Conversation with Susan

 

Vibeke: Hello Susan. I am so happy that you said yes to having this conversation together with me! I have been admiring your work for quite a while now and i am very excited to get the chance to learn more about both you and your work.

Susan: Hello, Vibeke, and thank you for inviting me to talk about my life and weaving here, on A Butterfly in My Hair.

Vibeke: A little bit about you...what you do?

Susan: I am a design weaver with a weaving workshop and retail store called Avalanche Looms. The store and workshop are on my farm in a valley town, Avalanche, Wisconsin. There are just 10 houses here on the West Fork of the Kickapoo River. Avalanche Looms seemed like a good name, and a little funny. I work by myself, but my store is open several days a week, and people come in to shop, and visit. I like this arrangement very much.

 
Vibeke: When did your interest for weaving start and how long have you been doing it now?

Susan: I can tell you how I got here. More than 30 years ago, my husband and I left our jobs north of Detroit. I was a book editor, and he owned an art gallery. But we were tired of our suburban life, and wanted to live in the country where we could live more self sufficiently, grow our own food, build our house, make our own clothes. We bought a run down, beautiful 100 acre farm in Avalanche, the farm we still live on. We didn't have a clue about what we would do for a living, but we were confident we’d think of something. We had many naïve and romantic ideas.

At first we farmed, until my husband found work he liked better as a builder.  I was at home, taking care of the large garden, the chickens, and some heifers.

I was  also writing fiction, and frustrated with what I was doing. We hadn’t made many friends, or much money, either. I began to think I was a person who would never be satisfied. I was lonely. Though I was still glad to have left our old life behind, the new one didn’t seem so promising.
Then, everything changed.  I was pregnant with my first daughter, and I taught myself to weave on an old Norwegian immigrant built barn loom. We live in an area of Wisconsin settled by Norwegian immigrants, and there are some of these old looms around, built by hand, with trees they cut on their farms 100 years ago. My neighbor had one, and asked me if I would store it for her. We had just built a new workshop for my husband, and I had said I wanted a studio upstairs. I set the loom up there, and learned to weave. Learning to weave is not rocket science, as people have told me, but it was still a  big accomplishment for me.  Having a baby and becoming a mother wasn't rocket science, either, but it was the most important and hardest work I've ever done. 

Vibeke: When you first started with this craft what did you make and how did it develop?
Susan: I started out weaving with rags. I always loved old rag rugs, their soft worn textures, and colors. Rag weaving offered so many possibilities for color, texture and design. And rags are not precious materials. They were available in every thrift shop, or rummage sale.

In the end, I had two floor looms in that studio, my sewing machine, a book press, along with book shelves, toy shelves, a hammock a double bed, a dollhouse, and a little Jotul wood burning stove, with a Japanese teapot on top. When they were young, our three (!) kids, and the dog, and the cat, stayed with me while I wove. It was a cheerful, bright place, and I was so happy to have that place to work. It was a very important change for me, to have a separate studio. I spent at least four hours a day weaving, and I got better at it. I didn’t do so much housework, or laundry, or clean the bathroom too often, because it was out of sight in the house. We all survived. Oh, and I never wove our clothes. Good, because with the little time I had to work on it, we would have been mostly naked.

Vibeke: And how do you work now many years after you first started this craft?
Susan: These days, I like to work on  three looms at a time. I like to start my weaving day on my old barn loom, weaving linen and paper flower weaves.  I call them, transparencies, like the Finnish make. I also call them House Blessings. I don’t change this design, and though it involves many steps, I don't have to think about them, at all. I like to hear the rustle of the white paper yarn flowers, the sound of the brush swishing in the cup of water, that I use to open the yarn into petals, the click of the shuttle,  the swing and thunk of the heavy beater on the old barn loom. It  is very calm, and ordinary. Outside the window, birds fly in to the feeder, and the sun comes in the east window. No matter what time of year it is, I am in my white paper flower garden, with the taut spaced linen warp,  and the simplicity of plain weave. 
 On another loom I may have scarves. I have been weaving a series of inlaid "Cross" scarves lately. The bast fibers, mainly Swedish linen, cotton and hemp are my favorite yarns. I start each scarf with a section of design that I repeat in every scarf, changing some colors. I use some of my favorite designs from the previous scarf in the next one, and I improvise with color and pattern for the rest of the scarf, and so the design transforms.

 On another loom I usually have a rag weave. Instead of weaving rag rugs, though, I've been weaving long bolts of fabric made from rag strips and yarns, with inlays. These are very improvisational weaves. Some of the inlays are rosepath patterns that fill squares and crosses.  With these bolts of fabric I sew cushions, or curtains for my "bachelor cupboards", made from old honey-bee boxes. The inlay squares and cross designs hold many different meanings for me. Sometimes the squares are bee boxes filled with the activity of the hive, or sometimes windows into an imaginative landscape, revealing the pattern that is hidden in the threading of the loom. Once, a square was a television screen with bad reception.  

