Fiber Art: An Overlooked Medium

by SAM WATSON

hen people ask Wendy Carpenter what she does for a living, she usually has some explaining to do.

She tells them: “I make fiber art.” People respond with: “What’s that?”

That question isn’t easy to answer because fiber art (also called textile art) is a wide-ranging and often overlooked medium. It encompasses practices as disparate as knitting, crocheting, sewing, quilting, tailoring, embroidery, fabric-making, fabric-dyeing, weaving, basketry and embroidery – any art form involving natural or synthetic fibers.

Carpenter’s personal brand of fiber art focuses on handweaving and loom weaving, which she uses to create fiber wall sculptures and tapestries. Large, dynamic pieces are Carpenter’s favorite to make – and looking at her body of work, populated with 3D sculptures of trees and pelicans and wall hangings taller than the artist herself, that tendency shows.

Although Carpenter’s childhood love of sewing was what drew her to fiber art, other local artists were brought into the fold in different ways. Ann Young, for example, got into the medium thanks to her job as an “office gal” at Sievers School of Fiber Arts on Washington Island, which she now owns. A knitter herself, Young spent decades helping out with (and later teaching) classes in multiple disciplines under the fiber-art umbrella.

“Being here for every single class over all these years, you grow to appreciate what goes into it,” Young said.

She also found how fluid the various categories under the fiber-arts umbrella can be, with students flowing in and out of classes to learn about media very different from their own.

“We generally have two classes in session at once; let’s say there’s basketmakers in one studio and an embroidery class in another studio,” Young said. “They always like to see each other’s work and learn how it’s done.”

That’s a trend Mary Carson noticed, too, when she established the Door County Textile Art Collective (DCTAC), a local group for amateur and professional fiber artists to connect and share techniques.

“Everyone informs each other,” Carson said. “That’s the magic of what we do.”

Carson first picked up a needle and thread for a distinctly unmagical reason: She was fed up with ill-fitting clothes.

“I was a tall girl growing up in the '60s, so I often had to make my own clothing,” Carson said.

What started out as a chore grew into a hobby, and now, much of Carson’s art involves simple hand stitches on layers of manipulated appliqué, with paint to tint fabric as needed.

Why Fiber Art?

Three very different draws – a childhood hobby, a desk job and a need for a tailor – guided these three women toward fiber art. What made them stick with it was the unique physicality of the medium: the ability to hold their materials in their hands, noticing the patterns and textures as they gradually transform into something new. Fiber art is tactile in a way many other media can’t be, because as Carson said, “You can’t necessarily hug and hold oil paint or a pencil.”

That’s something viewers take into account too, and it’s why some buyers choose fabric art over more traditional wall art like paintings, according to Carpenter.

“They want to get away from the linear,” Carpenter said. “They want something more organic and they want texture. That’s the first thing they say.”

The physical connection to the work combined with the repetitiveness of many fiber art media can be almost meditative, Carpenter said: Spending hours working at a loom or pushing a needle in and out of a piece of fabric forces artists to be present. At the same time, fiber art connects artists to the past because skills like fabricmaking, weaving and sewing have been practiced for centuries.

“People like to go back to the way things were done,” Young said of the students at Sievers.

But in eras when such practices were necessary, they weren’t usually considered art – an attitude that has carried over to modern times.

Carson suggested two reasons that attitude is so prevalent. For one, women were the main producers of fiber art, and the art world, like the rest of the world, historically devalued and overlooked their work. Countless forgotten female artists built the backbone for techniques fiber artists still use today, from embroidery stitches to fabric-dyeing techniques, “but nobody ever said, ‘Oh, you should put that in a gallery. Someone would buy that,’” Carson said.

Second, the practicality of fiber art calls into question its standing as “real” art for some. According to Carson, it’s a long-standing question debated in the art world: Can functional objects like chairs, pots or scarves be considered art?

Many artists think not – some fiber artists included. According to Carson, some DCTAC members hesitate to call themselves artists at all. Even Carpenter, who practiced fiber art in college, was dissuaded from making practical items in favor of projects with more traditionally fine-art elements.

“Fiber art was just becoming a fine-art medium” at the time she went to school, Carpenter said. “The first thing they told me was ‘no more scarves, no more placemats.’”

These attitudes bout fiber art are shifting, Carson said. But for her, Carpenter and Young, whether fiber art is “real” art was never a real question.