Textiles and Tea, Laura Strand

This week's Textiles and Tea was with Laura Strand, and here's some weaving you'll like.

Here's the weaver/teacher/researcher, and I include the slide about sponsorship because that sense of inclusion and appreciation and generosity  typifies most weavers and other textile artists and teachers, and definitely this one.

This is fabric she designed online and had printed out. It's a site whose name completely escapes me, and which I will insert if it ever comes back, because anyone may use it.

These are weavings she created based on aerial images of the Mississippi Delta. The circles relate to irrigation techniques to preserve the richness of the soil and conserve it. 

She's very interested in the science behind what she observes, always questioning. The Delta is a wonderful natural artwork, and I've carved stamps and made drawings based on it. I can quite see the attraction to her of this giant, constantly changing,  canvas.

She's very socially conscious, and honors  women's traditions in weaving. Here a mother and daughter show the red huipils traditionally woven and worn by Trique women from  Oaxaca.  And a picture of the daughter weaving at a back strap loom.

Laura was shocked to find how stigmatized the original dwellers are in their own country, people trying to discourage her from meeting and studying them, the usual stigma: they don't even speak Spanish (remind you of anything?) , they're dirty, another common slander on people who are different from the dominant population. 

She still went ahead and worked with them, was invited into projects, and found they're brave women, skilled weavers, try maintaining tension on the back strap, using only the movements of your spine, and you'll know. They're well worth your looking them up further.

Poverty, she points out, is often the lot of handworkers, in the modern age,  who, as expenses rise, look for better incomes, and the old skills inevitably dwindle as skilled workers leave. People like the Trique can't subsist on beautiful slow hand weaving.

Some workers in the more mechanized southern US have had their looms dismantled by their employers, shipped to Asia and their skills left unwanted, while even lower paid workers in Asia are assigned their work. 

With no tools and equipment and no work, they are forced to look elsewhere for work, outside of handwoven textiles. She's very conscious of her own privilege of working as a weaver as art.

Meanwhile she continues as a studio art weaver, and experiments. Above is a large collaborative work of a whole team of weavers meeting weekly, designing and working together.

She describes the collaboration as a miracle, and this artist totally agrees.

In the 90s I did collaborative work with Stefi Mandelbaum, for several years, using the joint name of Unified Field. We had a lot of in jokes about science like that one.

When we worked together it was as if a third artist took over. Our collaborative works, all four hands working at once, no discussion, just intuitive understanding of what the materials wanted, those works looked unlike each artist's individual works. 

Unified was very well accepted into all sorts of good places! Such a trip. And so rare, that it was never a leader and a follower or assistant. We referred to her as Unified, like a third person.

So Laura experienced something similar I was happy to see.

And here's her woven expression,  on the right,  of a mysterious building, I think in Mexico, on the left, which has openings nobody seems to know what for. Offerings? Iconic figures? Not sure.  She interprets it in a soft material, a contrast to the unyielding stone.

Altogether a great event, well lit, audible, what more could I ask.