♦ to see larger images, refer to the previous page.
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Listening at the Seal Hole
2018
15″ x 7″ x 2″
improvisational tapestry and fibers techniques: natural and synthetic fibers, silk ribbon, paper-covered wood
A soft-spoken man makes a quiet joke and smiles at the student of languages: “In Unangan culture it is good to be quiet, because we listen for the seals swimming under the ice.” On the other side of things, the people of the Orkney Islands tell about Silkies, or seal folk, beings both human and seal. If it is true that all that exists is made of the same stuff, and therefore every thing knows every other thing; and the seas of the earth are the same waters, and all of the ice is the same ice; then a girl rising up through the water to breathe and to listen for what is beyond, is possible too. —mls
seen at: “Small Tapestry International 6; Beyond the Edge”, Northwestern State University, Natchitotis, Louisiana, May-July 2019; Augustana College, Rock Island, Illinois, September-October 2019. Reproduced in catalog.
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Eclipse
2017
30″ x 11½ “
improvisational tapestry and fibers techniques: natural and synthetic fibers, ribbon
Eclipse is an interpretation of a relief carving in stone using tapestry and fibers. The decaying tombstone in an abandoned family cemetery expresses an ambiguity of pre-industrial frontier American life. The design is dual, its parts meeting in the middle like eclipses of sun and moon, earth and shadow. Here are two philosophies of life, two visual languages, two technologies and two ways of thinking about the purpose and nature of stone. At the top, repeating curved lines gather at flower-like medallions, making a ropy, inelegant drapery of mourning. The lower half, like a coin with evenly lettered center and edge, looks government-issue, crisp by contrast, templated, orderly and impersonal. The image is fixed in stone, yet it is dissonant. The eclipse of its parts are like the physical death of a man and its marker: the artifact of his being and our questions of story and meaning. —mls
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Temple of Vishnu
2017
21½” x 12″
tapestry and improvisational techniques: natural and synthetic fibers, silk ribbon
I knew about the erotic figures covering this temple, but I had no idea of the building standing within its compound of ruined structures and walkways, and the nearly vacant, planar landscape. Not long ago, I found an old, blurred photograph showing the distances and isolation of this place where those animated, red stone deities persist. —mls
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Kneeling Nun at Chino Mine, New Mexico
2016
21″ x 17″
tapestry and other techniques: mixed flax, cotton twist and cotton floss warp; silk, wool, hemp, flax, bamboo and synthetic fibers, silk ribbon
The Chino, or Chinaman is one of the world’s largest copper mines, named for the people who came there to work in a language not their own. The palette of acids flowing in the pit and out into the desert air looks beautiful, although we know it cannot be beautiful. The weaving is an object of delicacy, of intimate size, embracing the panoramic. It is perishable like the world as it was, before mining began eating away at the landmark, like the town twice crushed when the mountain collapsed, like the view of a figure praying we do not see, like naming the thing we believe. —mls
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Self-portrait with Lapettes
2016
15″ x 18½” x 1″
improvisational lace-making on a tapestry loom; mixed techniques. Natural and synthetic threads, yarns, strings and ribbons
The linen wings of peasant women’s caps are drawn with intoxicating gestural loops, often used as key compositional elements in early works by Van Gogh and Gauguin. And yet, even in close-up views, these painters use perspective lines and flattened space in a way that implies an observer separated from the scene. Today we find our distance from 19th century Breton peasant life compounded by nostalgia and an idea of the historic. Wanting to understand a more fully shaped world of the Breton women—their labor, their land-scape, their society and their faith—I began by untangling the physical structure of their lapette caps from the 2-D picture plane. The birch tree trunk background of my circumscribed and clothed self-portrait honors Paula Modersohn-Becker, a Post-Impressionist whose artistic life unfolded between the rustic Worpswede colony and Paris, and whose robust nude and pregnant flower-crowned self-portraits portray a human being, natural in a natural world. —mls
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penelope dissembling in frackutopia
2015
32″ x 35″
improvisational tapestry and stitching techniques, strip weaving: cotton, silk, flax, bamboo, wool, hemp, silk ribbon and factory ends
Evolved from an intersection of concerns: my unreliable skeletal structure in middle-age; the rage and current of deep shale fracking that quakes the earth beneath my town; weaving, with its surface sensitivity like skin and land, and its structures that are responsive to our assumptions about the stability of all matrices. My self-portrait is conceived as Penelope, whose intimacy with the principles of her craft enabled her to preserve what was dear. In life, there are times, simply put, when our refuge is in our hands. —mls
seen at “Fate, Destiny and Self-determination” Regis University, Denver, CO, August 2015; “Grassland Inspirations” Mari Michener Gallery, University of Northern Colorado, Greeley, CO August 2016; selected for reproduction in the gallery section of “CODA 2019”, a print and e-publication of the American Tapestry Alliance.
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Self-portrait with novelty hat
2015
13″ x 10″
linen warp; flax, wool, cotton, silk, bamboo, synthetic fibers, silk and synthetic ribbon
A first self-portrait in weaving for the Selfies project http://selfiesonslow.worpress.com . The hat is an antique matador’s hat.
