On the materiality of Rebecca Ward's works

(Images may be viewed in concert with this post!)

With one exception, all of Rebecca Ward's work that I've seen is all in the same sort of mode: a canvas is divided into very flatly colored regions, which may be strictly polygonal or curvilinear; in most cases the coloration of these regions is solid but every now and then a gradient makes itself known. Almost always one edge of the canvas has been unwoven, so that threads run straight off to the side, or the bottom (in none that I've personally seen is this unwoven edge on the top, and she seems to favor the right over the left). Or, better said, these threads run parallel to one edge of the frame, which can be conventionally rectangular or, in some instances, triangular. Sometimes this unwoven section is a single color field (it is rarely precisely solid), but it may itself consist of multiple polygonal or curved colored regions, just as does the remainder of the canvas—that part of the "canvas", the metonym for "painting", which is literally still canvas. (Works exist in which there are multiple unwoven sections, and in which there is an unwoven section in the middle of sections of canvas rather than running off the edge, which retains its woven integrity on either side, but I haven't actually seen them in person myself. One of them, "nonplussed" from 2014, seems especially interesting, in that there is an unwoven channel running through the middle, which changes angle very slightly. It isn't really possible to see what happens at the juncture between the angled sections in the image on her site, but one is very curious.) Or rather not "just as does the remainder of the canvas", because each distinct colored region of "the canvas" is actually multiple physically distinct pieces of fabric which have been sewn together to create the whole. When the unwoven sections comprise multiple colored sections, it is of course not possible for them likewise to comprise multiple pieces of fabric sewn together. They could have been different strings knotted together, but they aren't: they are just … different colors, just as one might have expected the still-woven sections to be.

One might think that from a distance the works would look just as if they did indeed comprise exactly one continuous if partially unwoven piece of canvas, with the edges of the different regions resulting simply from careful masking, or however it is that geometrically inclined painters have always made their edges neat and tidy, or however, for that matter, Ward herself makes the multiply-colored unwoven regions neat and tidy. (Sometimes these are not extremely neat or tidy.) It's not really clear to me that that's true, though; or at least, the distance required is, I think, greater than one is likely to have at one's disposal. One doesn't have to be all that close to discern that there are seams joining the sections, and even when far enough off that one can't tell that, precisely, the reality of the seam contributes to a noticeable physicality between the panels. The "ditch" in which sewists are occasionally instructed to stitch makes one aware of the separateness of the sections, even if the precise cause is not clear; at Peter Blum gallery, for vector specter, I stood as far as possible from "soft landing" and it still did not seem that the edges met each other directly. Of course, I was cursed by the knowledge that they didn't, so one may wonder how trustworthy any seeming-to-me really is. But they really are, even at a distance, distinct individuals whose boundaries match each other but are separated by a miniscule dark shadow. The edges are not sharp, without being blurry or fuzzy in the sense of bleeding into each other; rather, you can tell that they do not quite meet, that they are kept from each other ever so slightly. You can see this even in the photos on her site. (It is not at all apparent on the little printouts you can get at a gallery giving titles and details.)

Up close, of course, the manner of construction of the works at the, so to speak, physical level is quite apparent. One can see from up close not only the seams but also the stitches—perhaps inevitable given that the seams are pulled apart by the canvas's being stretched over the frame—and the bulk of her seam allowances, which is fairly generous, and which is always finished such that both seam allowances are folded in the same direction, resulting in somewhat wonky edges where multiple seams end close to each other, especially when one of them is curved. (Curved seams are notoriously tricky to coax to lie flat, because there is just more fabric either at the seam or at the edge of the seam allowance, depending on which side of the curve one is on.) There's an interesting irony about the visibility of the labor that these traces of the manner of assembly makes possible: different methods of joining woven fabric panels are possible which would have made the edges literally seamless, eg so-called French or invisible reweaving, but invisible reweaving is far more intensely laborious than sewing with a machine. (Of course such reweaving would also remove the seam's visible gap which both joins and separates.)

