‘Entwined’ artists weave beauty, memory, history into textile and fiber art

This story was originally published by ArtsATL.

"Entwined: A Group Exhibition of Textile and Fiber Art," at Marietta Cobb Museum of Art through June 4, is the latest in museum curator Madeline Beck's presentations of unconventional, aesthetically compelling perspectives on traditional genres — which seem to be developing as her signature style. As in previous shows, she primarily uses work by artists from the metro area, and as always, Beck has paid careful attention to diversity of all sorts, including aesthetics.

Although the traditional methods and materials of textile and fiber art are present throughout, they are combined with any number of untraditional materials, or composed almost entirely of them, as in the case of "Sigh," Sally C. Garner's 2021 basket-like sculpture woven from medical breathing tubes.

Garner uses weaving in a wide variety of unconventional ways. In "Altered Timelines No. 4, Jade" (2022), she binds bamboo toothpicks together into a flexible textile based on the idea of untethering the spokes of a basket. "Droplet in Time" (2022) uses woven strips from cyanotype prints.

Ali O’Leary also incorporates photography into craft media, as she superimposes cotton embroidery on quilted satin photographs. The results of this method are gorgeous yet theory-laden artworks. One example is "Presence" (2021), in which the word in the title appears and disappears beneath an image of ocean and sky, a lenticular effect that depends on the angle from which you view it.

Credit: Courtesy of Susan Lenz

These unanticipated processes are fairly simple subversions of customary textiles when compared with other contributions such as Susan Lenz's hand-stitching on vintage quilt fragments that attaches all kinds of equally vintage every-day objects in concentric-circle mandalas. Toy taxi cabs, spice shaker lids and 45 rpm record adapters are a tiny fraction of the variety of objects incorporated into these investigations of history and memory.

In her startling combinations of texture and color in wall pieces, Gabrielle Torres uses fabric torn from jeans, glass bottles and synthetic hair, but adds living plants such as English ivy; it will be kept alive throughout the exhibition as parts wither or droop.

Credit: Courtesy of Gabrielle Torres

As with all the other art in this exhibition, the effect is both aesthetically appealing and intriguing on a conceptual and practical level — what goes into such unexpected transformations of traditional processes? Curiosity about this question is a likely takeaway from the show for audiences unfamiliar with contemporary textile art practices.

Credit: Courtesy of Sonya Yong James

In this exhibition's disorienting context, even the comparative comfort of Rose M. Barron's dye sublimation prints on silk banners, depicting women wearing streaming robes immersed in flowing water, can seem discomfiting. The same is even more the case for Sonya Yong James’ initially familiar-looking, wall-filling "Spirit Is a Bone" (2020), which weaves together vintage hand-spun bedsheets and coyote teeth, crow bones and dog ashes to create a compelling meditation on history and mortality.

Trauma emerges as a consistent sub-theme, often in unexpected ways, as in Nicole Benner's body suits crocheted from copper yarn, a literal discomfort symbolic of a life lived in chronic physical pain.

Some of Jess Self's figure sculptures made from needle-felted wool are posed in positions reflecting the response to past traumas, but "Wholeness" (2021) has a variety of cream-colored textiles covering a wire frame version of her body, with a pile of loose fabric at its feet, symbolizing the process of attaining wholeness that Carl Jung saw as the unification of the conscious and unconscious.

Hannah Ehrlich approaches consciousness and inner darkness through a very different method. Her now-familiar wall hangings continue their exploration of chaos and order in emotional life in such pieces as 2023′s "bruises from knowing you, I’ve grown to know they are beautiful."

All the exhibition's themes of history, personal memory, trauma and transformation find their place in the work by African American artists, but their personal aesthetics remain the uppermost concern.

The combination of woven/knotted nets, hair weave, hair beads, pennant flags and a dozen or so other materials in Zipporah Camille Thompson's "Blue Magic" (2022) evoke rather than illustrate literally.

The same, yet in a completely different way, goes for the repurposed wood compositions by Ato Ribeiro in a signature style that some may remember from Johnson Lowe Gallery's blockbuster group show "The Alchemists."

Jamele Wright Sr.'s use of red clay and Dutch wax cloth is also familiar from recent exhibitions, but is subtly extended in the "Family Portraits" series.

Credit: Courtesy of Richard-Jonathan Nelson

Their varied metaphoric approaches stand in marked contrast to the traditional media and radical subject matter of Richard-Jonathan Nelson's digitally manipulated Afrofuturist imagery, an approach to queer Black culture through jacquard fabric. The title of a 2023 work sums it up succinctly: "Go move out of reach to the unusual."

Alongside its boundary-pushing cultural questions, "Entwined" remains devoted to beauty, but sometimes a difficult beauty.

Kathryn Somers’ stoneware frames woven with various fibers and wire embellishments are pure tours de force in which texture and color are sufficient in themselves in their innovative combinations.

In a nearly opposite sense, Kate Burke's squares of floral and text-based embroidery in thread suspended from dowels register first as sensory experiences. Burke's eloquently stated concerns about the inadequacy of technology to contain and communicate emotions of grief and loss are subordinate to the immediate visual pleasure of the objects themselves.

Despite being often so immersed in ideas that wall text is essential, "Entwined" is a joy to behold as well as an intellectual challenge to contemplate.

Dr. Jerry Cullum's reviews and essays have appeared in Art Papers magazine, Raw Vision, Art in America, ARTnews, International Journal of African-American Art and many other popular and scholarly journals. In 2020 he was awarded the Rabkin Prize for his outstanding contribution to arts journalism.

Credit: ArtsATL

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