Woonderful fiber art sculptures
Fiber artworks created by artist Janis Ledwell-Hunt of Unfettered Co. demonstrate how interrelated everything in the world is. She describes herself as a “maker of tangled things” and creates objects that bring together apparently irrelevant elements using macramé, crochet, as well as other textile art methods. A bird’s thoracic cavity opens to expose coral and much more mushrooms, and a set of human lungs is made up of different types of mushrooms. The intricate designs of the items are stunning, and the associations and ideas they evoke are assumed.
Ledwell-Hunt draws inspiration for her paintings from the cycle of life. She informs My Contemporary Met that she is “motivated (or perhaps more shocked) by the ways in which corpses, guts, and corpses can be reinterpreted as surfaces teeming with non-human life.” I find solace in the idea that, when reconsidered as disintegration, disease and death are ways of nurturing other types of life or living.
Ledwell-Hunt adores a paragraph from Virginia Woolf’s article “On Being Ill” so much now that she claims it has “likely injected itself into my Genes at this moment.” It makes it easier to understand the essence of her artistic approach. “[W]e stop to be warriors in the military of the decent; we turn defectors,” says Woolf. They advance in a combat. We are careless and uninterested, and possibly for the first time in years, we can glance around and up—for instance, at the sky—as we float with the twigs in the river and tumble with the dead leaves on the grass. Ledwell-Hunt asks, “When organs empty out, what can bloom in those rifts?” as a result of this. I’m attempting to create a feeling of post-human possibilities through the use of fiber.
Ledwell-art Hunt’s is informed by serious issues, but she encourages the audience to draw alternative conclusions. “I hope that these pieces will leave viewers feeling upbeat. But in all honesty, it’s the best honor I can think if they even take a moment to consider them.
In her fabric artworks, fiber designer Janis Ledwell-Hunt investigates the life cycle and how intertwined everything is.