I have been referring to the tint of her yarns and canvas pieces as their being "colored" rather than "painted" because they do not appear to be painted at all. Her media are given as "acrylic and dye", so presumably some of it actually is painted, but I confess that my impression is overwhelmingly of dyed fabric and yarns. This certainly contributes to the flatness of the coloration, which is more than simply its being matte: the color appears to be in the canvas, not on it, because, well, that's how dye works. The coloration of the yarns in the unwoven sections are even more interesting: in some of them individual adjacent yarns are distinct colors in the same family. I don't know if she dyes these separately and then carefully lines them up again, or what, but it's striking when right up close and contributes to an appealing mottled haze when not.

I have also been referring to her works as "works" rather than "paintings" because it seems fairly common to question their status as painting, or at least to insist that they are at a minimum not the most straightforward instances of painting. Frankly, one can see it: multiple pieces of sewn-together dyed fabric, some of which is unwoven? It isn't exactly squarely in the conceptual center of painting, even if some of those pieces of canvas do have paint on them. An interesting question for the reader: if you were to select some other concept under which to range these objects, what would it be? I've been going on about their physical construction so much because I think there's an extremely obvious candidate, but it is, strange to say, not the one that's popular these days.

Is there an art or craft characterized in large part by joining together into one large simple shape (a rectangle, a circle, why not a triangle) curved or polygonal pieces of colored fabric? Why yes, there is. Is there an art or craft characterized in large part the opposite of what Ward is doing when she removes yarns—always yarns running in the same direction, in any given case—from her canvas? Here too the answer is yes, and the name of the craft is even more obvious than in the first case. When someone puts together patches of fabric to make, say, a rectangle, that is known as "piecing", and it is a component of making a quilt. (The final component of making a quilt, in which multiple layers are sewn together with batting, is somewhat confusingly simply called "quilting", but one can quilt in that sense without being engaged in the making of a quilt. A winter jacket, that is, might have a quilted lining, meaning it is a lining, likely with a thin layer of insulation, with a diamond pattern sewn in it, for volume and to secure the insulation, without the lining's being a quilt in any recognized sense, because a quilt in the commonly accepted sense involves a pieced-together patchwork.) The thing which Ward is undoing when she unweaves her canvas is weaving. (In truth, I'm just guessing that Ward is unweaving a canvas that she has acquired in woven form, largely because I assume that if she were weaving the canvases herself and just leaving lengths of warp yarns unwoven her galleries would say so, since such unnecessary labors by an artist are always worth mentioning. But I don't know that.) That is, if one wishes to set these works alongside painting as an artistic pursuit and some other form of artistic pursuit, the obvious candidate, to me, is textile or fiber arts generally, and quilting (more than weaving) specifically. A 2015 interview actually does so (and mentions work of Ward's with batting, even, which I haven't seen). That sort of comparison is not as common these days, though. Nowadays, if one wishes to suggest that something's not quite painterly about these objects, the other pole of the comparison is sculpture.

This is quite baffling to my mind, and I truthfully cannot quite comprehend why it's the case. Or rather, I can think of one reason for it, but it's not one I've seen given and it's certainly more cute than convincing: in removing yarns from a tangle of yarns, mightn't we see Ward as engaged in a sort of construction by removal that we might analogize to a sculptor's removal of stone from stone? Like I said, cute. I can also think of a frankly cynical explanation, which by its nature one wouldn't see stated explicitly: that as Ward's star has risen it has been necessary to shed associations with the fiber arts, which are suspiciously lady-coded and not quite as artistically respectable as they might be, and replace them with associations with a finer art, something with more distinguished pedigree and less sullied by associations with the merely useful. If one restricts oneself to the classical artistic genres sculpture might seem to be the only other one left. It sure ain't dance, and sculpture is at least the art form of those classically countenanced that involves the physical construction of an object whether additively or subtractively (other, obviously, than architecture, but that one is even more of a stretch). If quilting is simply not on one's radar, or if one has decided that quilting is infra dig, but notes that these objects involve removal and putting-together, then sure, sculpture, why not.

