Blasted Belonging
On View May 2 - July 26, 2025
Opening Reception: Friday, May 2, 6-8pm
Closing Reception: Saturday, July 26, 10am-Noon
Girls’ Club Collection presents Blasted Belonging, a solo exhibition of new work by South Florida-based textile artist Jen Clay. The exhibit will transform Girls' Club into an interactive, sensory-inclusive environment where visitors step into a surreal evening landscape.
Inspired by American author H.P. Lovecraft’s 1927 short story The Colour Out of Space, the installation will feature multiple components that define Clay’s practice such as textile works and figures, text, animation and sound.
With Blasted Belonging, Clay presents a quilted alien forest sewn from hand-dyed, thrifted bed linens. Movable landscape elements and a symbolic ‘well’ allow visitors to shape the scene as if uncovering an unfolding mystery. A projected storm animation and an atmospheric soundscape heighten the eerie yet immersive experience, blurring the line between observer and protagonist.
Clay’s work blends sci-fi horror with soft textiles, embedding hidden, hand-sewn messages that oscillate between foreboding and intimate. Blasted Belonging invites visitors to explore a world of quiet dread and strange beauty, making them active participants in the story. Designed to be sensory-inclusive, Blasted Belonging features tactile elements and a soundscape welcoming neurodiverse and disabled communities, ensuring an accessible experience.
“I aim to create an installation that encapsulates a stormy afternoon and brings the elements from Lovecraft's story to life, where an alien element subtly changes the landscape, animals, and people until it cannot be denied,” explains Clay. “The quote from The Colour Out of Space that inspires me perfectly encapsulates this atmosphere: 'The trees budded prematurely, and at night they swayed ominously... when there was no wind...Strangeness had come into everything growing now. Yet, familiarity had dulled the people there.' “
Read the complete short story The Colour Out of Space, by H.P. Lovecraft, here or here.
This work was created during the Winter 2025 Mccoll Center Residency and was funded by the Broward Artist Innovation Grant and the South Arts Individual Artist Career Opportunity Grant.
This exhibit is free and open to the public.
Girls' Club by the River
330 SW 2nd Street, Corner Unit 102, Fort Lauderdale, FL 33312
Gallery Hours
Fridays, 1-5pm and by appointment.
Call or email to schedule.
About Jen Clay
Born in 1985 in Mountain View, NC, Jen Clay earned a BFA from UNCC Charlotte and an MFA from UFL in 2014. Now based in South Florida, they have exhibited at the Girls Club Collection, Norton Museum of Art, MOCA North Miami, and Miami Light Box. Notable installations include Soft Sanity (2019) and Welcome to You&Me (2019), designed for neurodiverse children.
Clay has been an artist-in-residence at Oolite Arts, Atlantic Center for the Arts, Vermont Studio Center, and the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, with support from the Windgate Foundation. A short documentary on their practice, The Texture of Anxiety, received a regional Emmy. They were awarded a Knight Arts New Work Award for their quilt-composed video game and installation at Locust Projects (2023). Their permanent public artwork, commissioned through Art in Public Places, is installed at Brisas del Este Apartments (2022).
Currently, they are a McColl Center artist-in-residence (Jan–April 2025), funded in part by SouthArts, with an upcoming installation at Girls’ Club Collection in summer 2025, supported by the Broward Innovation Grant. Clay’s sewn textiles depict non-human figures inspired by cosmic horror and hallucinatory experiences, exploring mental health through tactile, immersive works.
