A Weaver Looks at New Traditions: Cabinetmaking
It was quite a stretch for me as a weaver to relate to cabinetmaking; in addressing the theme of this exhibition I chose another definition of the word “cabinet.”
My dictionary says that a cabinet is a body of advisers to the president. In our current involvement in election politics, I decided to look at the very first U.S. Cabinet. George Washington’s first cabinet comprised the following: John Adams, Vice President; Thomas Jefferson, Secretary of State; Henry Knox, Secretary of War; Alexander Hamilton, Secretary of the Treasury; and Edmund Randolph, Attorney General.
I found electronic portraits of Washington and his cabinet on the Internet and assembled them into a banner in Adobe Photoshop® on my computer, reduced the resulting image to seven colors, assigned a different weave structure to each color area, then wove the resulting file on my TC-1, which is a handloom with jacquard-like capability.
The weave structures in this piece are in a class called “warp tapestry,” which is not true tapestry in the traditional sense, but rather a construction originated in industrial weaving. Warp tapestry is a type of double weave, with many colors in the warp (my example uses a 5-color warp rotation, but industrial warp tap can have as many as eight colors or more). These multiple fine, densely sett warps interact in various ways with a heavy dark weft, a heavy light weft, and a fine binder weft, to form hundreds of structures and a resulting palette of unique colors.
At first it seemed perverse to use this high-tech approach to interpreting a bit of early U.S. history, but when I considered that the first jacquard loom appeared in France in 1801, a mere 12 years after Washington’s first inauguration, the project entered my comfort zone.
A closer look at Jefferson's portrait.
There was a stunning collection of cabinets by woodworkers, as one would expect from the Southern Highlands Craft Guild members, but also a handful of unexpected interpretations of the Cabinetry theme by jewelry and fiber artists. My favorite was the two pairs of handspun, vegetable dyed, handknit drawers by Martha Owen of Murphy, NC. Martha's statement reads, in part, "as a long time handspinner and knitter who has kept sheep since 1980, I felt like I had made every sort of wearable. But when the proposal for this show reached me I realized there was yet another new thing to try: Cabinetmaking. Well, I had never made a pair of drawers!" Martha's sense of humor can't be beat–and her artistry is impeccable.
So if you're anywhere near Asheville, North Carolina, get yourself over to the Folk Art Center and see this show, which will be there until January 11. It's a winner, if I do say so myself.
Many thanks to Bruce for today's photographs.