Clothesline
Fiber Arts Group
University of Nevada Reno
Through Nov. 10
Two black-headed birds hang upside down and keep watch. Another, fully in view and sporting bright orange and yellow feathers everywhere but the wings, helps a friend into a nest. A different bird watches them from a perch above. Rounding out the colony, two others mostly hide in their nests, only a few tail feathers poking out of the front of each dwelling. They might be feeding their chicks inside.
These seven birds aren’t living among the pines, though, and you can’t find them in the wild. Instead, they’ve made their home in a white, woolen, blanket-like object hanging on an art gallery wall. How odd.
Maybe their incredibly still, pottery-esque nature explains their choice of residence.
The avian colony is a part of Ingrid Stumpf’s piece Nature’s Weavers, now on display through Nov. 10 at the McNamara Gallery in the Church Fine Arts building at the University of Nevada, Reno.
Nature’s Weavers hangs alongside 20 other works of fiber art for an exhibition titled Clothesline. It’s the first exhibition of the UNR Fiber Arts Group, a set of mostly multidisciplinary BFA and MFA students interested in fiber art. Stumpf, with Anna Newman, curated the show.
Nature’s Weavers captures the mood and function of the new group. Beads stick to the white body of the piece. Thin threads cross haphazardly, looking like surgery stitches gone awry. Dyed hair hangs in the wool, spilling color across it. Silk snakes among the pouches of the ceramic birds.
Viewed from a step back, it has a cozy, fuzzy vibe despite the mix of materials. The wool, the dominant material in the piece, looks like cotton balls all pressed and smushed together. The complicated textures and bits of color belie its richness in story.
It is a hodgepodge, yet the birds use all of it to build their little community. To make themselves a home.
The fiber artists are engaged in a similar activity. Fiber arts are not a UNR focus yet, but the artists have been meeting for Fiber Fridays. There, they share materials and skills, like crocheting and sewing. The wide range of fibers available allow each artist to come up with something that works for them.
Like the artists, the birds make different spaces to suit their needs within the wool. Some of the birds have longer, skinnier nests, while others have teardrop-shaped ones. Some lie beneath folds, and some are pinned on top of them. It’s a community in the sense that they all live close to one another, depend on one another, but still choose how they go about their business in different ways.
There’s a playfulness inherent to the birds of Nature’s Weavers, too. Imagining them going about their tasks when we aren’t looking gave me a sense of simple domestic bliss. It made me feel like I was a kid again learning about how birds feed their young and travel long distances in pursuit of warmer weather. Before I learned about how survival in the wild can be incredibly hard and how development and climate change make it even harder. The repurposed, constituent parts of the piece hammer that home even more. The birds seem to be happily sharing resources and time. Perhaps we could be doing the same with them. Nature’s Weavers allows the viewer the opportunity to dream and think expansively.
In creating this exhibition and Fiber Fridays, Stumpf and the other fiber artists seem to have done that for themselves. They’ve been able to foster an experimental space away from the pressures of the art world and college classes. The evidence is hanging on the walls.
What’s going on at Church Fine Arts: Toward a Tangled Turn: Knots, Nets, Threads & Loops, a diverse show curated by Austin Pratt, is up in the Shepard Contemporary Gallery through Dec. 15. A new collection of new work by Iyana Esters, titled Birthed from the soil and consisting of photographs of a female farmer from Alabama, opens Oct. 23 and runs through Jan. 1, 2024 in the Front Door Gallery.
