• Computer Assisted Hand Loom (TC-1) -- Lia Cook 2002 Traces:Wonder
• Warp & Weft painting -- Polly Barton 2001 Antiphon 3 -- Hiroyuki Shindo 1998 Hemp and Cotton Banners
• Shibori technique? -- Frank Connet - 2004 - Spiral Square 3
• Ikat Weaving -- Ulla-Maija Vikman - 1994 Kainuu

references to look at

• Susan M Pearce - 1995 - On Collecting, an investigation into collecting in the european tradition
• Sheila Hicks - Constantine & Larsen - Beyond Craft

A photo essay looking at modern fiber art collections, and the rise of the use of fiberous materials in modernist art. Very little historical background. Begins with the use of cloth based signs in cubism and as mere materials in dadaist works in the early 1900s, follows through the 1950s with Rauschenberg’s use of trash or other found materials as mere material.

The essay draws some strength from the conventional consideration of fiber arts as low class or poor materials, and their acceptance today into very high-class dwellings and collections. Traces the use of fiber in various connected genres (feminism as a signifier, etc.). Good discussion of visual/tactile synesthesia or close association. Can there be tactile sensations with visual uniformity? Is the tactile associated merely with the rhythmic in vision?

“Fibrous materials recall what our bodies feel like from the inside and also from the outside as we reside in space - an intertwining of physical and psychological unity. And because they remind us of our modest place - as just one among many perishable beings in the material world, they are radical, a far cry from classical Western philosophy which located aesthetics and perception as a singular discourse of the ‘higher’ abstract mind, not within the totality of the ‘lowly’ body and the physical world in which it resides.” - Polly Ullrich, p.11

Partially accurate; the traditional enclosure of the body within a cloth cocoon mirrors the past century’s encapsulation of fiber within a high-art frame. The sculptures presented seem universally flexible: presented here, they come across as an integral tradition in high art production and training since the 1950’s, but at a crafts fair their meaning and value would be far more vague.

The essay is compelled to focus on the recent trends in collecting fiberous arts, seemingly necessitated by their commonplace. The textual accompaniment allows for a focus not on the interminably banal and ancient interfaces with the material, but with the avant-garde modifications of the methods and process that allowed for minor tweaks -- we see the results of these works not as within a tradition but as critical of that tradition.

Indeed, perhaps this is a more general observation, that minor but chaotically important distortions of process generate the apparent complexity of form and emergence from common media traditions which give rise to the acceptance as artistically relevant of the post-modernist obsession on material and method. How does this parallel the procedural flexibilities used in the emergence of other sculpture? Paint as material in modernism?

Ullrich, Polly. Material difference : soft sculpture and wall works / by Polly Ullrich. Western Springs, IL : Friends of Fiber Art International ; Seattle, WA : distributed by University of Washington Press, c2006.