Monday, April 9, 2012

Fantastic Fibers 1

I was pleased to be juried into Fantastic Fibers, the annual show at the Yeiser Art Center in Paducah KY and went to the opening a week ago.  FF is a longstanding show that took a hiatus for a few years and has miraculously regained its reputation, with close to 400 entries this year.  The Yeiser is a lovely little gallery and they intelligently time the annual fiber show so that visitors to the big AQS quilt show can see it.  It's only a block from the National Quilt Museum and five blocks from the AQS show, so if you're in Paducah for the big show you can easily see FF.

Fiber artist Luanne Rimel was the juror for FF this year and she saw two trends: lots of paper, lots of text.  Here are some of my favorites:

Shawna Munro, Red Letter Cape (detail below)


















The words, cut from books, are hand-sewed to the white cotton backing with invisible thread.

Samara Rosen, Accumulation of Knowledge (detail below)

Strips of text and music cut from books were stitched together with machine zig-zag, and arranged into a 3-D swoosh.  It reminded me of the works of El Anatsui, one of my favorite artists, whose constructions bulge and billow like this one.

No big deal on installation: just pound a couple of nails into the wall and hang the paper construction onto them. 



Carla Tilghman, Moment (detail below)

The weft of this woven piece is strips from telephone books.




5 comments:

  1. These are really cool pieces. Thanks for sharing.

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  2. I absolutely loved these! I love the use of text and paper; and it was so interesting to get up close and see the details on how these were done. There were so many interesting ideas in this show-I was impressed!

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  3. Kathy, many thanks for posting photos of this show, love your choices, hope you keep them coming....I couldn't make it and I have three pieces in the show but I don't need to see them, haha.......regards, Debbie Bein

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  4. Thanks for posting. I adore these pieces and am stimulated. Thinking I may use copies of my 2003 book to write a new book that comments on my 2003 book.

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  5. Debbie -- stay tuned -- you'll show up in one of these posts! (Gail too)

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