At the Ackland Art Museum on the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, there is a forest that asks to be touched. It is not a real forest, but a quilted one, stitched from hand-dyed cotton, satin, velvet, and polyester minky fabric, and it has been growing in the museum since August 8, 2025. The installation is called "Soft Night, Watching," and it is the work of Jen Clay, a Miami-based artist who builds soft, uncanny worlds out of fabric and fear. What first appears to be an abstract evening woodland gradually resolves into something stranger: seafoam-green tendrils wrapping around bright purple forms, shapes that hover between plant and creature, and hidden flaps of cloth that conceal sewn phrases like "You'll always be mine" and "It will never be like this again" — words that read as comfort or menace depending on how long you look at them.
Clay, who was born in 1985 in the small North Carolina town of Mountain View, has spent her career making art that is deliberately, radically touchable. She earned a BFA in sculpture from UNC Charlotte and an MFA from the University of Florida in 2014, with a minor in costume design and applied behavioral analysis, before relocating to South Florida. Her early work leaned on immersive installations, costume design for stage productions, and small animated pieces. But during the pandemic, she pivoted decisively toward sensory-inclusive textile art — work designed to be handled, explored, and experienced by neurodivergent, visually impaired, and anxiety-sensitive audiences. "Soft Night, Watching" is the fullest expression yet of that philosophy.
The piece grew out of Clay's lifelong fascination with the strange. Growing up in the woods of Mountain View, she told the University of North Carolina, she felt that the quiet around her was less populated by people than by something else. "I felt like if I heard something in the woods it felt like it was more likely to be a creature or an alien than a human being," she said. That sensibility drew her to the literary genre known as "weird fiction" — the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century field of horror and science fiction. "Soft Night, Watching" responds directly to two canonical tales: H.P. Lovecraft's 1927 short story "The Colour out of Space," about a family farm corrupted and mutated after a meteorite crashes nearby, and Algernon Blackwood's 1907 novella "The Willows," in which two canoeists find themselves surrounded by a supernatural, living forest. Both stories are available for visitors to read while viewing the installation, and both, Clay notes, are fundamentally about what the environment does to a person's sanity. "I think exploring that is a big foundation of my work," she said.
That exploration is woven into every seam of the installation. Clay uses the strangeness of an archetypal forest as a metaphor for the disorientation that can accompany mental health experiences such as hallucinations. "I aim to confront and understand fear and anxiety, both for myself and others," she writes. "My work allows individuals to touch, hear, and immerse themselves in a safe space to experience uncertainty." The softness is deliberate: she uses soothing, plush fabrics to construct forms that might otherwise make people uncomfortable, wrapping the monstrous in gentleness. "I want people to feel comfortable being a little uncomfortable," she said. "To feel happy but eerie at the same time, I love those two opposing feelings."
The installation was commissioned by Lauren Turner, the Ackland's associate curator for contemporary art and special projects, who was introduced to Clay's earlier work and brought her to Chapel Hill. Turner watched the piece take shape over just three months, from May to August 2025, and she has described the opening day as a career highlight. "I'm ecstatic to have touchable artwork at the Ackland," she said. "On opening day, I watched two parents tell their children that they should not touch Jen's piece. It was a career highlight to be able to let them know that, yes, at least in this space, gentle touch is encouraged." For Turner, the work's power lies in its refusal to look away from difficult feelings. "Much of horror is concerned with fears of the unknown, and Jen's work uses unfamiliar forms as a metaphor for a person's internal struggles with mental health," she said. "Even though aspects of the piece are nightmarish, Jen's welcoming textures and vibrant palette choices are a beautiful reminder that even in those critical moments when people don't entirely recognize themselves, they still deserve attention, comfort and grace."
"Soft Night, Watching" is the latest chapter in a career built on making the frightening approachable. Clay's earlier interactive works include "Nearing" (2017) and "Welcome to You&Me" (2019), an installation created for neurodiverse children, as well as "Soft Sanity" (2019). In 2023 she debuted a quilt-composed video game and installation at Locust Projects in Miami, funded by a Knight Arts New Work Award, and her first solo exhibition, "This World Doesn't Belong to You," opened at Emerson Dorsch the same year. A short documentary about her practice, "The Texture of Anxiety," won a regional Emmy for its exploration of mental health through tactile art. She has completed residencies at Oolite Arts, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, the Vermont Studio Center, the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, and the McColl Center, and in 2022 a permanent public artwork commissioned through Miami-Dade's Art in Public Places program was installed at the Brisas del Este Apartments. She is represented by Baker-Hall Gallery in Miami.
The piece is a temporary, site-specific work built from hand-dyed cotton, satin, velvet, and polyester minky fabric with quilting, batting, and foam, and it is supported by the generous patronage of Dorothy L. Heninger. The museum has also partnered with the Chapel Hill Public Library, whose staff curated a Reader's Guide of books that relate to the themes in Clay's work. Related programming has included "Art and Literature: 'Soft Night, Watching' and 'The Colour out of Space.'"
For visitors, the experience is an invitation to slow down and feel. The installation rewards gentle handling: hidden messages become visible only through interaction, and the longer one lingers, the more the welcoming phrases seem to darken. It is a rare museum encounter in which the audience is not just permitted but encouraged to reach out, to press a flap, to run a hand across velvet tendrils. In doing so, Clay hopes, people will learn to sit with fear rather than flee it — to observe and be observed, to be happy and eerie at the same time. "Soft Night, Watching" remains on view at the Ackland Art Museum through July 12, 2026, offering a soft, strange place to practice being a little uncomfortable.