collective...

So last night we had out 3rd meeting of Collective Thread-our awesome NY fiber collective and it was great as always. We had kind of the perfect sized group and got to see the lovely, though hot, new working space of Sarah Bahr. She is working on her thesis currently and has some very exciting work going on as well as some very cool videos.


We also critiqued the work of Tod Hensley- who's work I had never really seen in person and whoa! The detail and build of texture is quite astounding. His work which is quite small in scale is a massive build up of teeny, tiny stitches. The work seems to have references in African, day of the dead, and religious reliquaries.


For both critiques we ended up spending a lot of time talking about how the work can best be displayed and presented to the viewer. To me, the final choice of how you present the work is essential in guiding the viewer to better understand your intentions and the experience you want them to have with the work. Especially with fiber where there are no traditional guidelines of presentation.

It was a great discussion and as always I enjoyed having an intellectual discourse with other artists- that is something that I miss from graduate school so it is great to build a community and have it again. Now I just need to get some new work made/started to I can get a critique myself.

At the next meeting in September we will be discussing how we got involved with working in fiber and what it means to us as a medium. Should be awesome!!!