Artist's Statement

I am interested in the ephemeral nature of beauty, the permanence of love, and the interplay between the two. By way of analogy, silk fabric is diaphanous and strong, delicate and sturdy; it survives multiple permutations and transformations, while retaining its fluidity and luminescence. Such contradictions, which function at both a material and a metaphorical level, fascinate me.

I primarily use the traditional techniques of Japanese shibori, a shape- and color-resist immersion dye process. Shibori embeds memory in fabric through color and form and echoes the way in which life experiences create multiple palimpsests as one proceeds forward in time, while continually registering the accumulations of the past.

Through layering and tying, my work creates variations in color that, coupled with the ethereality and translucency of silk, emphasize the interplay of shadow and light, and the remembrance of the heaviness of objects that have been removed from the fabric after dyeing. Suspended pieces are meant to engage the viewer by both their physical size and by their subtly shifting layers, as they respond to air currents created by movement around the piece.

November 2009

About the Artist

Rebecca Cross teaches composition, literature and art at the university level. She has also sung professionally. Formally trained as a bel canto singer at the Oberlin Conservatory, she has performed contemporary art music in a range of venues. The worlds of music and books continue to fascinate and inform her visual art, which has become a central passion since she began in 1989 to make quilts.

Intrigued by how all art must traverse the imagined and the material, Cross believes that the imagined is what resides in our dreams, thoughts, and memories; the material helps us "voice" these. Dreaming her way into art work allows her to explore what is captivating, troubling, deeply beautiful, or mysterious – sometimes doing so while quite literally holding on by a thread.

Her first pregnancy inspired many of the ideas in her early art quilts, and she subsequently enlarged the scope of her investigations by uncovering the layers of meaning embedded in folktales, fairy tales, poetry and myths. These narratives provided a psychic residence for imagination during the making of work.

Recent forays into shibori tying, dyeing and shape-resist techniques, primarily in silk, coupled with nuno-felting with wool on silk, continue to develop reflections on and expressions of memory. Shibori and felting processes embed memory in color and form in fabric, often in collaged layers. These processes provide a rich metaphor for the ways in which life experiences create multiple palimpsests as one proceeds forward in time, while simultaneously spiraling back into memory.