Mark Joseph Runge
ARTIST STATEMENT
My fiber work explores memory, identity, and the uneasy relationship between tenderness and violence. Through sewing, quilting, crochet, embroidery, and found textiles, I create layered, tactile narratives that move between personal history and imagined worlds. I am drawn to the softness of fiber and its ability to carry difficult stories—particularly those shaped by childhood, war, loss, and remembrance. Texture, repetition, and the physical act of making become ways of remembering, misremembering, and giving form to experiences that words cannot quite hold. At heart, I am a sloppy sentimentalist, stitching together the beautiful, the absurd, and the wounded.
LAST WORKS
LAST WORKS
ONE RUNGE SEWING
I’m sewing a quilted piece that became part of a larger drawing.
FORSELF PORTRAIT QUILT
I made this piece as an expression of the personal damage I incurred from my wartime experiences.
LOOM PINK
I like to make my own cloth to make things, like a sweater, with this.
WOUNDS QUILT
I made this piece as an expression of the personal damage I incurred from my wartime experiences.
DUCK RECYCLE MATERIAL
I struggle with is what to do with the scraps of my work, so I started making sculptures from them.
BIO
I was born in Shirley, Massachusetts, but I grew up in and around Tampa, Florida. I’ve moved around quite a bit, four years in the Army, undergraduate work in Maryland, time in Israel and later China, just to mention a few places. But I always return to Florida. My fondness for the moist air, intense heat, and ever-shining sun, as well as the flora and fauna, continues to draw me back from wherever I travel.
I have always been an artist. I remember as a young child illustrating stories that my brother made up and then binding the pages into books. I ran wild through the woods creating out of the refuse of others friends I could play with, bringing to life places that existed only in my mind. Some of my best art memories are those that occurred when the power in our house went out and we gathered at the kitchen table to draw by lamplight.
My grandmother introduced me to yarn art when I was young. She’d joke that she was known as “The Hooker of East Pepperrell,” and she’d belly laugh every time she told the story! I close my eyes and laugh with her often, even though she’s long gone. And my dad taught me to sew. He would make his own clothes. Both said the crafts are important, but I didn’t know their significance until 2008 when I introduced them into the classes I taught.
In high school I took graphic arts in a trade school. I learned to set type and run presses and about paper and other substrates. I was introduced to the importance of design and color theory, and my formal education in art began. It ended when I earned a Masters of Fine Art from the University of South Florida (USF), where I started teaching. Even so, I continue to take classes in drawing and painting, embroidery and quilting – anything that interests me and allows me to bring to life my stories and the things from my imagination.
After USF I worked at Eckerd College and then found my first high school teaching job, where the work was rewarding and invigorating. I moved to east Tennessee and became a luthier, where I made banjos, ukuleles, and Appalachian dulcimers. I taught in a STEM school there, but the pull of Florida is strong. I found myself in Miami, where I’ve been teaching art classes for the last seven years. I continue to build my art skills through training and practice, and I continue to tell stories through my art.