Ophelia Arc remembers herself being a “fidgety kid” growing up in Westchester, New York. This restlessness led her to pick up crocheting as a habit. While studying art at Hunter College and sculpture at Rhode Island School of Design, the artist, now 24, stuck with it. The skill has become key to many of her surreal, uncanny sculptures, as it serves their heavy psychoanalytic bent. After all, the stretchy, vulnerable texture of the yarn handily imbues her pieces with unsettling flesh-like softness and pliability, nodding to artists like Louise Bourgeois and Ernesto Neto.
“I’m very much into the medium serving the idea, as opposed to the other way around. So I venture out from there,” says Arc.
She tends toward pink yarn for its evocation of skin tones and innards—a sort of memento mori to remind us that we’re “just a sack of meat,” she says. Symbolically laden objects appear within the tangles, often adding autobiographical undercurrents. Take “starvation motive” (2024), in which a misshapen knit element, inspired by human organs, dangles from an IV pole while anchored by a specimen jar, once Arc’s from a doctor’s appointment, filled with $30 worth of quarters—apainful reference to how the younger Arc would skew the scale by hiding coins in her clothes to avoid hospitalization for being underweight.
Other assemblages hold photographs: In “Madonna and Child” (2025), crayon wax, surgical tape, and gauze frame an image of Arc as an infant held by her mother, whose strong religious beliefs contributed to a rift in their relationship. Her adjacent video practice complements her handicraft, taking shape from footage she films of herself in action. Sketches, collages, and palimpsests further explore the artist’s interest in the darker sides of medicine and psychology, stemming from her “defiant rebellion as someone who grew up in the psychiatric system,” with the involuntary stints she underwent creating a lasting skepticism.
Such ideas informed a hit summer show at New York’s Lyles & King, which just announced that Arc is joining the gallery’s roster, and in January, she’ll have her first LA solo show with Don’t Look Projects. Arc’s practice allows reckoning with her past, channeling, as she puts it, “a way of seeing that my experience exists, not only for me, but in this greater societal framework.”