Upper school art teacher and chair of Beaver’s visual art department Rebecca Roberts is showcasing her work in the school’s Nancy Lincoln Art Gallery. The show features “paintings” created with sewn-together fabric.
On Thursday, October 13 at 5:30 p.m., the community is invited to the closing reception for the show. The event will be held in the Lincoln Gallery.
Roberts’ artist’s statement explains her work:
I have always found inspiration form my work by working with a variety of materials such as canvas, brown paper bag material and now, fabric. I’m interested in using a material’s inherent qualities to help me to develop ideas about how to work with it. Having learned sewing as a young girl from my mother and grandmother, working with it as a “paining” medium feels natural to me.
Each painting begins with the relationship between two or three fabrics – their color, texture, or pattern.
"Fire in the Evening"
The painting develops as I take the pieces of fabric apart (by cutting) and put them back together (by sewing) over and over again. Unlike quilting, I do not find pieces of scrap fabric and make arrangements to sew them together.
I begin working in a very intuitive and meditative way; the arrangement of the shapes develops slowly and is a result of the choices I make.
Some of interests that influence these choices include: Shifts in size and scale such as small pieces next to big pieces; and Pushing the fabric to its limits…how much can I cut it and sew it back together?
The painting changes dramatically when I stretch it over the stretcher. This process is just as important to me as sewing the pieces together. I’m interested in the tension on the seams and the change that happen to the shapes.
The nature of this work is that the pieces often end up resembling landscapes, maps, and other visual phenomena that occur when man and nature occupy the same space. These subjects have always interested me and I hop the viewer makes those connections.
Recently, Rebecca was part of Boston Does Boston at Proof Gallery and her works on paper can be found at Carroll and Sons Gallery as part of the Boston Drawing Project.