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A Little Something from the Manufacturie
2014
8 ½” wide x 10″ high
silk/synthetic/metallic warp; linen, silk, bamboo, wool, cotton and synthetic threads, silk ribbon, plastic doll leg
The misfit object is suspended by its metaphors: a gauzy sling, the winding sheet, a lacy stocking—half a pair. Add Art Survey sarcophagus, stuffed vessel-urns, goddess horns with seascape, grape-blue serpent-waves, and metal; from Victoriana needlework, an apple tree or whale-tail, corset cleft; and existential fusion—itsy squint-field view of Denver airport tipis. Each according to its kind of stitch or structure. Model scale—a system, a creation.—mls
seen at “Unjuried/Untitled” ATA members show at Convergence 2014
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A Transect Through the Enchanted Wood
2011
8″ x 10″
cotton warp; linen, silk, bamboo, wool, cotton and synthetic threads, silk ribbon
A grade school assignment to plot, walk and write observations along points on a transect through our urban nature preserve—to everyone’s astonishment, my daughter’s notes included fairy sightings! —mls
seen at “Small Tapestry International 2” Taos NM, Tacoma WA, Glen Allen VA; collection of the artist ; see review*
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Green Places
2009
6″ x 17″
cotton warp; linen, silk, bamboo, wool, cotton and synthetic threads, silk ribbon
Countryside near Lexington, Kentucky imagined from a bird’s eye view—a plan of bold rectangles, frame structures, narrow roads and neat plantings. Recalls suburbia’s spacious areas integrated with contours of neighboring farms and pasture land—paddocks for people?—mls
seen at Weaving Southwest; private collection
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Nea
r to Far
2011
10″ x 30″
cotton warp; linen, silk, bamboo, wool, cotton, synthetic threads, silk ribbon
From near to far/ and here to there,/ funny things are everywhere. —Dr. Seuss
My sketchbook shows land around Medicine Hat, New Mexico looping in tiers of reds. Old Chinese painters of mountains stacked up space to describe depth moving up and far, shifting conditioned Occidental readings. And snippets float out of memory—candy jars filled with ribbon cuttings in my grandmother’s sunlit kitchen.—mls
seen at Taos Fibers Marketplace
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Wintersky Trio 
2010
17″ wide x 15″ high, installed
cotton warp; linen, silk, bamboo, wool, cotton and synthetic threads, silk ribbon
Colorado Big Sky—sequential snapshots of late afternoon; winter fields of platinum grasses, yellow wheat; whites chill hard, but feather-out in distance; erratic skies in changeable opacities break out at the horizon; space unrolls above, behind my head. This small scale, tri-part image crops and compresses the landscape, implying the vast by contrast. Woven “3 up” side-by-side on a four (?!) harness loom. —mls
seen at Weaving Southwest, Taos Fibers Marketplace; private collection; destroyed by fire, 2015
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Way Up the Mountain, Middle Ground
2011
14″ x 29½″
cotton warp; linen, silk, bamboo, wool, cotton and synthetic threads, silk ribbon
Driving up, a bald expanse of rock, faced by open, bodyless air; oxygen thins and the light itself becomes impenetrable—the ten minutes’ rise to 8000 feet is suspension: an ungrounding mist of transit between two homes.—mls
seen at Taos Fibers Marketplace, “Roving Beyond the Edge” Gaucho Blue Gallery, Penasco, NM
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Granite Lace
2007
12½″ x 24½
cotton warp; linen, silk, bamboo, wool, cotton and synthetic threads, silk ribbon
Colorado’s Big Thompson Canyon—angles, texture, fissures, light and time; the same rock faces sketched over a decade from the passenger side of a moving car; woven shapes, or strata, pieced together, forming a wall of handwork, mimicking the dynamic action and molecular delicacy of eroding rock.—mls
seen at Weaving Southwest; Taos Fibers Marketplace; (Oct. 2014—March 2015) ‘The Art is the Cloth”, New Hampshire Institute of Art, George School, Newtown PA, Deerfield Academy, Deerfield MA; Fiber Art Now, Winter 2014-2015 issue
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Continental Shims
2013
12½″ x 25½″
linen warp; linen, silk, bamboo, wool, cotton and synthetic threads, silk ribbon
Driving inland from the coast of southern California to the mountain forests, we ascend in short order through changing palettes, landform patterns, and the textures of conspicuous, specialized flora. Underneath is the fidgety cusp of a continent, waved and troughed, crumpled and back-filled. For all we imagine, riding the surface’s smooth-sculpted rise, the earth, in this moment, is stable: shimmed and leveled, joined and dovetailed—in bird’s eye and cut-away views.—mls
seen at Taos Fibers Marketplace, “Roving Beyond the Edge” Gaucho Blue Gallery
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Skytract Matrix
2012
9″ x 29″
cotton warp; linen, silk, bamboo, wool, cotton and synthetic threads, silk ribbon
Some formative suspicions about shapes—wedges, spires and trapezoids—as they ascend the warp, led to adapting a simple loom for changing the structural interlock of planes in my designs.This is a first experiment in weaving tapestry with repositionable groups of slanted warp threads—a test of the tensions and elegance evoked when a matrix, which is spontaneous and effluent, converges with the static framework of warp and weft.—mls
seen at Taos Fibers Marketplace
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Rock Garden for Sue Ping
2013
7½” x 18½”
linen warp; linen, silk, bamboo, wool, cotton and synthetic threads, silk ribbon
My neighbor on the mountain dreamed about a rock garden. I said, come on over, Sue, and we’ll make rock gardens. —mls
seen at “Roving Beyond the Edge” Gaucho Blue Gallery
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margaret sunday tapestry 