Suffolk
FOUR SUFFOLK ARTS VENUES have teamed again for a set of shows, this time with the umbrella title "Interwoven: Ideas in Thread." The shared subject is fiber arts.
Kat Allison, a respected Newport News fiber artist, organized Shooting Star Gallery's offering. She pooled nine other area artists to prove that fiber arts can be as adventurous as any other art medium.
Judging from her own work, Allison goes for a rich and surprising array of fabrics, paired with beading and metal. She tends toward nonrepresentational wall hangings and tabletop pieces that showcase her surfaces.
She and some other artists on display use Tyvek, a synthetic material that, when heated, takes on a weblike pattern of holes that lets other fabrics show or pull through.
Sandy Lupton designed a kind of ornate shade atop a vintage lamp base. The shade is covered in old photo transfer images of girlfriends. The title: "A Woman Needs Friends, Pass it on... "
Nancy Kinzinger also used photo transfer imagery, along with hand-dyed fabrics, colored pencils, beads and buttons. Her "So Little Gravitational Pull" incorporates an early 20th century photo of her grandmother, who died some years later from a ricocheted-gunshot wound at a costume party, when a faux cowboy decided to shoot into the ceiling.
Kinzinger never met her grandmother, and this type of work could be a way to forge a connection.
Kinzinger is director of the Suffolk Museum, at 118 Bosley Ave., (757) 923-2371, currently displaying work by the Suffolk Quilters Guild, which exhibits there every three years. The Suffolk Art League assisted with this project.
The museum is packed with well-crafted examples, from bed-sized quilts with traditional patterns to more contemporary styles emulating stained-glass windows.
The show causes visitors to marvel at all the painstaking and sometimes clever work. Nancy Glover's gorgeous "Magic Vine" quilt features an array of appliqued blooms, each design suggesting the true appearance of certain flowers through color, shapes and embroidery.
A handout sheet gives a title and explains whether the piece was pieced or quilted by hand or machine. Most visitors won't be quilters, so it would have been helpful also to explain whether the piece was from a pattern or made up. Improvised designs of significance to the maker are so much more meaningful.
A little bit of commentary from these quilters would have been welcome, too, such as why the artist was attracted to a certain design, and what meaning it has for them.
Red Thread Studio, at 153 W. Washington St., (757) 923-9832, has a show called "Piecing It All Together - Life and Art" that presents mixed-media art. The Suffolk Center for Cultural Arts, at 110 W. Finney Ave., (757) 923-0003, features an exhibit that explains how various fabrics are made.
Teresa Annas, (757) 446-2485, teresa.annas@pilotonline.com
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