Fabric Artist Helen Webber Invents in Tapestry
Creativity Elevated When Public Gains Access, Artist Believes
Oct 19, 2009
In the early '70s when Helen Webber's fabric collage tapestries began to attract attention and invigorate wide open, architectural spaces, her massive forms and emblems of the natural world would come to represent an amalgam of influence. These pieces not only related to her commissioned tapestries embodying bold humanistic visions, but also her more personal expressions in brayer paintings, drawings, and watercolors.
Webber's tapestries, her life's work, summoned the interest of architects and designers alike. They began to commission site-specific pieces for designed environments that would house Webber's pastiches of fabrics, segmented to mimic brush strokes and arranged and edged with varied thicknesses of yarn: meringue textures, rough burlaps, silky magentas and ecstatic cotton blues fashioned into large-scale pieces with names like Lake of the Moon, Earth Songs, or the suite of 10 expressive human figures called Spirit of the Child that continues to inform Webber's myriad and current art projects.
One of her most dramatic commissions for the Pittsburg California Civic Center in close collaboration with California architect, Fani Hansen, evolved into one of the largest works to date. Here the history of the city was celebrated as well as the hopes and ambitions of this multi-ethnic community located in San Francisco's Bay Area. The work was translated into eight 18' tapestries hanging throughout the building's multi-leveled atriums, and a 40' tall painted mural on a glass elevator wall. Webber's poetry takes its integrated place in the tapestries.
Commissioned Murals
"People loved the feeling of fabric on cement walls. It captured them," Webber recollects of her work hung in industrial spaces. During this highly productive period in the 70s in San Francisco it was typical for 30 young artisans and craftspeople at a time to work at building her tapestries.
In particular, fiber art commissions from Carnival Cruise Lines and Holland America, meant Webber's fabrics would light up and predispose large, seafaring spaces with color and highly imagined (often floating, etheric and Marc Chagall-influenced) figurative forms.
The job also served as the impetus for more broadly interpreted design work and major commissioned murals in materials including but not limited to: stained glass, sculpted clay murals, painted metal, and collaged wood murals.
Self-described as a figurative Expressionist, Webber also identifies herself as a practitioner in the decorative tradition, or as an artist emanating from a long and proud primitive custom where women decorated pottery and wove clothing and rugs.
Women's Custom
Eventually Webber moved from New York to California where her art flourished. As a single mother of three it was imperative that Webber make a living. "I was determined to make it in some form of creative expression," she offers, "Whether it was designing bedding, Italian ceramics, or illustrating children's books, I was completely un-snobby; I have always felt that the wall between art and design was an elitist construction."
A Calling
Webber believes that, as an artist commissioned to create for public spaces, she is obliged to strike a balance between her own aesthetic sensibility and artistic choices that may invite viewer appreciation, whether through color, line, texture, ideas, abstracted image, or highly expressed human forms. The artistic calling is to provoke and connect viewers to a sense of beauty, interest, or perhaps less overtly, curiosity and wonder.
Webber's series of the earlier-referenced 10 inter-related tapestries, Spirit of the Child, is a case in point. Referred to by Webber as a "love project," it was inspired purely by a determination to use her art as a way to further an important cause. The set of tapestries is an array of textiles composed in some instances into ascending figures and multicolored faces with transcendent and strong messages written by her husband Jim Petersen: "We shall soar," "Catch a dreamer, catch the dream," and "The earth is my mother, she whispers my name in the wind." Rendered to celebrate The 10 Rights of the Child as determined by the United Nations, Webbers explains, these large -scale 5' x 7' tapestries where first exhibited in Manhattan's Burlington building in the 1980s
Spirit of the Child continues today as a springboard for Webber's artwork integrating aspects of community youth activism, in particular a new Rights of the Child enterprise called New Earthsong productions as part of a traveling exhibition designed to underscore these rights as well as bring awareness of human rights violations against children.
Children aren't the only benefactors of Webber's heart and art. Woman and their emotional terrain are central themes and inspiration for work. The film created by Webber, "Women Songs" is a compendium of Webber's pieces, a 12-foot horizontal figure of a fecund, beautiful-bellied woman rendered in tapestry, a triptych painting, and multiple drawings with water colors (meandering, fluid lines running up and around surfaces, leading viewers to doleful faces, abundant forms, luscious thighs, soulful bodies dipped into repose and thoughtfulness, babies in utero).
In 1976, when Webber attended the Aspen Design conference, she was also moved to make a difference for women. Though the conference attracted 50 percent of women in the audience, a mere two or three women out of 30 were on the agenda as speakers. "Out of that outrage I founded 'Women in Design'," she notes. A non-profit that stayed in existence for 10 years, its mission was to encourage recognition of women's work in the design field.
These many decades after Aspen, Webber is still driven to create and renew: her Tell It Like It Is credo serves to push the boundaries and guide the energy informing her artistic and life choices.
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