Long before she was designing bold patterns and intricate screen prints for the fashion world, Hannah Buechler was a 13-year-old spending hours in her mother’s garage, happily making a mess with her hands and exploring the limitless possibilities of paint. Even at that young age, a definitive artistic calling had taken root. Reflecting on those formative hours, Buechler notes that she realized then—and still believes to this day—that making art was simply what she enjoyed most in the world.
Today, that childhood curiosity has blossomed into a multifaceted career. A multidisciplinary artist who earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts in fibers from the prestigious Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD), Buechler is now based in Los Angeles, where she operates an eponymous studio dedicated to producing her signature tactile collages. Her artistic practice is rooted in a deep fascination with simplicity blossoming into complex layers, achieved primarily through rich textures built from small, repetitive gestures.
As the daughter of a scientist, Buechler approaches her craft with analytical thoughtfulness, carefully considering the origins, physical properties, and untapped potential of her materials. Over the years, her material explorations have spanned an eclectic array of mediums, including resin, embroidery, and the creation of her own custom textiles.
This meticulous attention to texture and material naturally spilled over into a lifelong love for fashion. In 2021, Buechler brought her distinctive vision to the apparel industry by accepting a role at the renowned fashion house Libertine. As the brand’s senior designer, she specializes in surface design, patterns, screenprinting, and digital graphics, seamlessly translating her fine art sensibility into wearable collections.
While Buechler currently finds deep fulfillment in balancing her demanding 9-to-5 corporate duties with her independent studio practice, she envisions a future evolution. Having always maintained a creative corporate job alongside her personal studio work, she acknowledges the ongoing challenge of selling her pieces independently. Nevertheless, she remains deeply hopeful about eventually transitioning her studio practice into her sole career.
As part of her latest creative milestone, Hannah Buechler is featured in the latest edition of the popular design series, Friday Five. In this exclusive feature, Buechler opens up about her personal world, sharing five core inspirations that fuel her artistic vision alongside five of her most significant and defining projects.
Hannah Buechler’s 5 Inspirations
1. Music
Music has consistently served as a foundational driving force and vital source of inspiration for Buechler’s visual work. She often creates a piece while channeling the emotional resonance, color palette, or rhythmic patterns of a particular song, frequently naming her finished artworks after specific song titles. Eschewing the convenience of music shufflers, Buechler prefers listening to entire albums from start to finish, allowing her to appreciate the intentional song transitions and understand the underlying stylistic choices of each artist. Her eclectic musical palette spans a wide spectrum, encompassing heavy metal, rap, pop, rock, and indie music. Illustrating the diverse nature of her daily soundtrack, she shares that she recently started a single day listening to Electric Light Orchestra before transitioning seamlessly to Candlemass and Ariana Grande.
2. Experimenting
Embracing an experimental approach to art-making has continually opened doors to ongoing learning and discovery for Buechler. Her deep affection for blending unique processes with diverse materials has led her to engineer her own proprietary textiles, including a distinct material she refers to as "loom bands." Over the years, she has eagerly tested the boundaries of resin, embroidery, and advanced painting techniques. Among her most cherished experimental endeavors is an unreleased project titled Freshman 25. Begun during her freshman year at SCAD, Buechler collected empty chip bags and microwaved them, accumulating roughly 100 altered packages. Though she is still determining the optimal method for mounting them, the body of work remains a passion project deeply embedded in her mind, waiting for the right moment to be fully realized.
3. Fashion
Buechler’s relationship with fashion began early in life, sparked by parents who deeply appreciated clothing and personal style. Growing up observing how they dressed instilled in her a lifelong appreciation for looking and feeling good in what one wears. It comes as little surprise to those who know her that she has spent the last five years working in the fashion industry as a surface designer for Libertine. Her early aesthetic inspirations trace back to iconic runway presentations, such as Karl Lagerfeld’s Chanel collections—specifically the Pre-Fall 2012 Paris-Bombay and Pre-Fall 2014 Paris-Dallas shows—alongside the theatrical sets and garments of Alexander McQueen, including the memorable No. 13 Paint Dress Finale from Spring/Summer 1999. Furthermore, her childhood memories are rich with the tactile experience of exploring department stores and marveling at colorful textiles, particularly classic Chanel tweeds.
4. Collecting
A natural inclination toward collecting has always been a defining trait of Buechler’s personal life. Her living space features intentional arrangements, such as a white Panasonic VHS television accompanied by stacked "tape towers" composed of movies, television shows, and vintage cartoons. Her collection of cigar boxes houses an array of raw materials, ranging from colored pencils and pencil shavings to pens, paint scraps, and resin remnants. Among her earliest childhood collections was vinyl, sparked by gifts of The Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, as well as The Rolling Stones’ Undercover. More recently, she has developed an obsession with Kieselstein-Cord handbags, a niche and ornate luxury brand recognized for its sculptural, animalistic details, such as gold crocodile feet affixed to the base of a purse.
