Picture of the Week: The Past We Step Into by Carole Harris
February 13, 2022
Carole Harris is a Detroit fiber artist. Her mother taught her embroidery and crocheting, and she took sewing classes in elementary school. However, she did not begin experimenting with fiber art until she graduated with her BFA from Wayne State University in 1966. Her early quilts featured architectural and geometric forms, which is likely informed by her career as an interior designer. In 1976, she founded her interior and graphic design firm Harris Design Group, LLC (HDG). She served as the president for 33 years and dissolved the firm in 2009 to commit to her studio art practice full time. She is the recipient of many awards, including an Award of Distinction from the Kentucky Art & Craft Foundation in 1994 and in 2015, Best of Show in “Abstraction” at Detroit Artists Market and a Kresge Visual Arts Fellowship. Her work is displayed all over the world, including the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C., the Museums of Art & Design and the Folk Art Museum in New York City, as well as galleries in Europe, Japan, and South America. Her practice expands beyond traditional quilting, incorporating diverse stitching, shapes, and textures. Harris draws from a plethora of influences. She is inspired by “the color, energy, movement, and rhythms of ethnographic rituals and textiles,” along with the music and history of Detroit. Additionally, Harris’ travels to Europe, China, Japan, and the Caribbean have prompted her to contemplate the effects of time on natural and constructed environments. These travels also inspired a new approach to her artmaking compared to her earlier works. Nowadays, Harris derives influence “from walls, aging structures, and objects that reveal years of use.” She seeks “to celebrate the beauty in the frayed, the decaying, and the repaired.” Harris wants “to capture the patina softened by time, as well as feature the nicks, scratches, scars, and other marks left by nature or humans on constructed and natural surfaces.” Moreover, she wishes “to interpret these changes and tell these stories of time, place and people in cloth, using creative stitching, layering, and the mixture of colorful and textured fabrics.”
In her 2020 work The Past We Step Into, Harris employs hand dyed cotton, cotton batik, commercially printed cotton, linen, repurposed ethnographic fabrics (cotton and linen), thread, and cotton batting. She utilizes machine quilting and embroidery to compose the work. These materials and techniques are prominent throughout her art. The pieces of fabric are dyed in gold and various shades of purple, with some hints of red sprinkled throughout. These are often considered regal colors, which perhaps expresses how Harris raises her repurposed, aging materials to a high esteem. She appears to have cut her materials into different shapes. Two rectangular, patterned pieces of fabric lay perpendicular to each other. These pieces frame tiny purple and red fragments that look almost like tiny islands on a map, which may be a reference to how Harris is inspired by rich cultures and histories from all over the world. She layers the cut-up fabrics over one another, which is also a common technique in her artmaking. To add, they communicate how history consists of many different details and perspectives.
Each piece of fabric brings a story, or series of stories, with it. Perhaps one patterned fragment was once part of a dress worn on a special day, while another may have been part of a blanket that kept someone warm and made them feel safe. These fragments have been passed down over the years, and perhaps held slightly different meanings for each person who got their hands on it. Sometimes we try to run away from the past. It is filled with mistakes and traumas that we would much rather forget or discard. Some people may only be familiar with one side of a story, while others have no interest in history to begin with. To add, old and used objects tend to have a negative connotation. Nevertheless, Harris embraces the old, the tattered, the used and shows us just how beautiful they can be. We do not have to hide or forget the past. Rather, we can confront it, learn from it, and appreciate how it has strengthened our present selves. Harris encourages her viewers to step into the layered time machine she has created with The Past We Step Into and explore and value the past.
Written by Angela Athnasios
Source: charris-design.com