artist profile
Joyce Melander-Dayton In Perpetual Motion By Cynthia Elyce Rubin
Enter Joyce Melander-Dayton’s studio in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and you see a light-filled space bursting with color—piles of skeins of colored yarns, cones filled with multi-hued threads, embroidery floss of every hue, polychrome glass beads, as well as eclectic groupings of teacups, baskets, and Native American pottery. It’s a winning artist studio in the Fiberarts Magazine “Studios that Inspire” contest (2011). “My studio space has been transformed as my work has evolved,” Melander-Dayton says, adding, “the space is filled with light from two barrelvaulted skylights, all the better to see the many materials I incorporate into my work: yarn, beads, wood veneers, and wire.” But Melander-Dayton didn’t
always stitch. Born in Virginia in 1959, she spent a peripatetic childhood, daughter of a U.S. government official who lived in Taiwan, Okinawa, Turkey, and the Philippines. Upon returning to America and settling in Minnesota, she studied art at the University of Minnesota, then married and started a
family. In 1986, after moving to Santa Fe, she began a daily regime that even today includes a productive structure of exercise and piano playing. Her career began with painting, works that are representational and hyper-realistic juxtaposing strips of color and repetition. Then in 1997 she left the confines of the canvas to create wallhung tapestries. “I started weaving,” she explains, “because I wanted to incorporate woven elements onto painted surfaces.” Slowly and steadily, she moved LEFT AND TOP RIGHT: Promenade 2011; styrofoam, wool, glass beads; 24 x 59 x 7”.
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toward that goal, continuing to paint until her weaving was proficient enough to successfully merge the two techniques. With a library of books about global craft traditions, folk arts, and fiber techniques, she taught herself to weave, felt, bead, and embroider. Most people would be delighted to know just one of these art forms, but Melander-Dayton worked on a daily basis to satisfy her endless curiosity and acquire the necessary needlework skills. “While learning all these techniques,” she admits, “I felt free to integrate them, often discovering unexpected juxtapositions.” Her current work is all about process and materials with fiber-based ornamental and patterned elements, such as exotic burl veneers, gator board decorated with vivid silk fabrics, strings of yarn, and multicolored Venetian beads. Her fingers, nimble from the piano’s keyboard, easily ply their way among the rich variety of materials. She loves the problem-solving aspect of constantly seeking innovative fibers and unlikely combinations of stitchery techniques, juxtaposed with felting, beading, figured veneers, and weaving, to produce complex and imaginative compositions. I am reminded of the Bauhaus education. To tap into the student’s creativity, the German Bauhaus school in the 1920s endlessly practiced exercises using texture, form, color, tone, and line analysis. Training to become a master craftsman in the artisan apprentice tradition