Weaving community: a whole lot of gratitude

Yarn ball Christmas tree with moomintrolls who might be up to mischief.  Thanks to Rebecca Mezoff (and Emily) for letting me steal their idea for the tree.  Moomintrolls are characters from Finnish folklore.

At this time of year, if we are lucky, we celebrate the winter holidays with family and friends.  We celebrate friendship and love and laughter, and we are grateful not to be alone in the darkest part of the year.  We look back over the past year, recalling the good times and the bad (and the weird and the downright ugly).  With luck we might estimate that the good outweighed the hard.

I was thinking this morning about how fortunate I have been to be part of a sustaining artistic community every part of the way in 2018.  In the Atlanta area, I found my tribe at Southeast Fiber Arts Alliance (SEFAA), which hosted my show of tapestries in February and March.  I was honored to have friends not just from my neighborhood but weavers from Florida and North Carolina, come to see the show and give me their considered feedback.  You know who you are, and I am grateful!

Opening reception for ICONIC show at SEFAA.  Photo:  Nancy Langham

When we moved to New Mexico, I left one community and was humbled and so happy to be welcomed into another one.  The Las Tejedoras,  High Desert Tapestry and Las Aranas guilds have become my local fiber tribe.  It is thrilling to be among so many dedicated weavers.  I am looking forward to teaching Collage to Tapestry Cartoon at Espanola Valley Fiber Arts Center (EVFAC) in February and deepening my connection with several weavers there.*

One of the best things to happen to me in 2018 was the Handweavers Guild of America's Convergence conference and the subsequent American Tapestry Alliance meeting and retreat.  It was fantastic to meet, teach and weave alongside gifted artists from across the country.  The workshop with Rowen Schussheim-Anderson has changed my approach to tapestry in exciting ways.

Next year will afford me the chance to teach in four locations around the country, and I am deeply grateful to those weaving friends (again, you know who you are) who have helped me make those connections.

Finally, I continue to be grateful for the online community I have found on Instagram and Facebook.  I am as dismayed as anyone at the ongoing revelations about Facebook's cavalier attitude toward users' privacy (to put it generously), but I continue to feel that what I learn there from fellow artists and weavers far outweighs the negative.  Instagram has introduced me to fiber artists worldwide whose work inspires and teaches me something almost every day.

Last week I was touched to get thoughtful and valuable feedback on both social media when I publicly asked for help figuring out how (or if) to handle next year's tapestry diary.  (If you're wondering, I've reached a decision but I'm saving it for the next blog post!)  Weaving is a solitary pursuit, but sharing our work in progress, our questions, doubts and occasional triumphs makes it all easier.

I suppose it's not surprising that weavers are good at coming together, constructing a sturdy fabric in which each thread is a small but indispensable part of a larger, beautiful whole.  As I look back at 2018 and forward to 2019 I hope to continue to be one of those interlaced threads.

Santa Fe Plaza 

I wish for you, my friends and colleagues near and far, all the blessings of community wherever you are and whatever you do.  The online community is wonderful, but let's remember to get out of the studio and make connections in real life too!  Keep an eye out for those solitary threads who might be snagged or unraveling, and bring them into the web.  We're all in this together.


* There are still openings in the class at EVFAC.  Click HERE to register.

Working inside the box (part 2 of 2)

Last week I wrote about how a workshop with Rowen Schussheim Anderson "blew the lid off my traditional tapestry box."  I was, and am, excited by the prospect of incorporating mixed media and techniques into the traditional flat, weft-faced tapestry surface.

In the midst of these musings, I read about Irvin Trujillo's latest Best in Show weaving at Santa Fe's annual Spanish Market.  The piece is entitled Pensando en el Cajon or Thinking in the Box. As you would expect from Irvin, the piece was breathtakingly complex and exquisitely crafted.  His words quoted in the Santa Fe New Mexican newspaper article caught my attention:

"Irvin Trujillo, in discussing his winning piece, explained that while most artists are told to think outside the box, his weaving explores the concept of the box by going back to traditional roots.
'The box hasn't been defined yet,' he said of his textile, which took eight months to create.  'So we have to figure out the box before going outside.'" 

