A Review of 7 Artists Showing at Hunterdon Art Museum
In part one of this series, I showed you the works of four artists exhibiting at the Hunterdon Art Museum. In this second part of my review of “Intimate Lines: Drawing with Thread”, I’ll show you more of the exhibiting artists and their thread works.
In part one of the series, I neglected to mention Carol Eckert – the mastermind and curator of this exquisite show. Eckert is herself an accomplished textile artist. She creates sculptural forms using a basketry technique called coiling. Eckert creates her pieces with the help of gauges of coated wire and with cotton and linen threads. See more of Eckert’s works.
Drawing with Thread – Kelsey Viola Wiskirchen
Kelsey Wiskirchen combines storytelling, imagery, and weaving to create her art.
She starts with a story, weaves the fabric, then draws or writes text on a water-soluble material. Next, she pins the water-soluble material with her drawing onto the fabric she wove. And then she’ll go over the lines with her sewing machine. After that, she’ll soak the fabric in hot water to wash away the water-soluble material, leaving the woven fabric with her thread drawings on top.
She subscribes to the idea of “Cloth as a metaphor for society, and thread for social relations.” So communities are a major part of her work.
She says, “I stitched the life-sized figures onto transparent fabric so that layering and shadow would become elements of the work, and so the physical presence of a viewer walking through would also become a layer in the installation.”
And that’s exactly what happens with her work. I found it quite difficult to individually photograph her pieces. Because they interact so well with each other and with you the viewer. Since her pieces are hung from the ceiling not on walls, as a viewer, you get the chance to walk all around each piece.
When I walked among her pieces, the life-sized subjects in her drawings took on a life of their own. And you feel as though you are directly interacting with the subjects of Wiskirchen’s drawings, and not simply looking in as an outside viewer.
I loved Wiskirchen’s work a lot and I spent a lot of my time with them. I was particularly intrigued by her ability to create “sturdy” thread drawings on such loosely woven and transparent fabrics.
See more of Kelsey Wiskirchen’s work here. (Her site was undergoing construction at the time of writing)
Aurora Molina
Aurora is another artist who uses her sewing machine as a drawing tool. She starts on a blank canvas and she uses threads as both “natural and metaphorical” connections between elements in her composition.
I liked the simplicity of Aurora’s work. The graphic nature and the very thoughtful splashes of color reminded me of some of my own work like “Lemonade Makers” seen here in this post.
Also, she intentionally leaves the threads at the end of her stitches to connect to the next drawing element. See more of Aurora Molina’s work.
Daniel Kornrumpff
Daniel Kornrumff holds a BFA in fine arts and is an adjunct professor at Mount Ida College. He paints as well as does embroidery. His works on display in the Drawing with Thread exhibit are only his embroidery work.
He has a unique way of creating small embroidery pieces and mounting them on large canvases with a lot of negative space around them.
His piece, “No Mold Gold Teeth” was used as the show icon on all the printed exhibition materials.
I love his paintings. Especially, how he leaves some of his sketches unpainted/ partially painted.
See more of Daniel Kornrumpf’s work
Michelle Kingdom
Kingdom creates tiny landscapes in which she uses allegory and symbolism to “explore relationships and self-perceptions”.
The color in Kingdom’s work is amazing and the detail is mindboggling. Right down to the little tiny buttons on the dresses of the women in her scenes.
Kingdom’s pieces are intricate, to say the least. I find that although hand embroidery is different from free motion stitching, there’s so much that you can be learn from studying the way hand embroidery is used to draw. And Kingdom’s work will be a really good study for how to draw with a sewing machine.
See more of Michelle Kingdom’s work.
Patricia Dalhman
Patricia Dalhman’s installation in this exhibition was based on the story of her mom’s life from her early years during World War II in London to the USA.
Working with her mom, she created 20 “pages” of thread work to tell the story of their family.
When I took a closer look at the stitches Dalhman used to create her pieces, I noticed that her style is very different from most of the ones I ‘d seen in the exhibition.
Dahlman uses a sort of zigzag stitch to define the outlines of her drawings – a very interesting technique indeed.
In addition, to the hand embroidered drawings, Dahlman also had written text to help better tell the story of her life.
See more of Patricia Dahlman’s work.
Iviva Olenick
Olenick combines embroidery, watercolor, and antique textiles to create her work. She tells stories with her artwork using text, sometimes in the form of poems.
Her pieces have this look of “not trying too hard to create a polished look”, which is very charming. I think her watercolor washes are responsible for this unique look.
She’s very big on using text – specifically, handwritten text – in her artwork. Her handwritten notes also add to the “unpolished look:” – artist’s hand of her work. She’s even got a twitter campaign going on where she collects poems which she incorporates into her stitched drawings at her twitter handle @EmbroideryPoems. See more of Iviva Olenick’s works.
