MOST ART STUDIOS WILL TELL YOU WHAT THEY specialize in. Sisal Creative’s answer is essentially: everything. That’s not a dodge. It’s the point. Founded in 2012 by artist Becca Barnet, Sisal Creative is a Charleston-based multidisciplinary studio of artists-for-hire, serving homeowners, interior designers, hotels, restaurants, retailers and other businesses. Every project is fully custom and site-specific, blending fine art with function to produce immersive objects and experiences that defy traditional categories. For the team, the scale of their work shifts constantly, from sweeping architectural installations to intimate branding elements. Still, their philosophy stays fixed: every material, every color, every choice must earn its place in the story being told.
Barnet’s path to founding the studio is an origin story straight out of a Voltaire novella: Follow your bliss, say yes, take chances, repeat. Growing up in Spartanburg, South Carolina, Barnet convinced her parents to let her turn the family basement into a jungle. She made three-dimensional objects and threw herself entirely into the massive project. Later, she would collage her bathroom walls (despite her parents’ concerns about resale value). “I painted on everything that didn’t move,” she says. Later, she transferred to a private high school for a better art education and went on to earn a Bachelor of Fine Arts in illustration from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2009. However, she frequently answered two-dimensional assignments with three-dimensional solutions, such as stop-motion animations or sculptural responses.
A professor suggested Barnet consider taxidermy school, framing it as another way to think about assembling materials and working creatively under pressure. She loved the idea and enrolled in a six-week program in the Ozarks. Another mentor pointed her toward the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, where she interned and was eventually hired as an exhibition preparator. For two years, she worked on traveling exhibits, also finding time to apprentice with a Brooklyn blacksmith and a New Jersey taxidermy shop, absorbing every technique she could. “I had to be so annoying,” she says. “I never took breaks and never stopped asking questions.” New York, eventually, became too much. She chose Charleston for its smaller scale and outsized creative energy and arrived determined not to abandon the work she loved.
Barnet’s reputation landed her the lead fabricator role for the South Carolina Aquarium’s Journey to Madagascar exhibit, where she built animal habitats and enrichment environments designed to honor the live animals. It was absorbing, meaningful work but still only a part of what she was capable of. When her father asked what her dream job would look like, she described combining every skill she had to create anything for anyone. He encouraged her to go for it.
Today, Sisal Creative operates as an artistic design-build practice. Clients arrive with anything from finished plans to blank walls and no idea where to begin. The first phase is always design: The team engineers a concept all the way down to the hardware, fleshing out every element required to make a piece work. Fabrication follows, built either in-house or through a network of skilled craftspeople the studio has cultivated over the years, with Barnet and her team involved at every step. The process accommodates elements such as hand-sculpted large-scale works that begin as digital renderings and scale models, as well as smaller commissions like branded postcards, prototypes, and research and development work.
Alongside Barnet, project manager and senior designer Cara Martin brings over a decade of experience in operations, business management, marketing, interior design and graphic design. Her role spans creative direction and cohesive project execution from concept through completion. The studio also collaborates closely with TTS Studios, a set fabrication company whose work includes Broadway productions, weddings and pop-up events. The two teams recently collaborated at the Charleston Place Hotel, where they restored and repainted a 40-year-old vintage Venetian carousel in just seven days.
Sisal Creative’s portfolio reflects how seriously the studio takes the idea that art should respond to its context. For the North Charleston Chamber of Commerce’s new home in the historic GARCO Mill, a former tire plant, Sisal Creative was asked to create an homage to the South. The result is a 40-foot-tall installation inspired by the tradition of sweetgrass basket weaving, built from wooden dowels wrapped in flexible wood veneer so that horizontal rods echo the texture of the baskets themselves. The piece is accompanied by an essay by a fifth-generation sweetgrass basket maker that ties the visual and cultural threads together. For the Dewberry Hotel, the team designed armoires inspired by the work of textile artist Josef Frank, celebrating native plants through repeating patterns that span the hotel’s in-room amenities and architectural details.
For a real estate technology company, the brief called for something that captured the personality of the people who worked there. The team collected random personal objects from employees—guitars, pots and pans, buttons, the kinds of things you’d find in a junk drawer—and assembled them into an installation that told the story of varied, distinctive people and the equally varied homes they help others find. It was playful and funky, and entirely specific to that office and those people.
One of Barnet’s favorite projects of all is the renovation of Imagination Station, a 40-year-old toy store in Spartanburg that needed a full rebrand and interior overhaul. Sisal Creative handled everything: flooring, lighting, custom sculptures, color and signage. Every element was built and painted to the store’s specifications. The result transformed a beloved local institution into a destination where visitors come to play as much as to shop, breathing new life into a community landmark that had begun to slow down.
The natural history exhibit at the Charleston Museum offers a different perspective on the studio’s range. Barnet and her team redesigned the Bunting Natural History Gallery, restoring more than 150 taxidermy mounts, including specimens of the extinct Carolina Parakeet and the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker, while also creating custom illustrations and sculpting immersive habitat environments. The project drew on nearly every skill Barnet had spent years accumulating, from museum work to blacksmithing to sculpture, unified in service of a single coherent experience.
“This company has evolved and become a niche thing for people who don’t know exactly what they need, but they want something beautiful,” Barnet says. “We help them visualize that and make it a reality. We’re the people the ideas flow through.” She cites Walt Disney as an inspiration, specifically his gift for drawing out the best in creative people by giving them space to play. Her own approach to clients reflects something similar: No one has to arrive with a fully formed vision. The studio meets people wherever they are. “If we can’t make it, we know somebody who does, or we’ll find them,” she says.
It’s that willingness to say yes first and figure out the rest later that has defined Sisal Creative from the beginning, and it’s what keeps the work from ever looking the same twice. *
Robin Howard is a freelance writer in Charleston. See more of her work at robinhowardwrites.com.
