Maggie Hensel-Brown is an Australian artist working predominantly in needle lace. Drawing on techniques from a range of needle lace traditions, she creates pictorial works inspired by classical lace panels. But where those historical pieces told grand biblical stories or tales of royal lore, Maggie’s lace illustrates the most mundane parts of her own life: quiet, contemporary moments of frustration, boredom and bliss. Each piece is made individually over months of methodical and meditative stitching in silk, cotton and linen threads, often with glass beads, and carries titles as wry as Quarantine Self Portrait I: Lying, Scrolling and Caving to Temptation.
‘Zoom’ - lacework
Image courtesy of the artist
Born in 1990 into a family of artists, Maggie completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the University of Newcastle in 2014, the same year she opened The Workroom, a small gallery and workspace in the Renew Newcastle initiative, which she directed for two years. In 2015 she took a class in Reticella at the Australian Lace Guild’s annual conference, and lace has been her sole focus since. She remembers the moment it became her calling. “I was sitting on a train, coming home after viewing a lace collection at a museum, and it was like the whole world settled into place.” Having fallen deeply in love with the process, she was just discovering its many rabbit holes. “The history, the art and the craft, there was enough there to spend a lifetime exploring and never run out of fascinating things. Lace became a lens through which I could see my whole life.” She has since studied needle lace in England, Italy, the United States, the Netherlands and across Australia.
Her work has been exhibited widely in Australia and the US, including solo exhibitions Thread Through at Artbau Gallery and Vanderbilt’s Tablecloth at Maitland Regional Art Gallery, and group shows Laced at the Australian Design Centre, the Tamworth Textile Triennial, Home Is More Than a Place at Hamilton Gallery and Lace, Not Lace at the Hunterdon Art Museum in New Jersey. Her work is held in the collections of the Powerhouse Museum, the Denver Art Museum and Tamworth Regional Gallery, and she has featured on ABC TV’s Art Works.
‘Brown Sheets’ - lace
image courtesy of the artist
Teaching sits at the heart of Maggie’s practice. She runs regular classes in person and online, and has spoken at the Bard Graduate Center in New York, the Rhode Island School of Design and the Denver Art Museum. Her community work RADIANCE, measuring 2.8 by 3 metres, brings together more than 700 lace leaves stitched by 411 contributors from Australia, the US and as far afield as Iceland, India and Antarctica. In 2026 she led Lacing Communities Together with the Columbia Gorge Museum in Washington State, where hundreds of new and experienced lacemakers stitched triangles that were joined into the installation A Sense of Place.
Maggie is eternally optimistic about the role of craft in contemporary life. “I think there will always be a universal desire to work with our hands, a curiosity to know how things are made, and a need to connect to history through the passing of skills.”