Hannah Buechler Finds Inspiration in Music, Fashion + Experimentation

When Hannah Buechler was 13 years old, she spent hours in her mother’s garage, happily painting with her hands and making a mess. Even at this young age, she had already discovered her calling. “I realized then—and I still believe this to be true now—that making art was what I enjoyed most,” she says.

A multidisciplinary artist, Buechler received her bachelor’s degree in fibers from the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD). Now based in Los Angeles, she launched her eponymous studio to produce her signature tactile collages. She also explores how simplicity can blossom into complex layers as she makes rich textures from small, repetitive gestures.

As the daughter of a scientist, Buechler gives thoughtful consideration to the origins, properties, and possibilities of her materials. She has experimented with everything from resin to embroidery, and even makes her own textiles.

Buechler has loved fashion for as long as she can remember, and in 2021, she accepted a role at apparel company Libertine. As the brand’s senior designer, she specializes in patterns, screenprinting, and digital graphics.

Buechler is content to balance her 9-to-5 duties with her craft for now, but she envisions a future pivot. “I have always had a creative corporate job while continuing my studio practice,” she notes. “I have done my best to sell my work on my own, but I am hopeful I can make this my sole career.”

Today, Hannah Buechler joins us for Friday Five! Below, she shares five inspirations and five of her favorite projects.

Hannah Buechler’s 5 Inspirations

1. Music

Music has always been a driving force and inspiration for my work. Often I create a piece and feel a song, where it may be the colors or patterns, and many times I name my pieces after song titles. I don’t shuffle my music, so when I listen to albums, I can hear the song transitions and understand the style behind each artist’s album. My taste is all over the place: I love heavy metal, rap, pop, rock, and indie. Today, I started my day listening to Electric Light Orchestra, then switched to Candlemass and Ariana Grande.

2. Experimenting

Being an experimental artist has opened the door to continuous learning. I love blending processes with materials so much that I create my own textiles, including what I call my loom bands. Over the years, I have loved to experiment with resin, embroidery, and painting techniques. One of my favorite experimental projects—which I have yet to release—is called Freshman 25. As a freshman at SCAD, I collected chip bags and microwaved them. I have around 100 microwaved chip bags. Until I know how to mount them, I will only tell the world about them, but it has been a project deep in the back of my mind that I know I have to complete.

3. Fashion

I have loved clothes since I knew how to dress myself. My parents both appreciated clothes and fashion, so I grew up watching how they dressed and always felt inspired to look good and feel good in clothes. I don’t think it surprises anyone who knows me that I’ve worked in fashion for the last five years as Libertine’s surface designer. Even when I was younger, I can remember being inspired by specific collections: Karl Lagerfeld collections with Chanel: Pre-Fall 2012 Paris-Bombay and Pre-Fall 2014 Paris-Dallas. All of Alexander McQueen’s work, from the theatrical sets to the clothes (No. 13 Paint Dress Finale, Spring/Summer 1999). Growing up, I loved feeling and seeing the colorful textiles in department stores, especially the Chanel tweeds.

4. Collecting

I have always had a knack for collecting, as many people do. I have a white Panasonic VHS TV and love creating “tape towers” in corners of my room. My cigar boxes hold different materials: colored pencils, colored pencil shavings, pens, paint scraps, resin scraps, etc. One of the first things I started collecting as a kid was vinyl after being gifted The Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, as well as The Rolling Stones’ Undercover. My newest obsession is Kieselstein-Cord handbags, a brand that is niche and ornate, with gold, animalistic details like crocodile feet on the bottom of a handbag.

5. My dog, Stevie

Stevie, aka Steve, is my 9-year-old Boston Terrier child. She has lived with me all over the world, from Savannah to Paris and San Diego to New York, and now in Los Angeles. She has traveled to South America and all over the United States with me, being the best and easiest travel companion despite her stubborn personality. She is the strangest, quirkiest dog and incredibly bright yet silly at the same time. She has a funny way of understanding the materials I am working with and what she can step on. She will effortlessly walk around a painting or wet substrate on the ground but will also walk and sit on my loom band pieces.

5 Projects by Hannah Buechler

1. Satellite Series: Cosmos

Cosmos was the culmination of saved project experiments from college, extensive beading with broken jewelry, and themes of deconstruction and reconstruction, resulting in a large (63 x 48 inches) free-standing artwork that can also be wall-mounted.

