by Carlene Phillips ·
Friday, July 12, 2024
Sitting at the General Store across a table from Harvard resident Kristin Kelley-Munoz, I watched in fascination as she explained the warp and weft and threw the imaginary shuttle back and forth, lifting the imaginary yarn to make her pattern. I didn’t fully understand how it all works, but what I did understand was how passionate she is about her weaving. She has moved on from textile weaving to the very different art of tapestry weaving, and she currently has one of her tapestries in an exhibition in England; another is a finalist for an award from Australia Tapestry Workshop. In the fall she will have her work in a Tapestry Weavers in New England (TWiNE) exhibit at Fivesparks.
Tapestry “South Downs: The Trundle” contrasts with woven throw by Kristin Kelley-Munoz. (Courtesy photo)
Tapestry artist is a far different vocation from attorney, which is what Kelley-Munoz started out as. After five years of researching and writing for a law firm, she realized how often she felt stressed about her job. She wanted to be with her kids, and her husband was supportive of that. “And my personality was never well suited to litigation,” she added with a laugh.
She said she decided to learn how to weave “so I got a book and taught myself.” She said both her grandmothers were Irish mill girls—perhaps her attraction to weaving was their influence, from somewhere deep in her subconscious. Her mom’s mom, who lived in Quebec, planted flax and had woven a tablecloth, with added embroidery, which Kelley-Munoz now owns—perhaps a more tangible inspiration.
For 20 years Kelley-Munoz wove textiles, mostly household linens like kitchen towels and table runners. She made what sold, and she had a loom that could make large quantities of an item at one time. She was also teaching theory-level classes to area weaving guilds, demonstrating such things as how an increased number of shafts, controlled by the treadle, make more complicated patterns.
It was fun, she said, but after so many years, the shaft weaving had become repetitious. “There was no mystery left,” she said, and creativity was limited because “I was making what pleased others.” The pandemic, which closed shows where she sold her linens, gave her the opportunity to pursue “a tickle in the back of my head”—tapestry weaving. She had seen examples of tapestries at some of the weaving guild shows she attended. In 2021, she took an online course in tapestry weaving, undeterred by the fact that she had no art background.
Most tapestry art over the centuries consisted of replicas of paintings or copies of previously woven pieces. The mid-20th century was a real turning point when the fiber arts movement revived the earlier spirit of experimentation in the weavers workshop of the Bauhaus School originating in Germany in 1919. The emphasis shifted from pattern to more abstract designs. Sheila Hicks, an important artist in the movement, is described online as known for her “innovative weavings that incorporate distinctive colors, natural materials and personal narratives.”
Kelley-Munoz explained that the process of tapestry weaving is totally different from textile weaving. Instead of working with the shuttle and one strand of yarn left and right across the loom, you weave in “patches” from front to back, in and out of the warp (vertical) threads, area by area, color by color. And there are many bobbins, with different colors and kinds of yarn. “It’s fun to see how the threads mix to come out,” Kelley-Munoz said. The surface of a tapestry is made just from the weft (crosswise yarns) showing, so it has a slightly raised texture, a “bead,” that gives it light reflectivity.
At the end of the online class, Kelley-Munoz had learned the skills, and now wanted to study how to do the art. There are only four or five large tapestry studios in the world, none of them in the United States. After eliminating the one in France as being “too strict, with little room for creativity,” and the Australian studio because it was too far, she settled on the West Dean College of Arts, Design, Craft, and Conservation in Sussex, England.
The West Dean tapestry studio, established in 1976, is commissioned by artists and designers to translate their images into woven tapestry. The studio also takes on heritage tapestry projects, including The Hunt of the Unicorn, a series of seven tapestries based on 15th century originals, commissioned by Historic Scotland and currently at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It took 18 international weavers 13 years to complete, which they did in 2015.
Kelley-Munoz’s program at the tapestry studio at West Dean comprised six units of four days each, over a period of 18 months. Theory classes at West Dean covered how to design for tapestry; scale; dyeing; and finishing. There were seven students in her cohort, six of them from the United Kingdom. Kelley-Munoz traveled back and forth to Sussex, each time extending her visit around the class timeframe. This gave her the chance to explore the countryside, where the scenes inspired her work.
She was the only one in her cohort to have her tapestry accepted into a juried international show, Heallrealf 5. An Old English word meaning “a tapestry hung in a public place,” Heallreaf was started in 2015 by Margaret Jones, and each year since, tapestries of greater dimensions have been accepted. This year’s exhibition, the fifth, will be in three different gallery sites throughout England, starting this summer in Shropshire, moving to London, and ending in Cumbria in April 2025. Kelley-Munoz was excited to learn recently that her tapestry will hang at the entrance to the opening exhibition.
Kelley-Munoz talked about the process of making the exhibit tapestry, an abstract landscape called “South Downs: The Trundle,” which is 23 inches wide, 48 inches high and took her five months to complete. The Trundle is the fort that was at the top of a path she walked many times during her trips to Sussex. The tapestry does not try to capture the whole view but the essence of what she saw. A signpost on the hike is not a realistic portrayal; rather, it is part of her personal response to the landscape—“how it felt walking up to the fort.”
The first step in the studio was to create a mixed-media sketch, using oils, pastels, and watercolors on large paper, depicting elements of lots of different places from her walks in the area. Then she drew increasingly more focused drawings—40 in all—to get the colors and shapes that captured the “feel of the place.” In creating “South Downs: The Trundle,” she used only one section of the sketch. Another section inspired the smaller tapestry, “South Downs: Sanctuary,” which is a finalist for the Kate Derum and Irene Davies biennial International Tapestry Awards. The award, from Australian Tapestry Workshop, is for a “small scale, hand-woven piece reflecting an expressive use of materials, concept, color, and design.”
Kelley-Munoz said that what is gained from paper to tapestry is reflectivity—how light interacts with the colors and textures. The surface interest is greater; a mixture of materials, like silk and textured yarns makes it possible for a plain, chunky line to be raised. Six or seven strands of color interact in one small area, and there are different color effects from one area to another. “You have to trust yourself to believe in a small area, that it will work,” said Kelley-Munoz. And there’s no going back to paint over design mistakes; sometimes she has to pull out a section and redo it.
She said her goal is to push tapestry farther into the mainstream of the arts in the United States, to have it be seen not as a craft but as an art form. The fall exhibit at Fivesparks will further this goal. In addition to showcasing the beautiful, thought-provoking talent of TWiNE, the artists will have talks and demonstrations to expand the viewers’ understanding and appreciation of this unique art form.