Sophia Narrett
Narrett likes to tell stories with a needle and thread. She creates sculptural thread works with embroidery techniques.
Her works have vivid color and intricate details. The level of detail on such relatively small-sized works is astonishing.
Narett’s works are very expressive. You don’t get the full benefit of the extent of her creative skills unless you take a closer look at each piece to see the details.
See more of Sophia Narrette’s work.
That’s it with my review of Intimate Threads: Drawing with Threads at the Hunterdon Art Museum. Go and see it before the exhibition is taken down.
at Exhibition at Hunterdon Art MuseumHunterdon Art Museum
Warmest Regards,
Related Post:
Intimate Lines: Drawing with Thread Part1
SaveSave
Intimate Lines – Drawing with Thread is a wonderful exhibition of thread art by some 16 talented artists. When I saw the promotion online, I knew I was going to go see this exhibition because of my interest in thread sketching. So, I traveled to Clinton, New Jersey to see the exhibit and I’m going to share the experience with you in this post.
I spent a lot of time viewing the exhibit because I was enjoying the exhibit as well as recording it in detail so I could share it with you all. By the time I was through with the show, I was truly wiped and I couldn’t see the other exhibits currently on display in the museum. If you’re really interested in this art form – drawing with thread – I encourage you to go see it for yourself if you can. It is truly worth it.
So let’s get started.
Intimate Lines – Paul Nosa
Paul Nosa works on a solar-powered sewing machine to draw on fabric. He designed this machine himself which is attached to a bicycle. 10 minutes of biking gives him 1 hour of sewing power.
From a distance, his work looks like abstract art. But on closer examination, you see figures, shapes, people, animals, bicycles, and all kinds of realistic images in his work – all drawn with thread.
You should see him at work. It’s simply fascinating!!! He can even spell and draw words backwards. What I noticed about his sewing machine is that he doesn’t use a presser foot when he’s drawing, which makes absolute sense to me.
But I wonder how it’ll work on a regular sewing machine. Nosa uses a commercial grade sewing machine. He used a Singer CG 590 sewing machine to engineer his “Solar Sewing Rover”.
See more of Paul Nosa’s work.
Next, let’s take a look at the work of Mark Newport
Intimate Lines – Mark Newport
Mark Newport is an accomplished artist and the head of the Fiber Department of Cranbrook Academy of Art.
His artworks which were on display at the Intimate Lines Exhibit in Hunterdon Museum are part of a series called the “Freedom Bedcover Series / Sampler Series Series”.
This is how he explains this series. The Freedom Bedcover is based on quilts given to a young man as he attains adulthood and social and economic independence from his father. He created the Sampler Series by hand embroidering on cartoon book covers. My youngest son was so happy to see the superheroes in Newport’s works. He could easily identify each one of them.
I really liked two things about his work. I liked that he was using a narrative that already existed in terms of cartoon stories which people could easily identify with. And I loved that he was sewing on paper, something I’ve been admiring for a while. Although he used hand embroidering, he challenged me to figure out how to do machine stitching on paper.
See more of Mark Newport’s work.
Intimate Lines – Richard Saja
Richard Saja just like Mark Newport is an artist who doesn’t start with a blank canvas. His canvas is the fabric toile.
A piece of toile fabric features a printed design depicting a scene or activity of some kind. But “toile” is a French word which means canvas. So it makes perfect sense that Saja uses toile as his canvas.
He uses cotton floss to embroider the images and scenes on toile fabrics. He describes his embroidery as “quirky, irreverent embellishments”
Learn more about Richard Saja’s work.
Intimate Lines – Melisa Zexter
Melisa Zexter uses photographs as her canvas. She combines her photography with embroidery. She hand sews stitches on the photos to intensify the images in them.
Unlike the other artists we’ve looked at in this exhibition, Melissa doesn’t embroider the details of the images in her photographs. Rather, she creates an intricate network of stitches “on top” of the entire surface of her photographs. This adds a separate “framework” on top of the original photo – a very interesting concept.
It’s as though Zexter wants to leave her photographs untouched while at the same time, she uses them as a background to tell a story which cannot be told without their presence in the scene.
Learn more about Melissa Zexter’s work.
I could go on and on to show you more of the work in this great exhibit. This exhibition is a wonderful testimony to the excellent talents available in this art form – drawing with thread. However, I’m going to give you a chance to enjoy this first part and I’ll come back with the part 2 later.
Finally, let me know what you think about this exhibit. It’s absolutely fabulous. And if you can, don’t forget to check it out. It’s ongoing until January 7, 2018, at the Hunterdon Art Museum in Clinton, New Jersey.
Chat soon.
Related Post:
Intimate Lines: Drawing with Threads (Part 2)