The Marion Art Center is pleased to present its newest exhibition, Fiber Fusion, featuring five artists working in mixed media textile and fiber materials. Techniques include quilting, tapestry and loom weaving, collage and assemblage, surface application, design and embellishment, and more. Artists include Christine Anderson, Carol Flax, Lorraine Gentile Haynes, and Toni Newhall. The exhibit runs February 22 through March 28, with an artists’ reception on Saturday, February 22 from 3:00 pm to 5:00 pm at the MAC, located at 80 Pleasant Street, Marion.
Christine Anderson, a weaver and fiber artist, finds the intersection of threads, both basic and centering to her life and creative work. Her work includes intricate tapestries of local landscapes and mixed media pieces. To develop an idea, she uses a fusion of materials including delicate threads, fabric, scanned images, handmade paper, and beads. The scanned images, from nature, leaves, petals from flowers, insect wings are incorporated and can be duplicated and manipulated. Her pieces make a connection to the natural world and our place in it. Combining the life cycles of insects, birds, and plants with ideas of femininity, the work explores innocence, passages of life, aging and death.
Carol Flax moved to Cape Cod in 2013 and revived a technique of representational collage that she originally developed in her twenties. Her medium is entirely cut (reclaimed/recycled) paper. Best described as “painting with paper,” she pulls her “palette” of colors and textures from magazines, calendars, catalogs and other paper that tends to be a slightly heavier, glossy stock. She uses craft scissors to cut shapes that when applied with an archival glue stick onto a collage board backing, the layers, strongly resemble almost brush-like-strokes. Her “upcycled” artwork is inspired by favorite views from her travels, but especially the beautiful variety of landscapes, flora and fauna particular to Cape Cod.
Lorraine Gentile Haynes has always used her hands to create craft and art, including precious metal work, collage and printmaking. In 2015 she moved to Cape Cod and it was here that her love of combining line, shape form texture, space, value and color came together in the creation of her fiber art quilts. Because her mother was a tailor and clothing designer, she spent her early years in fabric houses where she learned to love textiles, She found that her background in layering and joining done in metal work, and the layering used in printmaking techniques, influenced and translated well into her fiber arts quilt projects.
Lisa Horton’s motto is the phrase: “One person’s trash is another person’s treasure”. To create her mixed media/collages, she most often combines castoff items and organic materials. She fabricates her pieces using various buttons and beads, threads, wire and scraps of paper, as well as other found objects. A bit of silk from an old scarf, a piece of lace from a friend’s blouse, bits and pieces of old jewelry – all find their way onto her canvas. The pieces she creates are of an abstract nature, yet each one is meant to evoke a meaning, a message or a memory.
Toni Newhall is a fiber/mixed media artist who likes to celebrate what has traditionally been considered “women’s work” by expanding these techniques into textured pieces of art. She uses fibers in combination with a variety of materials to create two- and three-dimensional pieces. She is drawn to the idea of multiples, expressed either as a series of works or as repeat motifs in a single piece. Her inspiration often comes from nature, by observing the smaller parts of a whole and expanding on or abstracting the details of an object.
More information on the exhibit can be found at marionartcenter.org/on-exhibit