Further (final?) thoughts on your fiber ancestry

Sometimes you think you're done with a topic, but it keeps popping up again in conversation and in your thoughts.  This is the third installment and possibly the final one (never say never) of a consideration of  one's fiber ancestry.  By ancestors I mean teachers and also those artists whose lives and work have inspired you even if you've never met or studied with them.   You can find my previous posts on this subject here and here.  

In a Facebook conversation, Ellen Ramsey remarked that the artists who make you "swoon" (my term) are not necessarily one's ancestors.  She makes an excellent point.  One's ancestors are those whose DNA you carry, whose tradition and ways of working have deeply informed your own.  They are in your bones.  I was taught by those who work largely in the French tapestry tradition, so that's my "tapestry DNA."  Other weavers have come to it from Native, Southwestern, Central and South American traditions, among many others.  

My notion had been that artists whose work I deeply love have influenced my own artistic practice (artists like Sheila Hicks and Lenore Tawney and Silvia Heyden) and that therefore they are my adopted ancestors.  But, and here is where Ellen is exactly right, we can admire other artists and at the same time recognize that their work is not ours to do.  Not simply because it's wrong to copy, plagiarize or appropriate other's ideas and methods wholesale, but because our work is to discover and develop our own voices.  

When we are learning a new medium this can be hard to remember.  We want to learn technique and we usually want to learn it "the right way," at least to start.  When we see work that moves us, naturally we want to make work like that.  And this is indeed one important way that art moves forward, in all mediums.  

In my conversation with Ellen she reminded me that she had first come across the idea of fiber ancestry in Austin Kleon's book Steal Like an Artist (which is a great and provocative read, by the way).  As you can guess from the title, his thesis is that all artists steal, by which he means take what they see and transform it to make it their own.  (Merely borrowing is plagiarism.)  Kleon has a chapter called "Climb Your own Family Tree."  He advises artists to choose one artist or role model and deeply study them.  Then study the people that person was influenced by.  And so on, "climb[ing] up the tree as far as you can go.  Once you build your tree, it's time to start your own branch."  Kleon has lots of great things to say about the difference between copying and "originality."  Get the book and read it for yourself!  Here's one page as a teaser:  

Austin Kleon, Steal Like an Artist, page 39. 

As long as we're taking about books,  I recently learned about an exhibit that happened at the Whitney Museum in New York in 1978.  The exhibit looked at the mid-century trend among American artists of making work about previous artworks, often in a parodic or satirical vein.  Pop Art pieces by Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein come to mind.  I've only just begun reading the catalog, called Art About Art by Jean Lipman and Richard Marshall, but the introductory essay by Leo Steinberg has already made it clear that stealing motifs and images from previous artwork goes back thousands of years.  (I found a very affordable used copy from an online merchant.). This promises to be an entertaining and informative read. 

Ellen shared a link to this 10 minute podcast on creating/discovering your own artistic family tree.  It's worth a listen.  Among the suggestions there:  don't just make a list of the artists you like, but go deeper and ask, What do the artists whom you admire and who influence you share with each other, and with your own work?  Don't limit yourself to your own medium in constructing this family tree.  Perhaps you are influenced by poets, or musicians, or woodworkers or architects. . .

This is clearly a deep and wide topic that gets at the heart of what it is to make art in a particular medium and tradition.  I hope these posts have helped you understand your own work and task as an artist a little better.  I'm going to close with another quotation from Steal Like an Artist:  "The great thing about dead or remote masters is that they can't refuse you as an apprentice.  You can learn whatever you want from them.  They left their lesson plans in their work." 

PS.  I urge you to check out and follow Ellen Ramsey's blog, which is always enlightening and thought-provoking.  She knows her stuff.  Thank you, Ellen!  We are all, always, learning from each other.  

Your Fiber Ancestry

Who are your fiber ancestors?  By that I mean, for starters, who has taught you?  Like our immediate families, our first teachers in a given medium have a huge and lasting impact on our practice.  I have been fortunate to take classes with Tommye Scanlin and Pat Williams (my first teachers--how lucky was I?), James Koehler, Kathe Todd-Hooker, Mary Zicafoose, Joan Baxter, Rebecca Mezoff, and Rowen Schussheim-Anderson (This is already a link-heavy post so I am not linking to these outstanding weavers; I trust that you can google them if you don't already know their work).  I have learned so many important things from each of them.  And I've written recently about the huge impact my fiber arts professor Lida Gordon had on me.  There are so many more teachers out there I'd still like to study with too.  And though I've never studied with them in person, books by Carol Russell, Mette Lise Rössing, and Joanne Soroka have also informed and influenced me greatly.  

