Rachel Beckman » Weaver & Textile Designer

A Collection

What follows are images of the work I made at the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts this past June. With the exception of the last piece, which measured around 15 x 15,” each is a small table-top sculpture measuring no more than 5″  at its longest or tallest . Instead of talking about the work, at the end of this post I have included the 27 lines Warren Seelig asked us to write. I will let that speak for the pieces.

to swallow
to gulp, slowly, then frantically
a pounding (rocks)
to pounce, and leap, the way pathways are made winding through geographic puzzles and mazes
i sat and the waves tried to erode me like everything else but i wouldn’t let them; still i sat still
we surge, ebb
laughing, an open mouth, having invisible eyes and faces
playground, a playset, a rollercoaster, jungle gym, emphasis on the jungle
spirits
the ghosts, ancestors
prayer till three in the morning
a caricature
to flicker: flicker of a smile or a wink
or the tilt of a hat (a very small hat)
as moss, lichen
growths
arching backs and rolling necks
posing (for portraits)
curiosities, looking, being looked at, to stare
stillness- to freeze and hold one’s breath
a priest
a queen (or the queen)
a table and a confidant
gathered
a conversation, a conversation with a collection
chatter
taking form, being born, coming into being, the act of

The Embroidered Sampler: A Story of Discontent

Embroidery Floss, Beads, Iron-on Transfer on Linen, 2010

The assignment for this piece was to reference sampling, and I saw it as an opportunity to work my writing into my work. Historically, creating a sampler was a way for young girls to show what they knew: to demonstrate fine stitching skills, memorization of verses, and as an act itself, a certain obedience. There are many levels at work here, not all of them were entirely successful, but as a break from my regular work I am pleased. The poem in the sampler is not legible but it is central; it comes from a collection of erotic poems I wrote last spring and speaks of the industrial revolution, modernism, attraction and lust in the context of contemporary youth.

Stitching allows for day dreaming, and this became highly narrative for me. My process was to create a character for myself as I stitched, placing myself in the historical context of my work. For me, this was very much about labor, the romantic border is heavily worked, layered, and begins to take over. The border is an act of obedience; the poem is a failed defiance which submits to the finery. As an artist, I have presented a finished piece, but I have left it so my character has not quite finished covering her tracks.  I am concerned as much about process as exploring a visual aesthetic; working on an embroidery frame allowed me to work much like I did with supplementary weft on the loom. Because of this, I anticipated a disconnect between the two distinct halves of the composition, and that remains unresolved.

The Effects of Mummification on Sainthood

The Effects...2010, Woven Tencel and Linen, Wire, Pattern Paper, Embroidery

The assignment for my Collage and Sculptural Surfaces class was “skin.” Starting was a struggle; I momentarily forgot that I had the option of thinking like a weaver. Continuing with thoughts on relics and ritual, I decided to work with something I learned last semester regarding the practice of mummifying potential saints to preserve bodies for worship and fabricate a divine presence. Sometimes, the knowledge of mummification of an individual gets lost in history, other cases of natural mummification quickly deteriorate when the bodies are removed from their tombs and the conditions that made mummification possible in the first place. With this piece, I was interested in drape, shaping cloth, openness of weave, and layering of space.

Embroidery Samples

The mirrors were crazy hard and in OTHER NEWS I officially love sequins. I threatened to sneak into my roommate’s closet at night and embroider sequins onto all her clothes.

Back to Business

Alright everyone. I’m done moping around my house after having that darn wisdom teeth surgery, and I’m ready to get back to work after a long week of doing nothing. My brilliant plan for a website is no more; I discovered I was wholly incompetent in that arena and I should just stick to the analog and non-digital machines I know best (not including my digital camera, which is slowly starting to earn as much respect from me as my 35mm slr). Blogging should suffice for now, I suppose.

I wouldn’t say I didn’t get anything done last week, actually. I finished knitting a small panel for my dollhouse project, “tapestries for small places,” and dug out the felt I made last year in foundation’s fibers for the applique work. Lot’s of embroidery to come.

Speaking of embroidery.

While I was in Maine I got a lot more work done on my embroidery project about personal folktales; I know it doesn’t look like a lot of progress but there are a lot of slow details going on. And no matter how hard I try to make the backs of my embroidery neat, it never works out that but, but I also never complain.

I have been talking a lot with my weaving teacher about the idea of creating something and not allowing it to be seen, that is to say, in a gallery setting. For our pick-up project, one of the ideas we were supposed to consider was the use of negative and positive images that were created on either side of the cloth, and I not only chose not to display the back, but I also concealed part of the front. That idea is still pretty heavy in my mind, especially when you think about all of the work that goes into a fiber piece; every process is so time consuming and labor intensive, the idea of doing all that work and then displaying it with the intention to conceal is rather destructive in a way, and a sort of paradox in a certain sense. I’m not literally taking apart the piece, but I would be destroying the content of the piece in the context of having an by choosing to only display the back, which can sometimes be just as beautiful. I mean- look at those colors!

There are several ideas that I’m running with here. One stems from a conversation I had about weaving regarding the precision and “correctness” of the craft.  Traditionally, I have heard of weaving classes consisting of mainly making yardage, and though the rigorous artistic content that was pushed in my class was far from foreign to me, it was apparently so for others. Weaving is an art. Ikat, when done to the point, is an absolutely beautiful, breathtaking form of image creation. And it all comes with rules, standards, and settings. The main point of the conversation I’m referring to was this: that weaving, in it’s purest essence as an art form, is nothing more than a medium through which an artist creates, and just like painting or drawing, the rules can only take you so far.

I am not interested in weaving a neat piece of cloth, and I never will be. Just like I am not interested in developing a perfect print (or even knowing all the darkroom steps) or drawing a perfect body, or making an imppecable piece of needlework that is as clear on the back as it is on the front. I’m not even sure I understand the appeal of making something perfect. I think the most amazing thing about weaving is that I can make a piece of cloth, but I don’t have to use any of the traditional steps to get there, and when I’m done with it I can wrap it around my neck, burn it to the ground, or hang it in a gallery, because it is not something precious.

Which is my other train of thought. As artists, we represent a certain class in society. There are the fine arts (the high arts) and the low arts, and everyone is always at war with each other, aruging and whining and trying to out-do everyone else. And whether your art is showing in the MoMA or your best friend’s basement which also happens to be the hottest spot in town, it’s still only accessible to a select group of people. And these days, with big name artists hiring other people to do their work (yeah, we saw DiVinci and the gang doing it with schools and studios – but it wasn’t really for the contemporary conecption of what art is today), the value of providing ideas versus actualy ability to create is hopelessly skewed. So what does it mean then, to see the content of the piece as it was made verus the content of the piece as it is displayed (front versus back)? Who is the real audience, and what then, is the significance of making, and being seen or unseen?