The word sutra, which refers to the sacred literature of Indian religions, also is the Sanskrit word for thread. In English, as well, text and textile share a common root. The affinity between thread and text is tangibly present in Lenore Tawney's art. In using linen thread to create majestic sculptures and incorporating fragments of books in mysterious objects, Tawney taps the essence from which the divergent meanings spring.
Tawney is an artist with a keen awareness of the streams that run beneath the surfaces of things. Extensive travels to India, Thailand, and Japan, as well as South America and Europe, have provided a framework of references that she synthesizes into works of great simplicity. In addition, her familiarity with the mythologies and spiritual writings of both East and West filters into her work. In particular, she is attuned to those that reveal links between her work and the female principle.
Impelled by a vision that is gentle but relentless, Tawney keeps ahead of her time by following an independent path. She is among the pioneering artists whose work in thread demanded the designation of "fiber art" as a new category. In the fifties and sixties, her innovative woven works heralded the emergence of the fiber movement in America. In the seventies, a radical shift in the focus of her weaving was accompanied by a prolific output of small, poetic objects in collage and assemblage. In the eighties, her fiber work focused on the thread as itself, minus structural control. Now, at the beginning of the nineties, works from the previous decades have been gathered in a sweeping retrospective, her first, which opened at the American Craft Museum in New York in April.
Tawney has the rare distinction of being recognized, not only in the field of craft but also in the art world, as an artist who carried weaving into the realm of fine art. Her shaped textiles of the early sixties, which transcended the limitations of the loom, thrust her toward international prominence through exhibitions in Zurich and Milan as well as at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. From there, her explorations kept widening. Although massive textiles are the dominant works, dispersed among them are intricate line drawings, delicate collages from fragments of books in different languages, feathers and bones in fetishlike boxes, and postcards with messages inscribed with stones or seeds that miraculously survived the postal system. Recurring images related to the cycles of life - birds, or eggs and nests, for example - become a subtheme that plays against the major theme of thread itself.
Viewed chronologically, the retrospective traces the development of Tawney's work from her abstract figurative sculptures in clay executed in the forties to the filmy masses of threads called "Clouds" that she has been making since the late seventies. Contrasting the early and late works, one sees radical shifts from opaqueness to transparency, from solid, self-contained forms that displace space to ethereal environmental works that, in her words, "fill space while you still have the space." Each phase of Tawney's work is like a plateau where she lives for a while and then moves beyond.
National Treasure
Diminutive in stature, Tawney, whose work has evolved gradually over more than sixty years, projects the aura of a "national living
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