Portfolio Sketchbook

Shrine for the Grandmothers -

Senior Thesis Show 2004. 



This installation celebrated my connection to my maternal and paternal grandmothers and female ancestors. A few show up in family tree research but most are long forgotten, yet they are still part of my DNA.



Eight marudais, each with a 16-strand braid, were then used as 'bobbins' in the creation of a suspended 8-strand spiral braid. The installation includes hand-dyed silk curtains with screen printed text, and a wooden parquet floor cut and stained so that the grain was visible. Each marudai sits on a mahogany pedestal constructed of interlocking pieces.



The braids were made from hand-dyed silk and commercially dyed cotton. The warps were quite long but easy to handle because of the way I wound them onto the bobbins. I used 85g and 100g bobbins. (I will do a little tutorial sometime soon on how to put long warps on bobbins.)



Kelly Newhouse, my younger daughter, was my studio assistant. She helped me walk the marudais through the spiral braid steps. It was our version of a two-woman maypole dance. One day it would be cool to arrange to do this with a group...



One of the unexpected things about the installation was the way that the silk panels seemed to breath with the breeze. The setting was in MICA's spacious fiber studio in the Mount Royal Station Building (1896), formerly a B&O Railroad station.



I have included images of some of the preliminary work that I found in my  files.



Special thanks go to Annet Couwenberg, my teacher and mentor at MICA and to the anonymous donor who generously gave a scholarship for a "mature student in fibers".



More work to come...