Windgate-Lamar Fellowship
2023
My grandma, a talented quilter, taught me how to cut, pattern, and sew my own blankets and clothing at a young age. Over the next two decades, the knowledge she passed on has come to define my practice and love for fiber. My work focuses on retaining this cycle of knowledge, encouraging it to move forward, and working to ensure the longevity of fibercraft. In my work, I explore traditional weaving and challenge established boundaries by weaving linen to create an open mesh-like material. This allows for additional woven threads to be shaped into silhouettes. This visual language, of woven and intersected linen, allows for the inlaid subjects to have a low opacity eluding to traces of their presence. These traces refer to the main question driving my work: where does our practice go when we are gone? Linen is able to decompose completely, which when contrasted with a longer-lasting material like metal, instigates questions of longevity. Longevity not only in the literal sense of the material but also in the longevity of its practices over generations. The advent of industrialization saw the removal of the human hand from these processes, relegating them to domestic or industrial applications. A cheap, mass production of goods has eliminated the need for hand-made ones while disrupting countless cycles of generational knowledge. This current work attempts to make hand work more precious, give attention to craft knowledge, and promote fibers from its place as a domestic medium.
Ashley Bohne (she/her) is a fourth-year BFA candidate with a dual focus on Fiber and Jewelry and Metalsmithing studying at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee. She works primarily with Fiber and Metal and uses the two materials and their differences to inform much of her work. Learning how to sew from her grandma, her love for fiber and interest in female-dominated craft began at a young age. She works with traditional ways of making (weaving, metal fabrication, sewing, etc.) as a way to connect with the work and challenge the boundaries of traditional making sets. Her work talks about the human experience focusing specifically on women and their impact on art and craft.