Location: Oakland, CA
Medium: Sculpture, Woodworking, Textiles
Website: emmadoven.com
Emma Doven is a woodworker, sculptor, and fiber artist based in the Bay Area. She graduated with a B.A. in Studio Art, with a focus in Three-Dimensional Art, from Mills College at Northeastern University in 2023. While there she received the Robert A. Dhaemers Award in Three-Dimensional Art and the Creative Excellence in the Senior Thesis Exhibition Award, and her thesis work was included in the museum’s 2023 senior thesis show.
Since graduating, Doven has continued to build her practice through hands-on craft training rather than a conventional studio-to-gallery path: furniture-making courses at California College of the Arts in 2022 and 2023, a course in sheep shearing and wool care at the Hopland Research and Extension Center in 2023, timber framing at the Port Townsend School of Woodworking in 2024, and Japanese plastering at the Canelo Project in 2025. In 2023 she also participated in Fibershed’s year-long “Borrowed from the Soil” Design Challenge and Exhibition, a program for textile designers and makers in Northern and Central California exploring a soil-to-soil vision for material culture. That accumulation of traditional techniques — fine woodworking, wet-felting wool, hand- and machine-sewing, timber joinery, and natural plasterwork — now forms the technical backbone of her sculptural work.
Doven works at the intersection of woodworking, textile, and sculpture, using natural materials and slow, traditional craft processes to build objects that sit between furniture and fine art. Her sculptures combine hard and soft elements — worked wood alongside wet-felted wool and sewn textile — to explore tension, primal energy, and the relationship between rigid structure and softness. By grounding her work in techniques like fine joinery and hand-felting, she deliberately blurs the line between functional object and art object, treating craft process itself as a subject of the work.
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