Mississippi Valley Textile Museum Presents:

Vernissage: February 12, 2011, 2-4pm

Exhibit: 12 February, 2011 ~ 5 March, 2011 Lower Gallery

Colour and Weave

The appearance of woven cloth is determined by how the weaver manipulates the structure and colour of the “weft” and “warp” (the weft yarn is shuttled across the lengthwise warp yarn). Highly complex patterns and colour fields can be created by the way yarns are dyed and then woven together. My approach to weaving is similar to that of painting, I try to create a palette of colours by plying, overdyeing, and bleaching out areas of commercially dyed yarn and then weave them into rich and stimulating visual fields. One of my goals is to elevate cloth to the status of a work of fine art.

Colour and Weave is an exhibition of the work I have been developing as Artist-in-Residence at the Mississippi Valley Textile Museum during the Fall of 2010. My goal for this exhibition was to create work that looks at how colour interacts within different weave structures and patterns and how the viewer reacts to the unique way colours combine in woven cloth. This combining of colours is an effect I refer to as optical mixing and is based on “divisionism,” which is the theory or technique of breaking colour in painting.

Some of my inspiration came from the work of abstract expressionist artists such as Marc Rothko and Barnett Newman, who used large bold colour fields to stimulate and surround the viewer by the “energy” of colour. My work is presented in a format normally used for paintings or drawings. The intent is to create vast colour fields or woven landscapes. The viewer is drawn to the rich and stimulating colours and hopefully captivated by the unique ways in which they interact.