Artist:
Johanna Norry
Bio:
I am a fiber artist and teach weaving and textiles at the University of North Georgia in Dahlonega. My work employs traditional techniques of weaving, hand knitting, coiling, embroidery and stitching to create work that often combines comforting materials with discomforting images and ideas. My artistic process is to respond, materially, to my research and culminates with art and installations that are themselves a sort of documentation, an accumulation/manipulation of evidence—incomplete, distorted, a fraction of the truth that remains/is revealed by my material interpretations.
Artist Statement:
This piece combines two forms that I use in my textile work. One is a new material I have been exploring–a cloth of structurally connected fulled wool pom poms, and the other is one I frequently incorporate, a knitted biomorphic tendril form that evokes both the internal body and plant life. I think the work embodies transformation in several ways–primarily in the transformation of materials through the fulling process–what began as skeins of fingering weight yarn first become a networked cloth of interconnected fluffy wool pom poms, that after fulling in hot water were transformed into a new and unfamiliar material of dense wool balls. Making felted pom pom cloth is something I have been exploring ever since seeing something similar in the Icelandic Textile Museum in Blonduos, Iceland. I came back determined to learn how to make it and manipulate it in new ways (the piece in the museum was a floor mat). Transformation, to me, is the very essence of what we do as fiber artists. We create beautiful and provocative objects where there was once just yarn and fiber. It is one of the many metaphors for life provided by our work as artists–just as we knit and weave fiber, we knit and weave people, ideas, and emotions.
Techniques Used: "My Work is Never Done" is created from assembled parts of unfinished knitting projects--sleeves, cardigan fronts and backs, vest halves, and scarves that I knitted over a 15 year period. Composed into this abstracted 'quilt,' I transformed forgotten objects into something greater than the sum of its parts, parts that had been languishing in bins, knitting bags and drawers, awaiting transformation and purpose worthy of the hours invested, though never completed.
Materials: Knitting, assemblage.
Measurements: 72" x 48" x 1"