The cross I weave is a design that has a long history in ancient weavings and not one that I associate with the Christian symbol. Native Americans used it to represent the 4 cardinal directions, which is more what it means to me.  Mainly, it is an easy block form to weave, and I like to fill it with a diagonal goose eye design. 

Vibeke: Have there been a specific artist that has inspired you and why?
Susan: Pia Wallen, the Swedish modernist who designed the iconic Crux blanket, has been my weaving hero. She said she worked with felt because it was one of the fundamental elements in a sub-polar climate, along with grain, potatoes, salt, herring, wood, furs and iron ore. She called the Nordic countries the Felt Belt. She has also said she is not inspired by nature, but by things made by other people. Folkloristic textiles filled her with passion, and she refined elements from that in her work.  She also felt it was her mission to carry on cultural heritage, develop it, bring it up to date, and to contribute to elevating the status of textile art, shamefully low, she thought, because textiles have always been women’s work.

I felt the same way about making things on the loom, traditional, simple, rustic, and modern. I like to make textiles that meet at the threshold of art and function. That is what I hoped to do, anyway. I am also inspired by things made by other people, old rag rugs and contemporary artists. And I agree with Wallen, that the status of textile art is shamefully low, because it is mainly women’s work. All of my grandparents were immigrants. My grandfather came from Northern Sweden, at the Arctic Circle, and I do think of myself as a Northern weaver.

Much of what I weave comes from a curiosity about the story of their coming to America in the late 1800's and early 1900's. What it must have meant to leave their families in uncertain lives, and not ever to return. Post cards and letters weren't frequent. So many things were never said, or written. How difficult it was for them to live here, once they had made the decision. I have a paper weave called “All My Eggs in One Basket” which is inspired by my grandmother, who had to leave her family behind in Finland, in a terrible civil war, to come here, alone, when she was just 19 years old. How brave, she was. She has not been the only one to come to America to escape a war.

  

 Vibeke: In one of your blog posts you have written these words, i find them very beautiful:

"A rug is a path. It is a record of many choices (color, texture, mood, balance) made by the weaver as she follows her hunches of which is the best way to go, what next, and next, and next. Off of the loom, and on the floor, the rug is an actual path. Wide enough for a person to walk its length, for a moment or two, along the path the weaver made. Choosing to weave rags is also a path."

I have always had a special thing for rags! It is so much history in them. My mom have some of the old rags that my grandmother weaved herself (some of them she made together with her own mother) and both my mom and i look at them as treasures. Do you have a special feeling about rags too and also about the process of making them?

Susan: I’m interested in the paths we all take, the choices we make, and our stories.

A rug is a path. It is a physical record of many choices (color, texture, mood, balance) made by the weaver as she follows her hunches of which is the best way to go, what next, and next, and next. Off the loom, and on the floor, the rug is an actual path. Wide enough for a person to walk its length, for a moment or two, along the path the weaver made. Choosing to weave rags is also a path. I’ve learned to pay attention and trust my eye as I weave.

Vibeke: Other artists that have been an inspiration to you in your weaving life?

Susan: I’ve been inspired by many artists in my weaving life, Chiaki Maki, Reiko Sudo, Anu Tuominen, Jokkum Nordstrom, are some of the artists whose work ignites my imagination. Imagination is the best part of being human, and I believe everyone has an imagination. Our imaginations are meant to meet and make sparks. All of our minds together will bring new ideas into the mix, new combinations. I’m so grateful to meet and know the artists I have found through the internet and blogging. To be able to connect with other artists around the world, as you arranged so well in your Advent project, is simply wondrous.

 
Vibeke: Dear Susan this has been such a wonderful conversation, SO interesting and inspiring! I want to thank you for taking the time and also for all that you have shared here with us. I have always had a love and interest for weaving but now i feel even more inspired and drawn to this craft than ever before. AND i also have to say that i find your work deeply beautiful, soulful and unique....just as i find you as a person too!

Susan: Thanks for the chance to talk about weaving here. I hope that someone reading this may feel more confident to start weaving, if they have considered it. It’s not rocket science. Weaving allows so much to happen. In weave you can build textures, create contrast, blend colors like painting. Color, light and shadow are shifting and dynamic. Appearances constantly change, day, night, sunshine, shadow, liquid, transparent, opaque. Trying to capture this mysterious changing realm, and make it into richness in the surface of a weave is endlessly fascinating. I believe a weave, even a plain rag rug, can be like a poem or a painting, making something meaningful, and possibly beautiful, with what you have.

Links:
blog,
etsy
and
flickr.