Field Notes: an art survey

browngrotta arts will present Field Notes: an art survey this May 3 - 11 in Wilton, CT Wilton, CT. February 01, 2025 – Fiber art is having a moment. It’s “the new painting” according to Art in America. Artsy calls fiber art a trend that will “take hold across the contemporary art world in 2025.” Exhibitions of art textiles are opening across the US and Europe, including Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction which will open at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in April. “The field of fiber art is currently experiencing a profound shift, gaining recognition as a respected medium within contemporary art. This growing appreciation affirms textiles’ versatility and expressive potential, establishing it as a powerful medium for storytelling and innovation in the current art world.” Aby Mackie (SP) In Field Notes: an art survey (May 3 -11, 2025), browngrotta arts will provide a high-level view of this medium, informed by its 30+ years specializing in the promotion of art textiles and fiber sculpture. More than two dozen accomplished international artists will share what’s on their minds, what’s on their looms, and what’s inspiring their art process, as the art form’s popularity crests. Rarely seen works by pioneers in the medium, Kay Sekimachi (US), and Mariette Rousseau-Vermette (CN), will also be included. Anxiety and Aesthetics “After a dark period, there will always be new perspectives,” Anneke Klein (DK) The inspiration for Laura Foster Nicholson’s (US) weavings, Sheds, comes from using landscape and form to project a mood. “The mood springs from my anxiety about the climate change,” she says. “The farms, which seem so evocatively. beautiful, are contributing radically to climate change.” For Wendy Wahl (US), disquiet is palpable and imbued in her work. “In November, my mantra became ‘what the F#%&,’” she says. “It feels appropriate in many situations these days. I’m working on a piece where the different scrolls of map, index, and top text paper are laid in the pattern of my mantra through Morse code disguising the message.” Anneke Klein’s (NL) new work takes a more positive approach. Entitled Prospects for Hope, the series reflects her view that “after a dark period, there will always be new perspectives.” Exploring Material and Methods “Fiber is the most appropriate material for my artwork because of its multidimensional perspective, physical characteristics, psychological stability, cultural nostalgia, and its ability to capture both sight and touch.” Sung Rim Park (KO) Other artists in Field Notes explore the physical properties of fiber. In Totems, made with optical fiber, Włodzimierz Cygan (PL) considers what kind of emotional message might be implied by a converging group of warp threads. He was influenced by the use of convergent perspective in Renaissance painting. “The simple logic of the composition and traditional raw materials allowed me to build, using the simplest weaving method, a systemintriguing with its internal rhythm and energy,” he says.” The introduction of the motif of changing light into this system turned this small weaving form into a magical, magnetizing object, encouraging meditation.” Sung Rim Park’s (KO) work explores repetition. Her work employs repeated knots, which in multiples, permit three-dimensional construction. The tightly tied knots, and the threads connected to them, are built up to form a spatial matrix. Having discovered a simple weaving technique using a continuous strand, Hisako Sekijima (JP) was interested in exploring its potential for more detailed structures. She built her own weaving board and using ramie fibers from her garden, she has created stacks of “mats” woven by this method. This new approach,”reversed my pre-fixed judgments about weaving and made me reconsider relation of fabrication method and form of material,” she says. Learning from the Past Susie Gillespie (UK) has an interest in archaeology and fascination with early textiles. Sa, featured in Field Notes, was made of homegrown, hand-spun linen, antique linen yarn, embroidery thread, bees wax, gesso, and oak tannin. It was inspired by the linen tunics the Egyptian Copts wore. “These surviving textiles give me a sense of the people who made them,” Gillespie says, “processing bast fibers into yarn and spending many hours at the loom.” The past is also present in Field Notes in works from the 1960s by Mariette Rousseau-Vermette (CN) and Kay Sekimachi (US), artists who were important in the evolution of contemporary art textiles. Sekimachi studied with Bauhaus weaver, Trude Guermonprez, and works are from that period of study, will be included in Field Notes. Mariette Rousseau-Vermette worked with Dorothy Liebes and shared her love of vivid and unexpected color combinations, evident in Reflets de Montréal, woven in 1968.

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Tickets: https://go.evvnt.com/2939689-0

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