KATE ZEHNTER
Perhaps it is true that there is nothing new under the sun and that all lessons learned are simply lessons rediscovered. That is what happened when, coming from a background in painting, I discovered space-twining in the 1980's. For two years I worked alone discovering this marvelous method of fabric art as I explored its potential when combined with other knotting techniques.
Making art has always soothed my being. At the same time, it is exciting, frustrating, and freeing. My art has reflected my physical environment and/or emotional state for the past 75 years. I have always created doodles or worked on fiber mini-tapestries, which allows me, to keep my hands busy, be creative and socialize at the same time. Since graduating from the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston, MA in 1965, I have been an art educator and visual artist. While in college I experimented with many genres from sculpture, painting, to printmaking. My three years stay in the Netherlands as a silk screen printer during my early thirties had a profound effect on my life. While there, I also experimented with crewel work and immersed myself in the people and culture there. This steered me to a love of three-dimensional, wearable, decorative art and pushed me into risk-taking and breaking traditional forms that informs my work today.
Today my work centers on painting and fiber art. I love the color journey of painting, and yet the texture and need to physically join the work continues to draw me to fiber. The sheer difficulty of translating concepts to the three dimensional plane of fiber art stimulates me and leads to a process that includes intricacy, variety and lack of patterning that is as organic as my life.
Just as art is interwoven with my life, each garment or sculpture I create becomes a vehicle for artistic expression.