I started this piece when I was sick and quarantined with COVID. I had never watched Euphoria before, so I binge-watched two seasons and beaded from my room with no idea how large this piece would become.

Over the four years I spent working on Cosmos, it transformed from a small, beaded textile into an endless artwork full of experiments, including embedded loose material under mesh layers, chain woven between rows of safety pins, and pieces of a beaded, broken vase dipped in resin. Creating Cosmos has made me think of the possibilities of making other time capsule pieces for others. I imagine someone who doesn’t want to throw out certain textiles, materials, or jewelry they may have.

I do look at this piece every day, though, and think about adding to it. I am starting to see shapes form the more I look at it, which makes me want to play off of that and create something more representational.

2. Palisade

Palisade was the product of staying hunkered down during the 2025 Los Angeles fires. I needed to create something in order to cope with the disasters around us.

The composition was inspired by my drive home the day the fires started, as I watched the flames rise off the mountains beneath the Getty. Growing up in San Diego, I will never forget some of the times we had to evacuate during fires. I grew up in a town that is filled with Eucalyptus trees, which always pose a threat. I will never forget the grayish-black, thick skies, often with a hint of yellow and orange depending on how close you were to the fire. With Palisade, I wanted to emphasize black, grays, and white, with bright, striking hues. Creating a little moment in the bottom right corner symbolized the drastic color change from before and after the fire.

At the time, my partner and I decided to stay in LA—despite living on the base of the Santa Monica Mountains. We were racking our brains over how to get our work out of our home (my partner is a fashion designer who makes custom clothes for rock ‘n’ rollers like Billy Idol). My family offered to drive up to help move some of the things that we couldn’t bear to part with. When thinking about leaving some of my larger pieces behind—like Cosmos, which was still a work in progress then—I decided to stay. Staying gave me the opportunity to create Palisade, creating something that symbolized a moment in time.

3. Alaska

This project brought many challenges; however, the outcome was better than I had hoped. I was commissioned by a woman whose husband caught the fish that is printed on the fabric substrate. The Japanese technique of Gyotaku lets you create an exact, lifelike record of a catch before selling or eating the fish.

Coincidentally, I took this project on a fly-fishing trip to Alaska with my family. It wasn’t until this trip that I really started to see the correlations between fly-fishing and beading. More than just the materials I work with, including fishing line, lures, and flies, beading and fishing are both very patient processes.

The commission took 11 months to complete, and when framed, I wanted to show the extensive beading on the backside of the textile, so I had a piece of plexiglass laser-cut with holes around the edge. This let me use fishing line to sew the fabric into the base of the frame. To secure the line, I added fishing lures/beads to hold the fabric in place.

4. Contemplation/The Weight of Memory

As the daughter of a biochemist, I think I was inherently fascinated with the human body and anatomy. We grew up with a real human skeleton in our home, named Walter, who probably should have scared me as a kid, but I found the body to be a source of inspiration. Growing up with Walter, I always found a way of tying anatomy back into my work. My first body of work was when I was 17 and in high school. It featured different parts of the body, using different techniques in each piece.

These two pieces were my way of adding representation of the body into my loom band work. These pieces brought many challenges, including letting go of the “freestyle” aspect of creating my loom band pieces. I had to plan and redraw the faces a lot, which was the opposite of how I approach my other works, which tend to be more fluid.

5. Wild Like the West Texas Winds

In many ways, painting has always been a way for me to be more expressive and representational in my compositions and processes. As I tend to allow color, line, and texture to drive my loom band pieces, my paintings give me a moment to reflect on gradients, repetitive patterns like stripes, camo, and animal prints, flora and fauna. Even though I completed this piece in 2019, it still remains one of my favorite paintings because of the time I had to make it.

The name Wild Like the West Texas Winds came from one of my grandpa’s many quotes he used to describe me. When I painted this piece, my grandpa had just been admitted to a nursing home. I would go to work every day, visit my grandpa, and then come home to paint; this piece was one I became obsessed with coming home to.

I have tried to create paintings similar to this one, but they end up being too chaotic. WLTWTW will always be special to me in many ways.