Sara Brennan in both American Craft and Selvedge Magazines this month
Viewing Sara Brennan’s tapestries is to be immersed in a land- or skyscape. Brennan’s evocative weavings are featured in two different magazines this month, selvedge published in the UK and American Craft in the US. In selvedge, in “View,” Issue 73, pp. 92-93, Lesley Millar writes about the layering of history in Brennan’s tapestries, “At the centre of her work there is a stillness and a sense of being held, which is an echo of the experience at the centre of an ancient forest.” Millar notes that the artist uses a traditional Gobelin high warp technique which links her tapestries to the Middle Ages. She also uses yarns she has been given, old yarns, sometimes yarns she had inherited from her father’s studio in Edinburgh. Brennan admits to obsessing about the surface in her tapestries, the qualities of a specific yarn. “The surface texture,” Millar writes, “slows down our gaze through a series of subtle, textured intervals forming a visual interplay between our eye and the sensuality of the surface.”
American Craft and Selvedge Magazine Covers
The article in American Craft, December/January 2017, by editor in chief, Monica Moses is in a section called “Collective Unconscious: On the Horizon,” pp. 36-37, features five artists, includling Brennan, whose work envisions where the sky and land meet. Brennan reduces the landscape to its essence, “earth and sky, demarcated by horizon.”
Linen Tapestry with Broken Grey Line by Sara Brennan, linen, wool, and cotton, 42.5″ x 42″, 2014
Brennan’s work can be seen at browngrotta.com and, through January 2017, in Here and Now a touring exhibition curated by the UK’s National Centre for Craft and Design of contemporary British tapestry artists and weavers from Australia, Norway, Latvia, Japan and the USA. For more information visit: http://www.nationalcraftanddesign.org.uk.
Art: Antidote to an Edgy Election
No matter on what side of the political divide you sit, it’s been a long 16 months. And for some of us, the next 16 months will likely feel even longer. In our house we’re hunkering down – old movies, dinners with friends, letter writing and getting to all those to dos, like organizing our art books – and a news ban, at least for the next few weeks. We’re also aiming for an art fix. We are going out in search of what’s inspired, exhilarating, thought provoking. The markets are holding steady; why not invest in art? Surround yourself with what brings you joy. Here are four works that brought us feelings of peace, gratitude, tolerance and awe.
Lenore Tawney, The Path, Tapestry. Photo Tom Grotta
Lenore Tawney’s The Path II, is meditative and reflective of a passage she marked in a favorite book: “[t]he spiritual path, the path of purification, of emancipation, of liberation, is a path where we change our inner nature.”
37ts Vertical to Horizontal and Vice Versa, Toshio Sekiji. Photo by Tom Grotta
Mariyo Yagi, Nawa Axis for Peace Project 2014
In his “fugue weavings” like Vertical to Horizontal and Vice Versa, Toshio Sekiji, imagines a harmonious confluence of disparate cultures, languages and nationalities, so different than the facts on the ground. Mariyo Yagi’s art is infused with concern about the Cosmos. “Art is committed to the energy of human life,” she says. In creating her sculptures she has been informed by the study of nawa –– which means a spiral cord, which for Yagi provides a link between earth and heaven and all living things, creating a spiritual loop from DNA to the cosmos. Enlightening and innovative, Anda Klancic’s work combines creative use of machine-embroidered lace technique with experience from other disciplines, including photography. In Aura, Klancic says, “I wanted to show the vital energy in the human species: that the light, connected from man to the earth and the universe, has the rhythm of breath, of life.”
Anda Klancic FiberOptic, textile sculpture
Have you other works to recommend? Let us know.