By Sara Anne Donnelly
Photos by Tara Rice
From our July 2025 issue
Last winter, Amy Ray plucked a ’70s jean jacket from a pile of clothes in her Eastport studio and saw a canvas. Her vintage shop was closed for the season, giving Ray, an artist known for her collages, drawings, and ink paintings, time to experiment. She sewed a triptych of mid-century silk-tie fragments onto the jacket’s back panel, then stitched yarn and embroidery thread in tangled ripples over the fabric. “It started to feel like my studio work, my impassioned stuff that comes from that undefined place where everything falls away and it’s just me and the material speaking to me and telling me what to do next,” she says.
Ray spent the rest of the off-season adding abstract imagery to more vintage denim jackets and to the necklines of sweaters and shirts. The resulting wearable art is improvisational, layering salvaged textiles, appliqué, and ink drawings on fabric under painterly hand embroidery that evokes webbing, seaweed, or swirling tidal grasses. Often, the threads are dense and snarled, as if the wild things they conjure are attempting to swallow the garment. This spirit of reclamation is central to the work, which embodies both Yankee frugality and environmental responsibility. “Part of this is saving clothing from a landfill and giving it new life,” Ray says.
Long intrigued by retro fashion, Ray began selling vintage clothing on Etsy and at Maine flea markets in 2010. Three years after returning to her hometown of Eastport, in 2020, she opened Bingville Style Shop in the 1887 Italianate Leavitt Block, on Water Street, built during the sardine-cannery boom that lured her ancestors here from Lebanon. The name of her store derives from the former hardscrabble neighborhood, known as Bingville, where she now lives, and her grandmother’s clothing boutique, Marie’s Style Shop, which once operated on Water Street. On days when the store is closed, Ray spends long hours in her second-floor home studio overlooking a thicket of prickly shrubs and Passamaquoddy Bay beyond. “Eastport is a very textured place,” she says. “It’s got a lot of itchy, brambly things, seaweed, rosa rugosas, sharp edges to the little cliffs. I’m fascinated by the patterns and find them inspiring.”
In addition to a collection of amoeba-like mixed-media wall art, recent works include This Too Shall Pass, a jean jacket with a cloud of pink, blue, and yellow embroidery breaking over a faded early-20th-century tapestry depicting grazing cows, and The Eleanor, a violet cardigan with a rainbow of yarns snaking across its shoulders (named after the woman who donated the sweater). Ray takes regular breaks from the studio to scour nearby beaches for washed-up treasures, from bits of rope to doll parts, that inspire, and occasionally get stitched into, her creations. (Her wall art incorporates some beach finds, as well as fragments of old quilts, baby clothes, mesh produce bags, and more.) Most of her garments are priced between $300 and $400 and, at first, Ray wasn’t sure they’d sell. But business has been brisk. “When people buy them, they really kind of fall in love with them,” she says. “It feels like adopting out a kitten. Like, oh my god, you love what I did and you’re going to take care of it? It’s really nice.”
Amy Ray’s clothing is for sale at Eastport’s Bingville Style Shop (open through mid-September; @bingville_style_shop on Instagram).
