Then and Now

I've been thinking about where is the thread in my work, excuse the pun. I'll be giving a talk on April 4th at the Sesnon House, in conjunction with the PVAC show, The Fine Art of Textiles. The working title for the talk is 30 years of my work, from the Tapestry Biennial to Now. How are things the same, how are they different*. Still vertical elements, still dots, still grids, still humbled by color, inspired by nature.

Here is the piece I exhibited at the Biennial in 1975. The dimensions of Forest are 10' x 10' x 10'. Inspired by the Shasta and Carlsbad Caverns, I hand dyed and crocheted 600 pounds of sisal, jute and manilla with fiber reactive dyes.

This dome was ten feet in diameter and eight feet high. All crocheted white and off white yarns. It had three chairs inside which were all covered with yarns. It was part of my grad work at UCLA.

This was an installation piece for a show at the Brand Library in Glendale in 1976. It is composed of opaque and translucent plastics. It is 12' x 18' x 12', and hangs from an atrium.

This piece was created, because Art Director, John Retsek at LA Public TV Station KCET saw the show at The Brand Library. I created a cyclorama for a sound stage. It is composed of 10,000 yards of Burlap, and was totally fireproofed. The dimensions were 22 feet high by 400 running feet. It was completed in 3 weeks by 8 stage hands weaving 7 days a week for 3 weeks.

*Today I looked up who said, The more things change, the more they remain the same. I thought it was Proust, but instead I found out that it was Alphonse Karr, in January of 1849.

When I looked up quotations from Proust, I found this gorgeous one written in 1948 from The Maxims of Marcel Proust.

Only through art can we get outside of ourselves and know another's view of the universe which is not the same as ours and see landscapes which would otherwise have remained unknown to us like the landscapes of the moon. Thanks to art, instead of seeing a single world, our own, we see it multiply until we have before us as many worlds as there are original artists...And many centuries after their core, whether we call it Rembrandt or Vermeer, is extinguished, they continue to send us their special rays.