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I’m thrilled to tell you that my tapestry, Displaced: Refugee Blanket was accepted to Small Tapestry International 6: Beyond the Edge. This show is the American Tapestry Alliance’s international small-format juried tapestry show. The juror was Jane Kidd, an artist I greatly admire. Getting into the show was a very sweet victory.
And if that wasn’t thrilling enough, a day later I received another email from the co-chair…
Barbara’s work has long been some of my favorite work in tapestry. Take a look at some current and past work in the photos below and then check out her website linked at the end of the post. Her work often deals with issues of humanity’s relationship to the environment but her work is extensive and varied and well worth study.
While we were looking at the show, I asked Barbara some about her practice and if she had any advice for younger artists. She said that she had had a teacher early on who told her to weave every day. She replied that often she didn’t know what was next. She didn’t have an idea for a new piece yet, so she was waiting for that to happen. The teacher replied that it didn’t matter. She should weave every day. If she didn’t have a new idea, she should weave her sketches or anything else she could think of. Just weave.
As someone who often finds herself in that place of “I don’t have the next idea worked out,” I found this to be exceptional advice. I think that the practice brings you through the times where you don’t feel an idea bursting out. The weaving itself will result in new experiences and the next piece will come quicker this way.
Barbara took that advice. She weaves every day and her vast body of work is testament to that.
I just returned from a trip to St. Louis to see the tapestry show at Webster Arts. Warp and Weft is a show of works in tapestry currently up at Webster Arts. The artists have all been students of mine in some capacity over the last seven years. Some are new to the medium and attended a foundations retreat or online class and some have been weaving for decades and attended an advanced design class or workshop or took my color gradations class online.
The video below shows the gallery, my talk, and a rather jumpy walk-through of the work. (I promise I'll get a tripod with a video head one of these days!)
I went to the Santa Fe International Folk Art Market this past weekend. I'd never been* and so this was the year. I had seen the film, Silkies of Madagascar, at the Clothroads film festival and then read the Thrums book, Silk Weavers of Hill Tribe Laos. Both things made me want to see the market where so many artists gather to show their art.
I’ve been a teacher in some form for most of my professional life, but I’ve only been teaching tapestry for eight years. The growth that has happened in my own knowledge of tapestry practice and in my abilities as a teacher has grown exponentially in that time. I’ve gone from an apprentice to someone who appreciates other artist’s practices, but has confidence in her own and can teach others to follow their own paths.
Fiber artists are creative and every day I see something unique and inspiring from one of my students. Sometimes it is a fully-formed tapestry. But often it is the small seed of an idea that someone is trying out in a sampler. My job is simply to offer a little oxygen and water to that seed and encourage the idea to grow and perhaps become something marvelous. One idea leads to another, and a little chain of successes can lead to a whole body of work which enriches the maker and the world.
Susan Iverson was in Fort Collins this week to do a couple lectures in conjunction with the show FABRICation which is traveling from Virginia Commonwealth University. VCU is the school where Susan was a professor in the School of Arts, Craft and Material Studies department until her recent retirement.
Susan's practice of tapestry weaving has many similarities to my own. We both weave on floor looms. We both value abstraction and weaving tapestry that relates to the gridded nature of the medium. And there is a deep sensibility from her around materials.
Tapestry weaving is a slow process. The image is built slowly in layers, one bit at a time. My process of weaving felt very similar to the geologic processes that created Petrified Forest National Park. In my month in the park, I hiked as much of it as I could and I was constantly amazed at the beauty of the layers in the rock. I also thought a lot about the span of time represented there.
My work often addresses the nature of time through the influence of landscape. In some ways, being able to look back at events that happened hundreds of millions of years ago in the rocks and petrified wood in the Park helps put our daily human struggles into some perspective. In a world full of short term gratification and goals, taking the long view, whether it is through appreciation of how the landscape was formed or through slowly building up a tapestry image in yarn, helps shift perspective and can even provide hope for the future.
