I have been exploring wool felting - an intensive, craft-based technique - for more than 20 years. I use a specially barbed needle to tangle the fibers of dyed wool and sculpt them into shape. A large cracker takes me weeks or even months of many sittings to complete. Most of my wool sculptures are also hand stitched and embroidered. Although the process of making this work is time consuming, I enjoy the meditative hours of handcraft.

A Cheez-It is a paradox.

Cheez-Its are the best-selling cracker in the US; approximately 80 billion are produced every year by Kellanova (formerly Kellogg’s). This is a high-tech product: the culmination of decades of human hours of perfecting a cheese cracker with a crisp but tender bite. Flavor chemists and engineers have been optimizing this cracker since it was invented in 1921 - both scaling up industrial production at factories and making it incrementally more fun to eat (and therefore more difficult to stop eating).

I have questions about the motives of snack companies: their slick marketing, the growing package sizes, and the impact they have on our health—not to mention all that red and orange plastic that ends up in the landfill.

However, when I feel the ridges between my fingers and the salt flecks hit my tongue, I am flooded with powerful, intimate feelings of pleasure, comfort, and even joy. This small orange square isn’t just mass-produced junk food; it’s a time travel device to core memories. When I smell Cheez-Its I am enlivened. I don’t know exactly how these ubiquitous crackers spark such aliveness in us, but I know their power is real.

By devoting my attention and labor to these mass-produced crackers and cookies, I hope to honor their potency and hold them up for examination in a semi-sacred way. I believe that it is good and refreshing to be brought alive by the mundane. I’m pretty sure Rumi was talking about Cheez-Its when he wrote: “When someone asks what there is to do, light the candle in their hand.”

LeBrie Rich, 2025

Solo Show by LeBrie Rich Opens April 3rd at Nine Gallery

PORTLAND, Oregon—This April, Portland-based fiber artist LeBrie Rich will unveil new work in her solo exhibition, “Crackers (& Cookies)” at Nine Gallery. Continuing with her visual explorations of mass-produced food and its cultural significance, Rich will present large-scale felted sculptures—including some snack-inspired furniture—featuring iconic brands of crackers and cookies. Stripped of their familiar outer packaging and magnified well beyond life-size, each object’s formal elements move to the forefront, although the resemblance to the original product is never lost.

In addition to these larger sculptures, the exhibition will include two-dimensional textile pieces Rich created while living in Amsterdam in 2022. These works contain felted Ritz Crackers, Cheez-Its, Oreos, and other modern snack foods applied to vintage embroidery samplers and textiles sourced from Dutch antique markets. By bringing together art forms from two different cultures and time periods, the artist illustrates the global reach of American food products, while the countless hours required to create each object offer a pointed critique of our throwaway consumer culture.