There is also the fact that since painting and sculpture are members of the canon of classical art forms, and quilting and weaving are not, there is simply more grist for one's intellectual mill to be found in comparison to sculpture than to the others. I wonder if something like this is in the background of Ekin Erkan's review of vector specter: the mind that inclines to theory and philosophy in these realms will naturally use those tools that are at its disposal in thinking through what's going on. But one should not seek enlightenment only where the light is good. Thus although Erkan reasonably denies that Ward's works are sculpture, he nevertheless finds a sculptural element in them, quoting Herbert Read saying that is "an art of palpitations—an art that gives satisfaction in the touching and handling of objects", and applies this to Ward's work:

Specifically, Ward’s “palpitations” tremble in the fabric squares and rectangles that constitute the right-most or bottom strips in her constructions. There is one such element in each work and, unless intimately viewed, it almost remains hidden. Bereft of vertical warp threads, these bands allot the passage of light, slightly revealing the wall below.

Well, on the one hand, a wall or bit of frame that you can see but not touch without disturbing the taut threads hardly seems to give or promise satisfaction in the touching or handling (and prima facie, any painting with thick impasto, objects affixed collagewise to the canvas, or textural interest at all would seem to do so, notwithstanding that one learns early on that one does Not Touch the Art). On the other, you know what also reveals the wall below or behind? Very many weavings! But on the third hand, why talk about sculpture at all? The moves in the review are, basically, "it might seem odd to call these paintings sans phrase, but they also aren't sculpture". Nu, who said they had to be sculpture if they weren't paintings? (Ward herself has spoken of sculpture in the context of her works, in an interview that I haven't been able to find in full (NB I also haven't tried extrmeely hard); I'm the last person to think that we should take anything on her say-so but I admit to curiousity about how the topic of sculpture came up in the first place, especially given the 2015 interview that referred directly to textile arts.) The partial translucency of parts of the works, partly revealing the frame and wall—is that truly all it takes to give something a sculptural element? The grounds for aligning these works with textile arts seem significantly stronger. (Erkan has something to say about that, actually, and I've gone back and forth with him a bit about the puzzling part of his piece where he says "there are no seams to be found between the fabric elements", but I don't really want to recapitulate all that here.)

If I were to pick a set of works that has that property—that the yarns out of which it partly consists allow you to see the wall and frame—it would be the works of Brian Wills shown here (tangentially, dig Edward Shalala's partly unwoven canvases at that link), and that's because of their method of construction (which you can discern in looking at them): they are made of threads individually pulled across the frame, individually placed. That is, whereas you can see through Ward's yarns because she has unwoven a canvas (and you can tell that that's what she's done, too), you can see through Wills's because he has placed them together like that; while "Ward is taking material away, sort of like a sculptor does" struck me as merely kind of cute, "Wills is adding material, sort of like a sculptor does" strikes me as … not necessarily conclusively cogent but somewhat more plausible.

Now, I personally have little problem simply saying that Ward's productions are paintings—not paradigm cases of paintings but still paintings—and that what's interesting about her is that she's found a way to make paintings out of fabric directly. We might compare her works in this vein to Jayson Musson's found a way to make paintings out of Coogi sweaters. But in each case this is at least partly a pragmatic matter; they're hung on a wall like a painting, stretched on a frame like a painting, they have a sort of painting-like feel, sometimes they even have paint!—why not? But if you want to make hay out of Ward's stuff not being paradigmatic paintings, and being not merely not paradigmatic paintings but a sort of painting-like object that participates in another recognizable form, that form, it seems to me, has simply got to be the quilt. They're the top layers of quilts, basically, doing duty as paintings. This even still allows you to talk about medium specificity and all that, a set of discourses I mostly find somewhat sterile, though obviously I'm willing to maunder on. But you ought to get the media in question right.