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A Different Direction

by Sharon Marcus

Beginning in 1997 I began to tire of the flat, pictorial and essentially rectangular format of my tapestries. Since 1978 I had been working in a fairly traditional style, using cotton seine twine warp, wool weft, and a cartoon traced onto the warp. It seemed time for a more experimental approach. At the same time I began to move away from thinking about tapestry as an exclusively narrative medium, and considered how I could evoke responses from viewers without imagery. 

As with Site the small tapestries were woven as rectangles, and manipulated after weaving into a more sculptural format. These forms not only had high relief, but intriguing shapes as well.

I have always found it useful to recycle my own imagery. It is a means of delving more deeply into the same material to explore its potential. I have done this since the early days of working pictorially, but continue to do so whenever it seems appropriate. Importing slide images of the ten parts of Chapters into the computer, I began to look at them simply from the standpoint of their two-dimensional outlines, appreciating the interest of the shapes without considering their high relief charac-teristics. From this observation came a group of ten more small units comprising the Walls of China tapestry.  In this case I used the silhouettes of the Chapters pieces as the outlines for ten wedge-weave woven, flat, shaped tapestries. The weft was wool/rabbit hair and wire and they were tea-stained after weaving.

The sculpted and shaped tapestries woven for the Lake Mungo installation evolved into shaped pieces in a very natural way without a great deal of pre-planning. I chose materials and techniques that supported the over-riding focus about the colonial impact on early Australia.  I believe that the ease with which I went from flat to sculpted to shaped work in this instance came about because my mind was very open to a major change in my working process at that time. Being in the stark Outback landscape, away from the familiarity of my studio in the Pacific Northwest, I had an ideal opportunity for a transformation in my working process. Though the actual tapestries were completed in my studio, the impetus which made them possible came from Australia. The total body of work stemming from the experience extended from 1997 to 2001, and includes photography, book arts, metals and textiles.

In 2003 I began the "Personal Knowledge" series, which is on-going as of this writing. Currently seven tapestries have been completed in this group: Burn, Facade, Shield, Intersection, Connections, Seam, and Restraint. Conceptually the work relates to my current interest in natural coverings - skins, crusts, husks, barks, hides, pelts, peels, rinds, sheaths, shells, plates, veneers and so on. I am curious how these various coverings relate visually and in a tactile sense to weft-faced textiles. How do the tex-tures, patterns, structural lines and forms correspond to weaving? Rather than attempt to replicate what is found in nature in a pictorial way, I decided to approach it from a structural point of view, applying a limited number of tapestry techniques to the problem, primarily eccentric, shaped weaving and joins.

The tapestries are woven very spontaneously. The outline is pre-determined and traced onto the warp, but all weaving occurs in response to the shape as the tapestry develops. The materials in the first ten of these pieces are wool warp and linen and wire weft. Ends are darned in afterwards so the tapestries are completely double-sided. They are then distressed, and mixed media materials applied. The resulting tapestries are flat and hang on the wall, but I have plans to bring more dimension to the work as the series continues. After years of working in a more constrained manner, I am exalting in the degree of freedom that this approach has brought. My hope is to create work which is evocative and archetypal, connecting to the viewer on a subconscious level.

below: Sharon Marcus, Chapters, weavings 6-7"h x 3-4"w x 1"d, 1999 linen, hemp and wire, wedge-weave tea-stained and embroidered. Cards: 8.25"h x 4"w, hand-letterpress laminated cards

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