Another exhibition, time for another catalog. The volume for this Spring’s exhibition, Transformations: dialogues in art and materials, is our 63rd (57 catalogs, 6 monographs). With work by 79 artists highlighted in Transformations, the catalog was bound to be a big one. In fact it weighs in at 164 full-color pages. The works in Transformations were installed to illustrate the varying ways artists used the same material — whether traditional, silk, cotton, sisal or more unusual, feathers, horsehair, and jute. The catalog essay explores additional themes.
Making and Meaning
Some artists in Transformations take their materials beyond physical characteristics— asking viewers to feel, remember, or reconsider. Stéphanie Jacques describes this approach with characteristic directness: “[P]lant matter is not the subject of my work. It is a means among others… But this means is not trivial. It connects me to what man has always done, shaping what he needs with his hands from what he sees around him. What matters to me is to talk about what is alive.” Jacques constructs sculptural forms that are humanoid but less than literal, using volume to give life to an unfilled interior space — speaking of the movements of the body, desire, intuitions, something that pushes from the inside and overflows. For Hisako Sekijima the subject is not the material alone; it is the dynamic interplay between what the material will and will not do, and what the maker can discover within that negotiation.
The Material as Its Own Message
For some artists, the material does not carry meaning so much as it is the meaning. Sue Lawty and Yasuhisa Kohyama work at opposite ends of the material world —one with fiber and stone, the other with clay and fire — but they share a conviction that the deepest outcomes come not from overriding what a material wants to do, but from creating conditions for it to reveal itself.
Material as Cultural Memory
James Bassler and Eduardo Portillo and María Dávila ask us to attend to where materials have been — to the long human histories encoded in fiber, dye, and weave structure. For these artists, meaning is inseparable from origin; the biography of a material is part of what the finished work contains. Bassler has spent decades drawing from Navajo wedge-weave, pre-Columbian scaffold weave, and Andean shibori, accumulating a global inventory of material knowledge. Portillo and Dávila traveled extensively in China and India to study indigo dye-making, silk sericulture, and handweaving, learning that fiber is a vehicle for understanding other cultures. Their Azul Indigo series emerged from looking for blue in their Venezuelan mountain landscape.
Between System and Surprise
One theme recurring in Transformations is the tension between system and discovery. Merja Keskinen describes this generative uncertainty: “I work to see. The joy of discovery and the delight of experiencing colors are essential to me.” Norie Hatakeyama works with factory-made paper-packing tape, an experimental material that enables her to break free from traditional limitations. By submitting an industrial material to the ancient technique of plaiting, she transforms both: the tape becomes sculpture, and the sculpture raises questions about what we mean by “natural.”
Drawing with Material, Drawing in Space
Several artists treat fiber not as the medium of weaving but as an instrument of drawing itself. “Instead of drawing on paper,” Marian Bijlenga says, “I draw in space by using textile as a material.”After rejecting weaving as too slow, she discovered horsehair as an element — stiff enough to stand on its own, allowing a new kind of freedom. Kyoko Kumai has spent decades achieving something similarly paradoxical with stainless steel. She has written of her chosen material with wonder: “Thin pieces of stainless steel wire create a richly expressive fabric that does not stand solidly, cleaving the air. It has its own language fluttering above the floor; breathing and melting into the air.”
The works in Transformations demonstrate how material intelligence, at its highest level, transcends the categories of craft and fine art altogether.
