Professional Weaver Podcast

This week we are speaking with John Paul Morabito of Chicago, Illinois.

John Paul is a transdisciplinary weaver who engages the medium of tapestry reimagined in the ditigial age. Their work outputs woven forms, moving images, and relational actions to imagine queer grace. Their work has been exhibited internationally, including but not limited to the Zhejiang (zhuh-zhong) Art Museum in China, Dorsky Gallery Curatorial Projects in New York and the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas. They also have work in collections like the Textile Resource Center at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. They have presented papers at the College Art Association Conference and the Textile Society of America Symposium, published essays with Art China, the China Academy of Art Textile Reader 2, and the Journal of Textile Design Research and Practice. Morabito holds a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where they currently serve on the faculty as an Assistant Professor, Adjunct of Fiber and Material Studies.

We hope you enjoy our conversation with John Paul as cover how they discovered weaving early in their life, queer identity and creation through textiles, the future of weaving and more.

This week we are speaking with Erin Riley from Brooklyn, NY.

Erin is a tapestry weaver who has dedicated her time and life to creating tapestries that portray different aspects of culture that are either overlooked or are difficult to confront. Since receiving her MFA from the Tyler School of Art she has done many solo and group exhibitions all over the country and the world and has received many awards. Her work often focuses on the darker side of our culture. A few of the subjects she has covered have been nude figures from pornography or selfies, drug paraphernalia, and mental illness. The tapestries she creates has evolved over time to showcase her skills as a weaver, but also her eye as a dedicated artist.

We hope you enjoy our conversation as we talk to Erin about how she became a weaver, discovering and establishing her artistic voice, and how she feels she fits into the weaving community.

This week we are talking with tapestry Weaver, Tommye Scanlin, who resides in the Southern Appalachian region.

Tommye is an artist who observes and responds to her surroundings for inspiration. Her primary artistic medium is handwoven tapestry, an ancient method of working with fibers to create images. As she seeks images and ideas to interpret into tapestry she experiences her surroundings as closely as She can. Photographs, sketches, paintings, and writings all are part of the research she puts into her work.

She has been living in the southern Appalachian mountains for most of her life and her surroundings are filled with the natural forms of woods, streams, and fields. Her eyes are frequently drawn to the myriad details of the landscape and many of her tapestries are based on aspects of those details, simplified and enlarged in a weaving.

Tommye has also written two books on the topic of creating tapestry weavings: “The Nature of Things: Essays of a Tapestry Weaver” and her newest book “Tapestry Design Basics and Beyond: Planning and Weaving with Confidence.” Her passion for teaching others is infectious, and she is always learning new things to pass along to others. It is inspiring and we hope that you snag her books to read up on her awesome tapestry weavings.

This week we are speaking with Tien Chiu.

Tien is a textile artist, a teacher, and a writer. She has achieved many awards and achievements with her weaving work, including such honors as her handwoven wedding dress as part of the permanent collection at the American Textile History Museum and her Kodachrome jacket being featured on the cover of Handwoven magazine. In her studio she is primarily a weaver, dyer, and couture seamstress, producing artistic garments, accessories and wall hangings.

She has written many articles for Handwoven and Complex Weavers Journal. She has also written a fabulous book, titled Master Your Craft: Strategies for Designing, Making and Selling Artisan Work. This book was a huge help for me when I started weaving as a full time career and is definitely recommended!

Her blog is an amazing resource in design inspiration, exploration, and problem solving complex weave structures. I have been following her work and her blog since I graduated from college, finding endless motivation through her writings.

We hope you enjoy our conversation as we talk with her about her growth into weaving, how she wants to help enrich the weaving community, and some insight on how mathematics and technology influence her work as a weaver and teacher.

This week we are speaking with the Sean Dougall and Andrew Paulson of the design studio Dougall Paulson, based out of Southern California.

As co-founders of the multi-disciplinary art and design studio, they seek beauty through new forms of weaving, furniture, lighting and objects. Using narrative as the thread that binds ideas together, their unique take on visual storytelling is the starting point for the creation of objects that straddle the fine, decorative, and graphic arts. They approach their practice with a focus on curiosity and discovery. Specifically speaking about their handwoven work: the art textiles explore the ways in which light appears through absorption, reflection, and transparency. Which, under the right lights, look like the pieces are glowing internally.

We hope you enjoy our conversation about how they grew and developed their design practice, the challenges of weaving with metal, and what inspires them to keep exploring and moving forward.