Woven Together - 11 Fiber Artists
Stonewall Gallery, Cambridge, PA, May - June 2008

The show was reviewed by Karen Rene Merkle of the Erie Times News - Erie, PA:

We love the ambiance of the Stonewall Gallery at the Campbell Pottery Store. Having it filled with more than 40 pieces by 11 of the country's finest fiber artists only adds to its appeal.

Fiber is just as exciting and varied a medium for artistic expression as paint, clay, metal, or film. For proof, take in "Woven Together" before it closes on June 15.

The artists, all members of the national Fiber Artists' Collective, transform and contemporize timeless techniques like quilting, embroidery, and paper craft. They create works that are both familiar and surprising, traditional and very much of the moment. They hail from Pennsylvania, New York, Ohio, Virginia, North Carolina, New Jersey, Michigan, and Massachusetts.

The quilters are perfect examples of the dichotomy. Barbara Webster utilizes conventional methods but introduces modern technology. She prints onto fabric images she's captured with her digital camera, and then features those images in quilts that manage to be both organic and conceptual.

Ann Brauer pares the landscape down to its essence, and her ability to select and arrange vibrantly colored strips of fabric to suggest rather than replicate a skyscraper or a summer sunrise is her gift.

Susan Boss says she has been inspired by African-American strip quilts, with their daring use of color and pattern. She brings movement and depth to her quilts with the use of irregularly shaped chunks of fabric, as seen in the single geometric stalk at the center of "Sister Corn." In contrast, the quilts of Melissa Sarris undulate more rhythmically, and her palette of hand-dyed fabrics is more muted --almost Amish-like.

Embroiderer Martha Fieber calls her technique "landscape in thread." She uses a variety of silks, rayons, metallics, and cottons on linen background fabric to create beautifully representative scenes of grasslands, forest glades, and wildflowers.

Natalia Margulis uses a similar machine-and-hand-embroidery technique, but her creations are even more textural, intricately stitched and ethereal in atmosphere. The seasonal scenes are saturated with variations of color that shimmer and dance. There is dimensionality not only in the perspective, but also due to the tactile materials and stitching techniques used.

The yellow totemic figures in Martha Bruin Degen's bright mixed-media embroideries are "Simpsons"-esque characters expressing the joys and banalities of everyday life. Reneé Harris has also created a series in hand-felted wool featuring birds and, in "Evening by the River" in particular, folk-arty sensibility with almost tribal representations of trees, snakes, and fish.

Kathy Cooper's work, meanwhile, is perhaps the least fiber-like of the bunch. Her painted floor cloths are colorful and fun, but they are more notable for their painted elements than for the fiber or fabric used in their construction.

We mustn't forget that paper is included under the fiber-art umbrella, and two of the artists take paper craft to an entirely new level. Carol Cole and Jeanne Petrosky both make molded paper sculptures that they then paint and adorn to create substantial wall hangings. Petrosky's pieces have a natural, stony appearance, while Cole's have the rusty, industrial feel of abandoned machinery -- albeit machinery sometimes embellished with pearls and straight pins.