Textile Landscapes: Maris Van Vlack’s Artistic Journey Through Time and Space
Maris Van Vlack, a Massachusetts-based fiber artist, combines textile and painting practices in her large-scale tapestries that investigate landscapes from the past. Her hand-woven work is inspired by architectural ruins, the New England landscape, and old family photographs, exploring how architectural structures retain the memory of events that occurred within that space.
Through the process of hand-weaving fabric panels and then piecing them together to create large tactile surfaces, these pieces reflect the narratives which shaped the landscapes that they depict.
A 2023 graduate from the Rhode Island School of Design, Van Vlack uses her background in textiles and drawing to develop a process that combines traditional weaving techniques with painting and drawing practices.
She begins each piece by making a to-scale painting of the composition, which then gets translated into a diagram that she follows when hand-weaving the tapestry on a floor loom. She uses a variety of fibers, from delicate threads to industrial climbing rope, to weave panels of fabric, creating a woven version of the original painting. After the weaving comes off of the loom it is seamed together to form one large tactile surface. She then layers the fabric with paint, embroidery, and knitting, cutting away some areas of the fabric and layering other areas with digital jacquard weaving and knitting that are collaged into the original surface. Van Vlack views this process of layering new material over her weaving as a way to connect the materials she uses to her architectural subject matter, imitating how a building gets obscured and buried with time, but through this process of decay new images are allowed to appear.
By using architectural forms as her subject matter, Van Vlack investigates a building’s ability to reflect the history of the people who lived there through the deterioration of the architecture throughout time. Much of her work is inspired by the old stone and brick ruins found in the New England landscape, where she grew up. She is drawn to these buildings because of their historical connection to the textile industry, as well as the individual stories each space tells about the people who once lived there. She also draws imagery from architecture found in family photographs taken in Europe, where her relatives once lived.
By using these accessible fragments from the past as inspiration, she builds new images out of mysterious and inaccessible memories of the past into the present using the immediacy of woven material. She uses distance and perspective to play with the idea of traveling into the past, accessing memories of past versions of the place.
Van Vlack’s work was recently shown in “Time Warp” at Superhouse, her first New York solo exhibition. The nine tapestries shown use a variety of weaving and knitting techniques to create colorful and mysterious architectural landscapes. This show includes Van Vlack’s first explorations into three-dimensional hanging pieces, with the panels of fabric hanging in space and forming walls which mimic the forms depicted in the works. The show is on view through October 19th.
Artist Website: marisvanvlack.com
Instagram: @marisvanvlack
Gallery Website: superhouse.us
Instagram: @super___house