Barbara Matthews

Manchester, WA

Barbara Matthews found silk dyeing and loved the wicking of dye on silk giving vivid and transparent qualities. I developed a technique to adhere dyed silk to acrylic glass allowing me to create three-dimensional art pieces that stand upright to take advantage of the light.

Strength and fragility rise as underlying forces that inspire my art. The simple beauty of the subject plays a dominant role, as does color and contrast of textures.

In 2009, I completed the University of Washington Fiber Arts Certificate Program to launch into an art profession. I have exhibited in 25 or more juried group shows and am a juried member of the NW Designer CraftArtists, a regional collective of artists, and the Art Cloth Network, a group of North American fiber artists.

Barbara Matthews Fire Flower Story

 Fire Flower 2

 

 

Escaping the NW rain, we packed the care in late fall and travelled a slow, leisurely trip down the coast into California, eventually ending in Tuscon, AZ for an extended three month stay. We encountered or left in our wake one climate disaster after another — first the “bomb cyclone” along the Oregon coast, a small earthquake in Los Gatos, CA and of course the fires in Monterrey and the ultimate in the Palisades that we watched in shock long after we had passed through.

Fire Flower 1

With fire imprinted in my mind, I strove to capture not the destruction, but the captivating beauty of fire, a remarkable dichotomy. I brought a limited cache of art supplies, mostly silk that I had hand dyed prior and some precut eco acrylic pieces. Using a new collage method, my task was to prefect the adhering of the silk to the acrylic while attempting to capture an abstraction of fire.