Gale Bautista-Domingues

Gale is a Filipino American artist who currently works in creating textural wall tapestries on a weaving loom using mostly natural fibers. She holds a fond memory of starting a friendship bracelet making business in the 4^th grade with her cousin, selling each bracelet for twenty-five cents at lunch time. Gale found joy in working with embroidery threads, putting colors together and knotting them into patterns creating wearable art to share. That experience planted a seed bringing her back to fiber arts many years later. She now works in a variety of fiber art forms such as knitting, crocheting, sewing, yarn dyeing, macrame and of course, weaving. She continues to hone her skills within the fiber arts as her passion for it grows.

Gale graduated from NJIT’s School of Architecture in 2006, where she had the greatest lessons in self-discipline and her fever to create and build ideas into physical form ignited. While in school she also began exploring jewelry making using various vintage pieces and watch parts that her father, who is a watchmaker, had given her to tinker with. In 2008, she opened a brick-and-mortar shop, Hello Again Vintage, with the same cousin from her friendship bracelet venture in their hometown of Jersey City Heights, selling vintage clothing, home décor and local handmade goods, including Gale’s jewelry. Many jewelry pieces later in 2012, Gale attended a metalsmithing workshop at Fredricka Kulicke’s School of Jewelry Art to expand her skillset and soon began creating distinct jewelry pieces using sterling silver, gemstones and minerals. She practiced metalsmithing until 2018 while running her handmade business, Nuda Designs, continuing to sell her work in various markets and shops around New Jersey.

Among Gale’s many creative endeavors, her favorite and most rewarding experience was her opportunity to work one on one with people who lack articulate use of their hands, such as those with physical and developmental disabilities. Through A.R.T. Artistic Realization Technologies, Gale worked as a “tracker” using non-verbal cues and techniques, while remaining neutral, to empower the artists to gain perfect individual control of the art making process and express themselves.

Though Gale’s journey through fiber arts began years ago, it was during the pandemic and especially after the birth of her daughter in 2020 that she really fell in love with all things fiber arts, especially knitting and weaving. The transition from crafting in a hard medium, as with metalsmithing, to a soft medium has suited her well through the many turns in Gale’s life. She looks forward to continue honing her skills and possibly merging her experience of multiple disciplines of art making in the near future. She is excited to share the wonderful world of weaving with novices and also experienced weavers who would like a brush up course on the fundamentals of Frame Loom Weaving in her current workshop at DuCret Center of Art.