Slits as Kilt Allusion

by Joan Baxter

Every once in a while we all make a tapestry which draws all our themes together in a complete and satisfying way. I call them milestone tapestries.  "Migdale" Kilt is one of my milestones. I wanted to develop a "clothing as landscape" theme started about a year earlier, when I wove several "pine forest scarfs" using digital photographs as the main weft component on a tie dyed woollen warp.

below: Joan Baxter,  Forest Scarf 2,  11" x 55". Dip dyed woolen warp, cut digital photographs as weft.

below: Joan Baxter, detail of Forest Scarf 2.

I had also used the idea of checked cloth within the designs of a group of work entitled "Landscapes of Home" based around my local terrain and the archaeology within it. One of the first elements of these designs was to create a series of horizontal and vertical bands of colour which represented the colours of the landscapes and also alluded to different zones within the landscape, in vegetation, layers of history, time of year and so on. While working on the series, I was already thinking about tartan as a way of expressing a landscape.

below: Joan Baxter,  Fleet Check, 27" x 16"

The final theme in "Migdale Kitl" is water. I use water a lot in my imagery. It represents a gateway or gives the impression of transience or transparency. . . . At first, as I began to think about the design for "Migdale Kilt," using photographs, the remembered atmosphere of the place, and examples of the different versions of the Sutherland tartan, I assumed I would be weaving the tapestry as a normal rectangle with the kilt allusions simply there as fragments of the tartan. However, as I began to think about the kilt as a garment, and how it felt to wear a kilt, the swirl of the pleats and the actual shape of it, it suddenly occurred to me that I could use slits to emphasize the pleats and the idea of using slits to physically form the piece into a kilt-shaped tapestry quickly developed.

below: Joan Baxter, Migdale Kilt, 28" x 82"

The tapestry is joined at the bottom by a row of reversed knots, then divided into the two flat end sections, which represent the parts of the kilt which wrap over each other at the front when the worn; and the central "pleated" section on the back and sides, further divided into 10 cm strips. . . . After the piece was cut off and the ends finished, I stitched each pleat down to the one beside it, overlapping it by four warps at the top.

Point of Contact = Point of Power

by Mary Zicafoose

The contemporary tone of my work revolves around my pre-occupation with "point of contact," or better said, "transition."  This point of contact is made when wide-open space encounters a stripe, design element, or another large field of color.

below: Mary Zicafoose, Barn Burning, 68" x 30" 2003

The great moment of my awakening to the visual importance of point of contact happened years ago at a Jean Pierre Larochette and Yael Lurie workshop in Taos, New Mexico.  Jean Pierre masterfully, yet understatedly, demonstrated how to weave a perfectly straight horizontal line, peak-less and valley-less.

below: Mary Zicafoose, The Voyagers, 62" x 23", 2004. On loan to the United States Embassy in Jakarta, Indonesia

Even more than a point of contact, the juncture where two colors touch is quite literally a point of tension, dissension, and power.  Each color bends, to some degree, to the influence of  the other, each shape concedes a bit to what it is opposing.  Because of this, I often separate the two dueling areas with a very fine sharp line of yet a third intensity, be it complementary or contrasting.

below: Mary Zicafoose, The Sound of Fire, 68" x 28"

My attention to transitional detail also holds true for the beginning and end of a piece, which really are the ultimate transitions.  Literally, the very first woven shot sets the tone for the entire tapestry and the last shot ends the story. . . . All my pieces begin and end with a very fine line of color, call it a hint, a memory, or just a nuance of a thought.  This gesture draws the tangible line between the manifest and the unmanifested, the idea and the object, the dream and the doing.

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