In life and in art there are also our adopted families--those friends who become like family to us.  In tapestry these might be the artists whom you've never met, who may be dead, but whose work has impacted your own.  This wider family of tapestry ancestors has been on my mind lately.  I've been working on a talk I'll give at Convergence in July called The Contemporary Tapestry Scene:  Trends & Traditions, so I've been researching fiber art of the past 50-75 years.   I've also been delving into catalogs, books and videos by and about artists I admire, and I'm thinking about what I can learn from them and how their approaches to fiber and weaving compare to my own.  As with my real-life teachers, I learn from each of them--if sometimes it's how my own orientation or approach are different.  

Among my own most important adopted ancestors are Sheila Hicks, Lenore Tawney and a recent addition for me, Olga de Amaral.  Sue Lawty, Silvia Heyden, and Agnes Martin have also expanded my understanding of what is possible (look for a future blog post about them).  Massive museum shows and important books can be--and have--been devoted to each of these artists.  My purpose here is just to share them with you, partly to clarify for myself why I love their work, and partly in hopes that you will find them inspiring too if you haven't already.  

Molly Elkind, detail, Deep Dive minime (c) 2020

Sheila Hicks' influence for me is primarily through her minimes, those small, improvisational studies she has done for decades on a simple wooden stretcher-bar loom.  The  book Sheila Hicks:  Weaving as Metaphor* contains color reproductions of dozens of her minimes (she has made over a thousand).  This book freed me to weave improvisationally, to follow with warp and weft the "what ifs" that often occur to one while weaving, even to embrace technical awkwardness on the way to new ideas.  Hicks's work shows me that the yarn and the weaving process itself is enough to carry a piece; one doesn't have to weave an image or picture.  Her work is the inspiration for my Convergence class Weave a Minime (This class is full and has a waiting list but I will offer it after Convergence to guilds).  

Molly Elkind, detail Open Warp Vista:  Big Sky (c) 2020

Lenore Tawney is one of the American weavers who first took weaving off the loom (and off the wall) and into three airy dimensions.  Her eccentric weaving on very fine, open warps may be fragile and unstable, but it is gorgeous and for me, inspiring. Her "Cloud" installations of thousands of hanging threads strip weaving back to its barest poetic essence, the empty warp.  Like Hicks, she was inspired by the qualities of her materials and by the process of weaving.  She also loved to do collage and I appreciate her work there too. Books about her work that I've enjoyed include Lenore Tawney:  Mirror of the Universe and Lenore Tawney:  A Retrospective.  You can find her collages in Lenore Tawney:  Signs on the Wind. 

Molly Elkind, samples of woven paper yarn;
top sample printed with ashes in matte medium

While I had seen works by Olga de Amaral in person and in books, I did not fall in love until I recently came across these two videos about her:  Olga de Amaral:  The House of my Imagination and Olga de Amaral:  To Weave a Rock.  (Apparently "weave a rock" was an assignment she gave once to her students at Haystack.  Her approach is metaphorical and poetic.  Hmmmm. . . how would I weave a rock?)  It is Olga's wholehearted love for her materials, her metaphorical, poetic approach, and her love of obsessive, repetitive process and pattern that pull me in.  Olga de Amaral does not hesitate to color her woven surfaces with pigment, gold leaf, clay and other materials.  As the photo above shows, in my own way I have been experimenting with unusual yarns and with printing on woven surfaces.  There is also a book entitled Olga de Amaral:  To Weave a Rock which is wonderfully inspiring.  

Ultimately, it's impossible to trace all the artists who have influenced us.  We are in fact influenced by everything we've seen, whether in a museum or on Instagram or in popular visual culture in ways we may be barely aware of.  We're invisibly influenced by the teachers and artists who influenced our teachers.  The weight of the tradition we were born into--European, Native, South American, or any culture that values weaving--this is the very air we breathe that we may take for granted.  

Who are your fiber ancestors--both your direct lineage and your adopted family?  Tell us in the comments below.  

* I am not recommending or benefiting from any of these booksellers' links; they are just informational.