For Roxanne Brown, fiber has been a constant throughout her life. From learning to knit through 4-H as a child to discovering weaving, raising a creative family, and eventually developing her current thread-painted work, making has continued to find its way back into her life.

Roxanne grew up surrounded by fabric thanks to her mother, who sewed for their family of seven. She learned to knit through 4-H and later experimented with sewing and quilting, but initially pursued a very different career. After studying English and law at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Roxanne worked as an attorney and university administrator. Fiber remained something she loved, but largely fit around the rest of her life.

That changed after a move to Worcester, Massachusetts. While working part-time and preparing to take the Massachusetts Bar Exam, Roxanne enrolled in a beginning weaving class at the Worcester Center for Crafts. Entering a studio filled with looms, surface-design materials, and fiber tools was transformative. “I was like a kid in a candy store,” she remembers. Roxanne ultimately chose not to return to law and instead completed the Center’s two-year Professional Craft Studies program in fiber.

Years later, the COVID-19 pandemic led to another change in her creative practice. Roxanne and her husband, David, began taking daily walks, and she found herself paying closer attention to changing light, blossoming trees, wildflowers, and other details in the natural world. She began photographing what she saw and eventually discovered free-motion machine stitching, or thread painting.

By lowering the feed dogs on her sewing machine, Roxanne can move the fabric freely beneath the needle, allowing her to use thread much like a drawing tool. “This was just mind-boggling to me that a sewing machine could do anything besides linear stitching,” she says. The discovery opened an entirely new way of translating her photographs into fiber.

That work comes together in her first solo exhibition, Nature Inspired, Thread Rendered: A Collection of Thread-Painted Botanicals, on view at SEFAA September 5 through October 24, 2026. The exhibition reflects not only what Roxanne sees in nature, but how she sees it; the patterns of light on bark, intricate tree silhouettes, and botanical details that make her stop and look more closely.

Ultimately, Roxanne hopes her work encourages that same moment of recognition in someone else: “I know this artist. I know how she looks at the world. I’ve seen what she sees.”

For Roxanne, that connection is the power of art.

To learn more about Roxanne check out her website here or follow her journey on Instagram or Facebook.