Irvin Trujillo of La Centinela Weavers in Chimayo, NM, describes his winning piece to
Barbara Crowley of Maine at the preview for Spanish Market.
Photo by Luis Sanchez Saturno of  The New Mexican

Wow!  Irvin comes from seven generations of Rio Grande weavers, and he feels the box hasn't been defined yet!  I am going to ponder that thought for quite a while.  Irvin's words, and even more, his stunning weaving, confirm that there is still plenty to be discovered and achieved inside the traditional box of weft-faced weaving, and within the various traditions within the tapestry field (Rio Grande, French, Navajo and others. . .).  Treat yourself and hop over HERE to see some of Irvin's work.   And of course the art of many other contemporary tapestry weavers who work within the parameters of pure tapestry also affirms this.  For proof of this, look no further than the member artists of the American Tapestry Alliance.

Many of us have discovered that working within limits can be paradoxically freeing and actually lead us to find new solutions for creative problems.  On the most basic level, if you've ever run out of a particular type or color of irreplaceable yarn before you've finished weaving, you know what I mean.  You have to find new solutions within the parameters you're working in, and often those solutions make for a more interesting piece in the end.

So, where does that leave me (and maybe you?), a contemporary weaver, excited by the modern anything-goes approach yet impressed and informed by what is possible in the traditional manner?

Darned if I know!  I'm headed back to the studio to see if I can find out where my work lies in relation to the box. . . .  Meanwhile, let me know in the comments--is your work inside the box?  Outside?  How does your conception of your relation to the box inform your work?

Blowing the lid off the tapestry box (part 1 of 2)

I've recently been mulling over the familiar metaphor of working "inside (or outside) the box" with regards to tapestry.  Last month I had the great pleasure of taking a week-long workshop with tapestry artist and art professor Rowen Schussheim-Anderson at the American Tapestry Alliance's retreat in Reno, Nevada.  I was excited by the promise of learning to use mixed materials and techniques, including collage (already one of my favorite approaches to design) in tapestry.  I am still excited and still exploring the possibilities.

It was fun to be introduced to so many new-to-me techniques, including weaving a window in the surface of the tapestry, adding novelty yarns, adding on surface embellishments such as wrapped and coiled pipe cleaners and bits of clothesline, and twining, crochet and beadwork techniques as part of the woven surface. Rowen told us our workshop weaving would not be a coherent work of art, and she was right, at least in my case.  It's a funky little thing, but it will be a good reminder to me of some of the things we tried.

Molly Elkind, mixed media sample from Rowen Schussheim-Anderson workshop, 2018.
That's my painted paper in the window.  

Speaking of funky little experiments, another thing we did was add large stitched marks to previous tapestries we may have done that we were not happy with.  I really liked the energy and added texture that stitches added to this very early tapestry of mine.  I'm definitely keeping this in mind for future work.

Molly Elkind, Pedernal study

We also did a number of sketchbook exercises including an approach to collage that I haven't tried before.  For me this involved enlarging a section of a topo map and using it as a template for a cut and pasted paper design.  I had always built up my collaged compositions intuitively on a blank sheet of paper, so this was a more challenging method.

Molly Elkind, paper collage from Rowen Schussheim-Anderson workshop, 2018

While I'm not sure the overall composition quite succeeds, I think some of these cropped details could make interesting small experiments. (To find them I cut 4x6" and 6x8" rectangles out of the center of sheets of white paper, forming makeshift frames.)

The most eye-opening thing for me about Rowen's workshop was simply being given permission to think outside the box, to let go of traditional notions of pure tapestry:  warp faced, using mostly wool wefts, perfectly flat and straight-edged.  My tapestry teachers up to now have been incredibly gifted practitioners of this traditional approach, and so I have worked within those parameters.  But I love the idea that a tapestry can itself be a collage, with various disparate and surprising elements layered and juxtaposed.  I've been saying to friends that Rowen's workshop "blew the lid off my traditional tapestry box."

Tune in next week to find out how my thinking did a 180 when I heard Irvin Trujillo's comments on working inside the box.