While Helena Hernmarck’s studio has been on pause due to the Corona virus, Hernmarck and archivist Mae Colburn have embarked on a detailed archival overview of Hernmarck’s career as a tapestry artist, conducting oral histories on each of the more than 270 tapestries she has produced over her nearly sixty-year career. This presentation will reflect on these oral histories, and illustrate the vital role of the archive in the artist’s life and work.

From weaving recipes, to yarn samples, to charts documenting inches woven per day, to folders chronicling each commission, Hernmarck’s archive is a vast, creative endeavor that has evolved alongside her illustrious career. Informed by a distinctive sense of ‘woven time,’ it illustrates the essential, if often overlooked, relationship between our haptic, material passions and our broader sense of order, progress, sequence, and chronology.

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Mae Colburn is a writer, researcher, and educator with a focus on handweaving in contemporary life. She has worked alongside Helena Hernmarck since 2015, both as studio assistant and as archivist documenting Hernmarck’s nearly sixty-year career. Colburn has taught textile history and theory courses at Parsons School of Design, and is a co-founder of the weaving and design collective ‘friends of light.’ She has previously contributed research to the New Mexico Fiber Arts Trails and the Norwegian National Institute for Consumer Research’s Wool Project. www.maecolburn.info

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October 31, 2020

“Velvet Weaving: A Worldwide Overview of Contemporary Hand Weaving Practice”

Barbara Setsu Pickett

Dr Barbara Setsu-Pickett will share her passion and extensive research on today's velvet weaving techniques in Italy, France, England, Japan, China, Turkey, India, and Uzbekistan.  The effervescent Dr Pickdett is pictured here with a velvet she designed and wove.  Titled “Unfurled” it was woven on a 19th century manual velvet Jacquard loom at the .Fondazione Arte della Seta Lisio Firenze, Italy  the design is loosely based on marbled paper patterns and an aerial view of the Grand Canal in Venice. More recently, she traveled Cholapur, India and wove on renowned historian and designer Rahul Jain’s velvet drawloom.  Currently Dr. Pickett is testing her understanding of the ikat velvet process that she learned in Uzbekistan. 

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Dr Pickett will also offer practical advice for those who want to try to do it themselves, adapting standard weaving equipment and stuff at hand. using what she calls her Frontier Velvet set-ups, a method she has engineered to weave velvet without a manual Jacquard velvet loom.

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While sheltering at home, Dr Pickett experiments with gold velvet pile on brown ground is with 20/2 cotton.  The design is a spiral done using 15 blocks for the pile on 15 shafts and 4 shafts for the 3/1 twill ground. This velvet is photographed on her Frontier Velvet setup,  pictured here.

Be sure to attend this joyful celebration of the world's most luxurious textile.

Enjoy some of Dr. Pickett's scholarly papers by clicking on these links https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1044&context=tsaconf

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/334225906_Rahul_Jain%27s_Reimagined_Velvet_Drawloom

January 30, 2021

“Texture in the Art of Anni and Josef Albers”

Fritz Horstman 

Albers Foundation educator Fritz Horstman will speak about the art and life of Anni Albers. Tracing her trajectory from the Bauhaus to Black Mountain College to Connecticut, we will look at ways that she elevated weaving as an art form. 

Fritz Horstman is the Artist Residency and Education Coordinator at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, where he has worked since 2004. He has lectured and given workshops at the École des Beaux-Arts Paris, the Bauhaus Dessau, The Royal College of Art in London, Yale University and many other institutions. He has organized exhibitions in Italy, Ireland, Croatia, Norway, and the United States. He is also an artist who has shown his photographs, sculptures, drawings, and videos in recent exhibitions in Norway, France, Russia, Japan, California, Rhode Island, Massachusetts and Brooklyn. 

February 27, 2021

“The Weaving Culture of Sweden”

Sally Orgren

A trip to Sweden for a family reunion in 2019 evolved into two weeks of non-stop textile adventures for Sally Orgren. Enjoy behind the scenes tours of Östergötlands Ullspinneri (a wool spinning operation pictured here), Klässbols Linneväveri (four generation linen factory), Almgrens Sidenväveria (Stockholm silk museum), and some of the student textile work exhibited at the University of Borås in this presentation. Tag along virtually as Sally visits weaver Kerstin Froberg, the 14th Century Bocksten Man (with his clothing mostly intact!) and nearly 400-year-old textiles recovered from the Vasa, a famous Swedish ship that sank in 1628.

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Sally Orgren is Editor of Shuttle Spindle & Dyepot magazine, produced by the Handweavers Guild of America, Inc. (HGA). Sally has exhibited, won awards, and written about weaving and related topics throughout her more than thirty years of producing fiber art. Prior to working for HGA, Sally completed an extensive career as Creative Director for a marketing firm based in the Midwest. Sally belongs to three local guilds: Frances Irwin Handweavers, Jockey Hollow Weavers, and North Country Spinners, and two national guilds, Complex Weavers, and the invitation-only Cross Country Weavers. She posts projects at Ravelry.com and #instaHGA regularly.

March 20, 2021

“Split Shed Tied Beiderwand”

Deborah Silver

Currently, Deborah designs and weaves pieces that combine her interest in combining tribal imagery with contemporary faces. Using a split-shed technique, Deborah has transformed a traditional pattern into a signature method of hand-weaving. All horizontal yarns travel from edge to edge, differentiating this fabric from tapestry. The work is inspired by the increased cross-culturalism in our world, with an emphasis on our collective history.

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Deborah’s weavings have been shown in numerous local and national juried exhibitions.  In 2015, she received a Cleveland Jewish Arts and Culture Fellowship award.  In 2017, she received third prize in the ARTneo national juried competition. In 2018, she received the Complex Weavers Award and First Place at Complexity 2018. 

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Deborah is the author of The Technique of Split-shed Weaving, a book that illustrates pictorial weaving using a split shed on four shaft looms. She also lectures and teaches workshops on split-shed weaving. She is married to the painter, Patrick Haggerty. They live happily in a home with too little wall space and too many cats in Cleveland Heights, Ohio. https://www.deborahsilverstudio.com/about

You may order Deb's book here: https://www.deborahsilverstudio.com/product-page

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Split Shed Workshop: Sun Mar 21th, 10am - 4 pm. Separate fee required. Registration will start Dec 15.

Fuyuko’s main medium is pictorial, which involves complex methods of dyeing and re-weaving. Her development of an original weaving technique of “Combination of Painted Warp and Painted Weft” is internationally recognized along with her other worldly spiritual imagery. She has received many awards such as Individual Artist Grants from New York Foundation for the Arts and Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.

Fuyuko’s current theme for weaving is “A Phase of Light”, expressing the quality of light as energy source of life. “Light represents an energy source from a spiritual view.  The overlapping, growing circles of luminous light emphasize the positive quality of the energy.”

In the presentation, Fuyuko will discuss her background, inspirations and imagery and also explain her complex technique processes.

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“There are two vital aspects of textile/fiber arts that led me to develop this technique. One is the range of possible ways the construction of fibers can carry light and color. The other is the fascinating integration of the arts of weaving and dyeing. The process of the technique also matches the concept of my imagery. Through the consecutive actions of painting, deconstruction, and reconstruction, I observe the image disintegrate and transform.”  www.fmartworks.com