Turquoise Key Skyline, 10.5" x 13", 2013, Hand-dyed wool weft, cotton warp.
Second in a series of Mystery Key Skylines.
Here is a blurb I wrote about the series for the Members Exhibit at the Richmond Art Center:
This series came about while I was driving along in the car, thinking about weave-able shapes, and a Silver Jews song came on with the line “the jagged skyline of car keys.“ Nice image, isn’t it? I happen to have a collection (as I’m sure you do) of old keys in my junk drawer. I no longer know what they unlock, but am unwilling and a bit superstitious to throw them out. I traced their “skylines” onto cardstock, blew them up, and overlaid the stencils to create multilayered and multicolored landscapes. These act as the “cartoons” that I then translate and weave into a tapestry.
These landscapes are personal in the sense that they bear some intimate relation to my life at some point in time, but universal in that I’ve lost connection to the what, where, and when, and I know I’m not alone in that. You do it too, right? It’s along the same lines of driving through your old neighborhood and not being able to picture what a block used to look like. How could we have let this happen?
Key Skylines make for very weave-able shapes. The jagged angles work well for composition and structural integrity, and the asymmetry of the skyline shape is a nice change of pace in a medium that is so carefully controlled.
Tapestry works well for expressing a 2D picture plane in a textile that cannot help but be sculptural in the end. I like that juxtaposition- flat yet sculptural. In this series, I have made use of the double-weft interlock and pointed dovetailing techniques to get bold outlines on my shapes, while building a structurally sound tapestry. Color is of the utmost importance to me, so I hand dye my yarns to be sure to have access to the colors I see in my mind’s eye.
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