Page 8 - Transformations: dialogues in art and material

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ed restraint, balance, tension, rhythm: an essential stillness.” In
her hands, stone and fiber need no translation. They already
speak their own ancient, elemental languages. Dictionary –
Light Indigo wrought in indigo-dyed linen, shows how even
color, in Lawty’s practice, feels less applied than absorbed — as
though the fiber had always held it within.
Kohyama, born in Shigaraki, Japan, has devoted more than five
decades to wood-firing and hand-building clay. The color of his
pieces is created without glaze, shaped solely by the movement of
ash and the position of the object within the fire — surfaces that
are textured and tactile, rough, ancient feeling, and unmistakably
alive. “Every time I fire,” he has said, “I’ve come to recognize that
I am in Nature; I am a small part of Nature… working with clay,
inspired by Nature, I am free to allow creation to happen.”
Material as Cultural Memory
James Bassler and Eduardo Portillo and María Dávila ask us to
attend to where materials have been — to the long human
histories encoded in fiber, dye, and weave structure. For these
artists, meaning is inseparable from origin; the biography of a
material is part of what the finished work contains.
Bassler has spent decades drawing from Navajo wedge-weave,
pre-Columbian scaffold weave, and Andean shibori, accumu-
lating a global inventory of material knowledge and bringing it
to bear in works of extraordinary structural complexity. When
he weaves with nettle fiber or natural dyes made from avocado
seeds or madder root, in works like Cumbe, he insists that ma-
terials have genealogies worth preserving.
Portillo and Dávila traveled extensively in China and India to
study indigo dye-making, silk sericulture, and handweaving,
learning that fiber is a vehicle for understanding other cultures.
Back in Mérida, in the Venezuelan Andes, they established their
own silk manufacture — growing mulberry trees, rearing silk-
worms, and weaving threads with natural dyes and Venezuelan
palm fibers. Their Azul Indigo series emerged from looking for
blue in their mountain landscape and finding it only in the sky,
translating that atmospheric odyssey into woven silk and indi-
go — the hours of the day rendered in textile.
Between System and Surprise
One theme recurring in Transformations is the tension between
system and discovery. Merja Keskinen describes this genera-
tive uncertainty: “I work to see. The joy of discovery and the
delight of experiencing colors are essential to me.” In works
like Rhythm of Colors, she combines different-colored threads
according to a preselected system, creating geometric shapes
whose surfaces produce a pixel-like optical blending — distin-
guishable as individual threads up close, but merging into un-
expected color combinations from a distance.
Norie Hatakeyama works with factory-made paper-packing tape,
an experimental material that enables her to break free from tra-
ditional limitations. “My work stems from an impulse to redefine
both material and method,” she says. Intricately plaited, three-di-
mensional forms, like Complex Plaiting Series - Connection I, pos-
sess the energy of growing organisms — geometric yet biolog-
ical, as though discovered rather than designed. By submitting
an industrial material to the ancient technique of plaiting, she
transforms both: the tape becomes sculpture, and the sculpture
raises questions about what we mean by “natural.”
Drawing with Material, Drawing in Space
Several artists treat fiber not as the medium of weaving but as
an instrument of drawing itself. “Instead of drawing on paper,”
Marian Bijlenga says, “I draw in space by using textile as a mate-
rial.” After rejecting weaving as too slow, she discovered horse-
hair — stiff enough to stand on its own, allowing a new kind of
freedom. Hung away from the wall, a work like Korean Bojagi
Color Grid transcends its background, casting shadows that are
as much a part of the composition as the threads themselves.
Kyoko Kumai has spent decades achieving something sim-
ilarly paradoxical with stainless steel. She has written of her
chosen material with wonder: “Thin pieces of stainless steel
wire create a richly expressive fabric that does not stand solidly,
cleaving the air. It has its own language fluttering above the
floor; breathing and melting into the air.” In Transformations,
Kumai renders this material as Sudare, a shimmering tapestry;
A Beginning-S, a multi-vistaed sphere; and Plates of Glass, steel
details sandwiched between glass panes. Her work, like others
in this exhibition, is in the permanent collections of MoMA,
the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Victoria & Albert Museum
— a recognition that material intelligence, at its highest level,
transcends the categories of craft and fine art altogether.
Materials as More
What unites the artists in this exhibition is not a shared aes-
thetic or geography, but a shared conviction: that the choice
of material is a serious act, that the process of working with
it is as meaningful as the outcome, and that the objects that
result carry something more than form — they carry thought,
history, culture, the trace of the maker’s hand, and an invitation
to connection.
Rhonda Brown