Addie Langford lives and works in Metro Detroit. She completed her MFA at Cranbrook Academy of Art in ceramics after a BFA in architecture at the Rhode Island School of Design. In 2006-07 she was a Fulbright Fellow in Madrid, Spain, where she conducted research on tapestry in relation to contemporary collage. Drawing upon her Fulbright research she exhibited a body of large-scale mixed media drawings, Slow Knots, in 2007 in Madrid. Since then, her practice has focused on painting, mixed media collage, and ceramics. In 2018 she launched a solo exhibition of paintings on domestic fabric and large-scale ceramic vessels at the Hill Gallery, Birmingham, MI.

Langford’s practice draws on her varied background in painting, ceramics, drawing, fabrics, and structural influences from architecture and Appalachian craft.  Her work is concerned with imprinting atmosphere, scenario or predicament – both physical and psychic, constructed through layering and uneven density / opacity in relation to the support. A hyper-exposure of materials to natural forces (water, pressure, layering, erosion, thinning, thickening, tearing and repair), not to destroy, but to form, distort or shape. Her works archives gradient qualities of deformation / submergence resulting from organic sedimentation and imposed pressure or stress.

Southern forms native to Appalachia, from quilts and weaving to barn structures and basketry emerge and recede as forms or fragmentary histories in the work and are in dialogue with movements such as Supports/Surfaces and Korean Dansaekhwa, or artists such as François Rouan, Simon Hantaï, McArthur Binion and Phyllida Barlow. For Langford, the art of attention comes from the slow accretion, and patience required in this layering correlates to the endurance of daily life. The patience, or sometimes stamina, required in traversing thresholds or conflict is mirrored in her making.