ABOUT
BARBARA
I didn't know what I wanted to be when I grew up; a teacher possibly, a musician since I had some gifts in that direction; maybe a librarian, since I loved to read, except that our local grouchy librarian was a discouraging role model. I didn't think too much about art, although I distinctly remember reading a Life Magazine article on Jackson Pollack when I was about ten. Strong encouragement from home put me into Home Economics - a safe choice for a minister's daughter in the ‘50s. I wasn't a sterling student, neither prone to following directions nor knotting all my sewing threads.
One of my undergraduate requirements was 2-D Design where I discovered that I had been using basic design concepts for years and I really enjoyed mixing paint. Much of what I knew about music seemed to resonate with the visual exercises. The class was located next to the small college gallery where I experienced a show of Abstract Expressionists as well as an extraordinary collaboration between John Cage and Merce Cunningham. Somehow art seeped into my soul during that time, mixed in with the dreaded home management house ("housework is love made visible") and stealing time for music. A lot more life happened before I chose to pursue fine art, and textiles in particular. I received my MFA in Mixed Media around the time I turned 40, honored as a University Scholar at Northern Illinois University.
For years I taught workshops for adults and participated in residencies all over the world. I have a personal goal to help the field of textiles to be recognized as a major part of the art world. Acting on this goal has been generously repaid, opening doors and providing opportunities and friendships with colleagues in many parts of the world.
I write about my field, and have learned much from the artists who have been my subjects in both magazine articles as well as in my book, Celebrating the Stitch: Contemporary Embroidery of North America (Taunton Press 1991).
Looking back on a life of working with art and artists, I know that I could never have planned such a dynamic experience. I live and work now in an old loft building in downtown Durham, North Carolina, and the adventures haven’t stopped yet.
INSTALLATIONS
Lay Inlet
50" x 89"
Installed in the permanent collection at the Renwick Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC
Videos
Reconstruction: where one work becomes two
Skyward
30” x 33” | 2024
Long Ago & Far Away
38” x 18” | 2024
Click to play the video
Recently I finished a large work and posted it on Facebook and IG. After its debut, I realized it just wasn’t right. It didn’t have the airy quality I had in mind, and the various shapes just didn’t ring true. Somehow a pair of gold ‘wings’ had appeared, but they sure didn’t make it fly for me. They did, however, give it a name: Skyward.
It would have been easy to just let it go and start another work, but I don’t want to settle for less and show a work that doesn’t please me. I stowed it for a bit, but kept hauling it out of hiding and had numerous conversations with it.
It needed a major edit, and the only way I could determine what to do with it was to block off areas with paper until the composition felt right - a balance of movement and stasis, an upward thrust, both active and quiet. A deep breath and I lopped off three sides , added lighter bits and pieces, restitched as needed. The name stuck: Skyward.
Never one to just toss out a leftover,I began studying the pieces I had cut away, moving them around until the background of a new composition appeared. This work developed a mind of its own, and I couldn’t choose between what photographers call portrait mode or landscape mode. I really like it both ways. So, the frame sports wire in both directions. This one is titled Long Ago and Far Away.
Click to play the video
Had I Not Seen The Sun
34" x 49"
2024
What's in a name? Our first words name people and things. But why name an artwork? Here's why I do. While I hope that the visual aspect of the work will draw you in to examine it closely, I also hope to provide a context within our communication. I want
the title to hint at what was going on in MY mind as I made it. There's another, more personal, reason too. When I finish a work, I send it out into the
world, and I don't want it to go alone. It needs a name. Frequently, the name suggests itself as I work, but other times it arrives late. That was the case of "Had I not seen the Sun." I wanted the work to be about light, and I struggled to arrange and rearrange the sections until it gathered light within. But no title emerged until I went to a concert and heard a poem by Emily Dickinson sung by the enchanting choir, Conspirare.
Here's the poem:
Had I not seen the Sun
I could have borne the shade
But Light a newer Wilderness
My Wilderness has made.
This music is available on the Conspirare album, Threshold of Night
Click to play the video
South Jetty
50" x 50"
2010
I made a day trip with an artist friend to the South Jetty at the mouth of the Columbia River. We stood on an observation platform that provides a full-circuit view of rocks, sea, river and wetlands.
As I photographed, I felt the wind and absorbed the salt spray. It was total joy.
Back in the studio, I thought about how to depict the strength of the waves, jetty, wind, but also the strength of friendship that held us together. I wanted the work to be more than a seascape. I wanted it to sing of this special time and place.
I began by painting the fabric in large sections that I could divide with free, strong sweeps of the scissors. I sprayed some of the paint like the wind across the top of a wave. I assembled these elements by collage. I finished the work by stitching across it leaving lines like navigational maps. South Jetty became an ode to nature, power and friendship.
Click to play the video
January '22
40" x 30"
2022
Early this year I decided to start a work to be titled Clean Slate. I’ve never titled a piece before it was made, but I was sure of what I wanted to do: White with some undertones of gray like a poorly erased blackboard. A palimpsest for the new year.The white asked for contrast, so in came some grey. Not quite right, so I added some slightly darker shades; then really dark, and even a touch of color.
My plan was disappearing; obviously the piece had a mind of its own.
It began as a horizontal, making that line of white look like a horizon, so I tilted it 90º to the right and that improved the composition for me. By this time, Clean Slate was gone, but in its place I saw the strong dark to light textures of these particular times. It named itself: January ‘22.
Click to play the video
What the Tide Revealed
5 Panels | 60" x 8" each
2019
I have a fascination for places where water and land connect. Ocean and sand. Rivers and rocks. Steel or wooden pilings that form bulkheads or snags, ever- changing and full of life and death. Rarely do I have time to sketch, and so I photograph the details and make notes on the colors, shapes, forms, percentages of light and dark, anything that recalls the moment. I don’t make finished drawings. If the drawing becomes a finished product, I don’t want to make a copy of it. I want to maintain spontaneity in the final work.
The textures that inspire me are most apparent at low tide. Rust, mud, barnacles, seaweed: death and life meeting to form an imposing surface. Bulkheads and bridges, structures of strength. There’s a connection for me with the low tides of our lives revealing both strength and beauty to survive.
Click to play the video
Downstream
44" x 31"
2023
What’s in an inspiration? A dream; a beach: a boatyard; a walk on a country road…or a city one, for that matter. The great naturalist, John Muir, wrote that going out for a walk was really going in. Going in: INspiration.
My phone becomes an instant note maker. I appreciate knowing where and when the photo was taken, since it’s often years before a particular picture resonates with my current explorations. Occasionally I compose a recognizable image from a photo source, but more often I lean into a feeling, a suggestion, a gesture; an overblown detail that reads as abstract. Either representational or not, a finished work rarely resembles the actual source.
That’s the case for a recent work titled Downstream. I was walking around Raft Island, where I used to live. It had rained heavily, forming a run-off in one part of the road. Sand and mud were pouring toward a drain, and the light hit at just the right moment. I was drawn to the energy of the flow. That photo, several years later, became Downstream.