Beckett Brueggemann is a fiber and sculpture artist. He received his Bachelor of Fine Arts from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and his Masters of Art in Teaching for Art Education at Tufts University. He is a quilter and a weaver, and his work explores the role of narrative in his creative process and world-making. His work also explores themes of astrophysics as black holes form in the rips in fabric and alternate dimensions become accessible through puddles. Poetry and photography elements are translated into quilts as fibers and technology come together as a means of creation, comfort, and healing escapism.

 

I explore soft escapism and the ways slowness opens space for healing, comfort, and care. Through intersecting practices in photography, fiber, and storytelling, I investigate how the languages of craft and cosmology mirror one another. Drawing on the vocabulary of astrophysics—fabric of the universe, black holes, the warping of space-time—I build narratives that bind together material processes and celestial mythologies. In my work, holes in socks become ruptures in the space-time continuum, stars transform into god-like figures spinning the threads of existence, and I take on the role of traveler and narrator through my drag persona, Grendelin Drag, who moves through and interprets this otherworldly folklore.

Language also carries me into the world of fairytales, folklore, and the shifting stories societies use to understand themselves. Engaging with the Catholic Bible, cryptids, and European folktales, I rewrite and reimagine inherited narratives through drag performance, queer aesthetics and histories, and the softness and sadness I hold within my own queer trans body.

My practice moves fluidly across media through a continual process of reaction and response. Writing inspires performance; performance generates photographs; photographs become quilts; and quilts give birth to new stories. I am energized by artists such as Tau Lewis, Firelei Báez, and Yayoi Kusama—makers who craft immersive worlds through installations, artifacts, and narrative frameworks. Their practices resonate with my own commitment to world-building and to reshaping the stories that shape us.

A guiding concept in my work is restorative reimagining, a term I encountered in It Came From the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror, edited by Joe Vallese. Folklore and fairytales hold remnants of communal fears and warnings—cultural anxieties that seeped into our nightmares. My work asks how we might use those inherited fears to better understand our world as it exists now, and then reimagine these stories to create the world that we want to live in.

​