 

Though she has sewn everything from a nearly photorealistic Doc Watson to kaleidoscopically abstract interpretations of a water tower, Cary’s greatest renown lies her endeavors to preserve North Carolina’s history. She employs her art to catalogue humble landmarks—buildings and businesses, homes and haunts. She selects places that reside in the collective memories of locals, those places which give identity to place. A low pest control building, an old motel on the side of a busy road, a beloved coffee shop, a historic movie theater—Cary preserves places that evoke a sense of connection and community. 

In praise of her innovative documentarian method, Cary’s work has been featured in Our State magazine, Walter magazine, and The News & Observer. Her work is also widely collected, awarded, and exhibited in galleries, public spaces, and private collections in North Carolina and beyond.

“I love fabric for its sentimental power,” Cary says. “Fabric is comfort. It’s home. It’s the protection of clothing, and the softness of drapery and furniture. Moreover, it is a repository for amazing artistry; even fabric totally made by machine begins with the design ingenuity of artists. I love that in making my work, I am inherently ’in conversation’ with a huge number of fellow artists. When I depict the built environment in fabric, it automatically becomes softer, more dear, more relatable. I love the feeling that each piece is also a part of the legacy of textile design, manufacture, and craft in North Carolina and beyond.”

In recent years, Cary has expanded her artistic range, and she’s currently experimenting with more abstract forms and additional mediums, including encaustic wax, imported silks (a gift from the NC State School of Design), paper, film, and more. In 2024, Cary is at work creating a series that depicts libraries made from book binding fabric in response to her rage over book banning and censorship.

Cary is available for commissions by appointment.