ANN MATLOCK

Brief Career Summary and Background

Background
I have been weaving since 1969. While a graduate student at The University of Texas at Austin, I taught myself to weave and spin, using books as my teachers. In 1971, I studied spinning and natural dyeing in Canada with Edna Blackburn. Since that time, I have continued to develop weaving, spinning, and dyeing in a personal direction. The designs for my weavings come from work in drawing, photography, and watercolor. I also make some watercolors for their own sake, since painting is a more direct way to explore form and color in nature. Most exhibitions of my work include both textiles and watercolors. For twenty two years, I supported myself primarily as a studio artist, working for gallery and museum exhibitions and for commissions. In the fall of 1991, I accepted a teaching position in The School of Art, Ohio University. I also teach workshops and classes for craft schools, universities, museums, and in the public schools. I maintain a studio in a cabin that I built in the hills west of Austin, Texas and another textile studio near Athens, Ohio.

Image Sources
Most of the images and colors in my weavings are abstracted from the landscape. By handspinning and hand dyeing the yarns, I am able to create the subtle shadings that this work requires. Most of my tapestries are human in scale, made to be used in interior spaces. The newer weavings include mounted wall pieces woven of silk. Subject matter includes the Texas landscape, as well as plant forms, such as the prickly pear cactus, agaves, and plants of southern California. Images for my newer work in surface design on fabrics are drawn from my photographs translated to silk screen as well as from block prints, rubbings and the direct application of dyes.

Three Dimensionality
All of the woven work has a somewhat three-dimensional quality , achieved by combining traditional tapestry techniques with brocade stitches that I developed. The sculptural quality of brocade adds to the sense of space in the work as well as depth of color. The use of silk and fine mohair yarns, in combination with brocading, allows the weaving to respond to changing light conditions. Most of my painted and printed textiles are meant to be functional and to take advantage of the draping qualities and transparency of the cloth. The surface design work is done on silk, rayon, fine linen, and cotton.

Watercolor
Most of my watercolors are painted on location, although some of the larger ones are made in my studio. I try, whenever possible, to work directly from nature. In the past few years, the watercolors have been concerned with plant and landscape forms from the southwest, especially the Texas hill country. I am currently working on a series on the purple prickly pear cactus, and hope that some of these studies may develop into tapestry designs. New photographic work, meant for use in surface design, concerns textures, details, and objects of special personal or symbolic meaning. Since I have learned to use the new computer imaging technologies, I am also developing designs for both woven and printed textiles in this way.

Yarn

All of the weavings in this exhibition were made from silk yarns that I dyed especially for the piece to be woven. I use only the most light-fast, fiber-reactive dyes for this work. Some of the yarns are hand spun, while the others, usually finer, are commercially spun and vary in color and texture, even before they are dyed.

Warp

Most of the warp yarns threaded on the loom are colored in some way before the weaving begins. Some warps combine a variety of dyed shades, others are dyed in a wash of color, and many of the more recent warps are printed with photo silk screen or block printing, using silk dyes.

Weaving Process

The woven structure begins with traditional tapestry interlocking wefts to provide the fabric structure and add color and design. After each row of tapestry, a row of brocade is woven, using many different bobbins of color. The brocade weaves add the slightly three-dimensional quality that is visible in the finished work. Thus, unlike drawing or painting, a weaving progresses, row on row, in time. It combines the flow of color of other art forms with the architecture of textiles ¬the image is not on the cloth, but in it.

The weavings in this exhibition represent several years of work. I enjoy making even larger pieces, but these tapestries are exploratory and done in an intimate scale. The subject matter reflects an interest in plant forms and in textile history and processes. My research into historical textiles is reflected in most of these works. I love the exuberance of plant forms as expressed in printed and woven textiles and in other decorative arts. Two small silk tapestry crochet pieces reflect on my own history in fiber, since I was taught to crochet by my mother as a young girl. The abstract patterns in crocheted works are an homage to the utilitarian items, such as warm throws and wraps, made by the women in my family.

In all my work, I am interested in conveying a feeling that the weaving that is presented is just a fragment of something larger, not a picture contained by its edges.