Tapestry Topics Feature Article
A Quarterly Review of Tapestry Art Today
page 8
Summer 2004, Vol 30 No 2
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I did not make a conscious decision to weave nudes, but clothes seemed a distraction to the issues I was trying to express. With the weaving of Conversation with the Monks, however, I knew that my female figures were nude by intention. It represented my feeling of vulnerability but also a determination to express my observations, despite the discomforts of exposure.
At my fiftieth birthday I decided I wanted a photographic record of what my body looked like for each decade in the future. Finding someone to photograph me was not likely by the time I turned sixty so I decided to weave one. It evolved into the series The Door Opens on Aging, a fun project to do. As the series progressed, I discovered that I was not able to create a nude image for all of my adult decades. Nudity did not fit for the years when my primary role was as wife and mother. For those years, I turned to specific garments to represent me.
For the first time in my career, I felt a need to explain my imagery. I mounted the tapestries on Plexiglas with the words around them. The writing is barely legible but its coppery crudeness seems to work well visually. The last segment of the series is an account of seeing my mother nude at the age of eighty-seven. She was so beautiful. Though incredibly shriveled, weighing less than ninety pounds, her form was quintessentially feminine. As others have concurred, there are no more beautiful curves than on the human body.
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Linda Rees, Conversation with the Monks, 34" x 43", 1992
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Linda Rees, The Door Opens on Aging: Plausible Past; New Perspective/ Age old Event; Shared Experience/ Little White Rock; Physical, Fit and Fifty; and Sighs for a Sagging Body, 17" x 12" each, 2001
Exposing my physical body actually was easier than baring my unknown interior expressions. In retrospect it seems a rehearsal for the kind of creative output I was looking for. Of course, there are other ways to open up our artistic channels. Whatever the means, some degree of discomfort or risk taking is essential.
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below: Linda Rees, Nights without Dreams/ Passage, 35" x 27", 1988
Linda Rees, Sighs for a Sagging Body, 17" x 12", 2001
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Jon Eric Riis has dared to feature the mundane and the mythical of the human body. He surely must have questioned his art’s reception, not only while creating some of the most provocative references to the human form in contemporary art, but with such simple subject matter as a foot clad in a white sock. His impeccable skill at rendering crisp imagery, and his use of exotic materials in combination with photo realistic anatomy, contribute to the impact of contemporary tapestry as art. I would say that he has survived exposure to reap the rewards of personal expresssion. (See images page 3.)
