I grew up surrounded by rugs. Rugs on the walls. Rugs on the floor. These were hooked rugs made by my mother and grandmother. In the 1960s my grandmother taught my mother, her son’s wife, how to use old wool, clothing, and discarded cloth to create images of the world. In these first textiles, I encountered animals. The family farm. A world changing, slipping, held together in a craft two women practiced.

 One green in these rugs could be, on closer look, ten different greens.

 As an artist I have ventured far from this beginning only to come back through my childhood home, seeing connection. It is part of me, whether I see it or not. The danger of discarding it, of discarding any history, is blindness. I am an artist raised in a house that valued care and picking anything discarded up, as its inhabitants suffered and navigated suffering in their own private ways.

 Emotion has no solidity, and is a constantly dissolving text, and as an artist I reach for the quilts and textiles often stuffed away in attics or tossed off to Goodwill that carry the silent tragedies and joys of households within them. I deconstruct and reconstruct them, later, on the loom. I find images or images find me — they drag me into mystery again. I use all of it to weave something new.

 And what is new happens to be older than me, beyond me — bound in the past and future, even as I play with loosening the structure, finding my breath in walking away from any tether. And then I go back in. ~ Rachel Meginnes

I focus on hardware as a site of possibility and of friction, as connection points that can be collapsed, moved, expanded, rotated. I build using bolts, tapped holes, slots, wing nuts and pins, relating manually machined parts through means made to be taken apart, re-oriented. These connections, solid but reversible, accumulating and alterable, all slightly different, hold capacity beyond the capitalist-efficient confines of mass production. These parts produce a series of elastic relationships and contexts, infinite variance, familiar but unfixed.  ~SR Lejeune

My recent body of work translates my experiences crossing international checkpoints by car and by foot into woven tunnel-like forms and paintings. I am inspired by the Rio Grande Valley of the South Texas-Mexico borderlands, where I was born and raised. I use basketry, to emphasize tension and reflect on the social and political strain prevalent along the border region, marked by its walls and fencing. I combine metal and reed twining techniques with cement to transform the domestic basket into a representation of movement. The forms are woven, joined, mudded, painted, and rubbed with graphite and often reference drawing. My work is concerned with themes of migration, containment, joined and permeable space intuitively informed by the impact of border politics. ~ Sarita Westrup

In my struggle to learn the language and communicate through speech, I gained a strong empathy for the universal experiences that seem to provide the undercurrent to language through art. I gained awareness of the complexities of our daily functions and the social infrastructures that subtly guide these interactions.

In my sculpture, I seek figurative extensions of these shared experiences. The vocabulary consists of gestures, patterns, textures, colors, and rhythms. In conversation, these qualities bring the figure to life. ~ Kensuke Yamada

‘Fullness’ is a collection of mixed media paintings that explores a new visual expression of Black identity. The pandemic shut down created an opportunity to examine all the ways I was locked into thinking about identity. I was constantly engaged in social issues and events that intersect with Blackness and culture. Being in lockdown with just my family, gave me a minute to realize the unintended message of my work is that the Black experience is directly tied to struggle. By shifting away from battling with social forces I was able to focus on everyday experiences and interpersonal relationships. The works employ layers of color and abstracted shapes to represent the Black body not only in terms of ethnic identity but as a psychological state of being. Blackness is the way we relate to each other and the way we exist in the world. ‘Fullnes’s provides a new visual framework for Black life by envisioning how our world could hold Blackness as sacred and worthy without conditions. ~Jamaal Barber

PURCHASING FROM THE EXHIBITION

To inquire about works in the exhibition or more information please contact us at 828.765.6211 or via email Kathryn Gremley, Penland Gallery Curator at gallerycurator@penland.org