5. My Dog, Stevie
Affectionately known as Steve, Buechler’s nine-year-old Boston Terrier has been a constant companion through a nomadic chapter of her life. Stevie has lived with her across multiple cities and countries, including Savannah, Paris, San Diego, New York, and Los Angeles, while also accompanying her on extensive travels throughout the United States and South America. Described as remarkably bright yet delightfully silly, Stevie is remarkably well-behaved on the road despite a stubborn streak. She even possesses an uncanny awareness of her owner’s artistic workspace, routinely navigating carefully around wet paintings and delicate substrates spread across the floor, though she occasionally makes herself comfortable directly on top of Buechler’s loom band creations.
5 Projects by Hannah Buechler
1. Satellite Series: Cosmos
Measuring an impressive 63 by 48 by 3 inches, Cosmos stands as a monumental free-standing and wall-mountable artwork that represents the culmination of saved college experiments, extensive beadwork utilizing broken jewelry, and deep explorations of deconstruction and reconstruction. Buechler initiated the ambitious piece while quarantined with COVID-19. Unfamiliar with the television series Euphoria at the time, she binge-watched two seasons from her bedroom while continuously beading, having no initial concept of how large the final composition would grow. Spanning four years of development, Cosmos evolved from a modest beaded textile into an expansive visual archive incorporating embedded loose materials beneath mesh layers, metal chains woven through rows of safety pins, and fragments of a shattered beaded vase treated with resin. The creation of Cosmos has inspired Buechler to consider similar time capsule commissions for individuals seeking to preserve personal textiles, garments, or broken jewelry that they are reluctant to discard.
2. Palisade
Created during the harrowing Los Angeles wildfires, Palisade emerged as an artistic outlet for Buechler to process the environmental disasters unfolding directly outside her home. The striking color palette and composition were drawn directly from her drive home on the day the fires erupted, witnessing flames cresting over the mountains near the Getty Center. Growing up in a San Diego community dense with eucalyptus trees—which carried a constant threat of seasonal fires and mandatory evacuations—Buechler sought to capture the dense, grayish-black skies punctuated by ominous hints of yellow and orange. The finished framed piece, measuring 58.25 by 44.5 by 2 inches and crafted from loom bands, wool, and felt, uses stark neutrals contrasting with brilliant, striking hues. A small, vibrant corner detail symbolizes the dramatic shift in atmosphere before and after the disaster, marking a poignant moment in time during a period when she and her partner chose to weather the crisis at the base of the Santa Monica Mountains.
3. Alaska
Commissioned by a client whose husband caught the fish displayed on the fabric substrate, Alaska bridges fine art textiles with the traditions of fly-fishing. The underlying fabric utilizes Gyotaku, a traditional Japanese fish-printing technique designed to create an exact, lifelike record of a catch. Undertaking the commission during a family fly-fishing trip to Alaska, Buechler discovered unexpected parallels between fishing and beading—not only through shared materials like fishing line, lures, and flies, but also in the immense patience required by both practices. Requiring 11 months to complete, the finished 33-by-19-inch work demanded an innovative framing solution to highlight the intricate beadwork on the reverse side of the textile. Buechler had a sheet of plexiglass laser-cut with perimeter holes, allowing her to anchor the fabric securely into the wooden frame using fishing line fastened with actual fishing lures and beads.
4. Contemplation / The Weight of Memory
Shaped by her upbringing as the daughter of a biochemist, Buechler’s lifelong fascination with human anatomy finds direct expression in these two companion works. Growing up with a real human skeleton named Walter in the family home instilled an early comfort with anatomical forms that has continually informed her portfolio since her first high school body of work at age 17. Measuring 39.25 by 25 by 2 inches, Contemplation and The Weight of Memory integrate anatomical skull motifs into her signature loom band, wool, and felt medium. Unlike her typically fluid and improvised textile pieces, these works required a departure from purely freestyle composition, necessitating careful advance planning and repeated anatomical sketches to achieve the desired clarity of form.
5. Wild Like the West Texas Winds
Completed in 2019 using gouache on a 48-by-30-inch canvas, Wild Like the West Texas Winds represents a vital outlet for Buechler’s expressive and representational painting practices. While her textile works are largely driven by color, line, and texture, her paintings offer a dedicated space to explore gradients, repetitive patterns including stripes, camouflage, and animal prints, alongside flora and fauna. The painting’s title originates from a favored phrase used by her grandfather to describe her personality. Painted during a period when her grandfather had recently entered a nursing home, the artwork became a comforting daily ritual; Buechler would commute to work, visit her grandfather, and return home each evening eager to immerse herself in the piece. Despite subsequent attempts to recreate similar compositions, she notes that later variations frequently became too chaotic, cementing Wild Like the West Texas Winds as a uniquely cherished and enduring milestone in her painting practice.
