Arcata Community Center, 321 Dr Martin Luther King Jr Pkwy, Arcata, California 95521, United States
+1.707.599.2729 Linda
Featured artist 2024
Carolyn Jones
I learned to weave at HSU back in the early 80s, in a big light-filled studio at the west end of Gist Hall. At that time, weaving was in the department of Home Economics, with sewing and cooking and childhood development... utility, not art. We learned to start with raw fiber, spin it in to yarn, color it with both natural and synthetic dyes, and then turn that yarn into fabric. This is how cloth was made for millennia... mostly the work of women—unbelievably time-consuming, immensely important and generally utilitarian.
These days we have so many choices. Dozens of fibers, hundreds of yarn styles, every color of the rainbow. We buy comfortable, durable and cheap woven goods for daily use, leaving us time to explore and create. But, somehow, that idea that fabric is essentially useful has never left me. To weave something that is both a one-of-a-kind work of art and also useful makes me happy.
I work on three different looms which are typically warped with three different styes of cloth: one with cotton or linen for towels and runners (and often, one shawl woven with silk or another luxury yarn), another with slinkier yarns for scarves, and a third for playing around, most recently with wall pieces.
The wall pieces are a sort of summary of 40 years as a weaver. Weaving uses very large quantities of yarn and typically involves high levels of waste. For years I have been saving what would have been thrown away... the last couple feet of colorful warps, the half-full bobbins that aren’t enough for a regular project, odds and ends of miscellaneous yarns discarded by others. These are the palette with which the inlay wall pictures are painted. In fact, it is hard to imagine creating these pieces with the cones of uniformly sized yarns that I typically use. These works embrace the serendipitous small quantities and varied colors, sizes and textures of leftovers.
For nearly as long as I have been weaving, I have also been making artists books. This began as a collaborative project with friends: Dorothy Swendeman and my mom, Vikki Young, both now sadly gone, and Terri Tinkham, still working with me. For decades we created limited edition calendars on a variety of themes, incorporating, at first, handwoven fabrics, and later, a wide variety of textile and arts techniques, with some of them in book form. Terri and I continue to create both annual themed calendars and one-of-a-kind books: the a-b-c books are another exercise in creative re-use, individually collaged from materials drawn from the limitless free supply of beautifully printed material discarded daily in today’s world—books, magazines, catalogs, calendars. With this rich pool of materials it is possible to select a group of original images that tell a story that is greater than the sum of its parts. And great fun.
How lucky I am!
Carolyn Jones
