Fiber Ancestry, part 2

In last month's post I wrote about our fiber ancestors, those teachers and artists who have taught and influenced us.  I described the impact Sheila Hicks, Lenore Tawney, and Olga de Amaral have had and continue to have on my own work, even though I never took a class with any of them.  They are my "adopted" ancestors.  I also mentioned Silvia Heyden, Sue Lawty, and Agnes Martin.  Today I want to talk about them.  

Silvia Heyden, Weaving Dance, 2006, 35" x 41"
Courtesy the American Tapestry Alliance website Artist's Page

Many tapestry weavers cite Silvia Heyden as an inspiration.  Swiss-born, Silvia spent the last years of her life living and weaving near the Eno River in North Carolina.  Her work was commissioned for locations in Europe and the U.S. and featured in exhibitions world-wide.  If you haven't seen the documentary about her work, A Weaverly Path:  The Tapestry Life of Silvia Heyden--run, don't walk, to watch it HERE.  Indeed, one of Silvia's lasting impacts has been the concept of "weaverliness"--of approaching tapestry and image-making in purely "weaverly" ways to make objects that can only have been woven, not painted or produced in any other media.  She wove loosely and improvisationally, often on colored linen warps in an open weave that allowed the warps to show.  She wove eccentrically and innovated a type of wedge weave she called "feather weave" to create patterns that moved rhythmically across the tapestry. Exploiting the basic elements of triangles, half-rounds and slits, she developed a unique tapestry language.  Her work was deeply informed by the parallels she intuited between the strings of a violin, which she played her whole life, and the strings of the loom and between the movements of music and the movements of thread.  Silvia wrote a book about her work, The Making of Modern Tapestry:  My Voyage of Discovery, but unfortunately it is out of print.  Ask around at your local guilds and among your weaving friends to see if you can borrow a copy.  

I am fortunate to have a copy of Silvia's book and and a small study of hers in it was the source of my experimentation with exposed-warp triangles in this sample and later in my piece SkyGrass.  Thank you, Silvia. 

Molly Elkind, Sample inspired by Silvia Heyden's open-weave triangles. 
Linen warp and weft, 2020. 

Molly Elkind, Sky Grass, (c) 2020.  Linen warp; wool, linen and metallic weft.  26" x 45" 

I first stumbled across the work of Sue Lawty (see her other Instagram page here) on a visit to the Victoria & Albert Museum in London in the mid-2000s.  I was gobsmacked by her tapestries then, and I wasn't even a tapestry weaver yet.  

Sue Lawty, Silent Witness, (c) 2002, 206 cm x 30 cm (approx 81" x 12"), 
linen, raphia, cotton tape

Sue Lawty, No Mans Land, (c) 136 cm x 137cm (approx. 54" x 54") 2004, linen, hemp, raphia, cotton

I adore the way Sue allows her materials and the basic structure of weaving to speak a quiet, nuanced, textured language that for me is endlessly fascinating.  A simple search online will turn up enough links to the Victoria and Albert Museum, West Dean College, and Browngrotta to keep you engrossed for an afternoon.  On the Browngrotta page if you scroll down you will find links to two books about Sue's work that I can recommend (among many other tempting books about contemporary fiber art):  Earth Materials and rock-raphia-linen-lead.  The titles of these books reveal Sue's abiding interest in her materials as her key inspiration.  In recent years she has moved away from weaving toward "drawing" with grids of tiny pebbles on white grounds.  These works also rely on subtle variations within repeated patterns and upon allowing the textures and shapes of her materials to speak for themselves.  

Molly Elkind, Sample in Blues, 2021. Linen warp;
wefts include Churro wool, paper, cotton, soy silk 

The third artist who haunts me these days, as she haunts many artists, is the late painter Agnes Martin.  She is often called a minimalist, but she herself felt she was an Abstract Expressionist.  Her work lacks the wild, spontaneous gestures we associate with that movement, but for Agnes it expressed deep emotions, as evidenced by her titles for her work such as Happiness.  Others have written far more knowledgeably and extensively about Agnes than I can here, but for me, it's the daring to strip her work back to barest essentials that impresses me.  That, and the dedicated exploration of horizontal stripes in pale tints of blue, pink and cream.  She swore her work bore no resemblance to the New Mexico landscape she lived in for decades, but having witnessed our winter sunrise skies here I see a definite resemblance:  there are horizontal bands of pink and blue and lemon just as in her paintings.  I can recommend two books:  a biography by Nancy Princenthal called Agnes Martin:  Her Life and Art, and a short memoir by Donald Woodman called Agnes Martin and Me that recounts the story of his tumultuous friendship with the painter when she lived in Galisteo, NM.  There is also a wonderful documentary called With My Back to the World in which Agnes speaks for herself about her life and work.  You can stream it  through Kanopy with a public library card or university ID.  

I reiterate my challenge to you from last month:  Spend some time thinking about who your own fiber ancestors are--not just those whom you have taken classes with, but the artists in any media whose work has knocked you out and inspired your own.  What would happen if you let go of your doubts and fears and strove to honor your own unique voice, as those inspiring artists honored theirs?