Moran mends at Center Gallery
By Allison Stupka
Sun contributor
For many years now, to accompany the excitement of the Glen Arbor Art Center’s annual Plein Air paint out weekend, Center Gallery Lake Street Studios has featured an artist who works in a medium other than paint. This year we are featuring fiber artist Susan Moran, and hosting a stitching event called a “Mend In.”
Moran, who hails from Ann Arbor, uses the processes of silkscreen, dyeing and resist dyeing, drawing, collage and embroidery to create her works of art.
She holds an MFA in Textiles from the University of Michigan and recently retired from being a faculty member at the Center for Creative Studies in Detroit. Along with being an artist, she is a student of traditional methods of fabric design and creates her own work using these techniques. Moran is drawn to nature for inspiration, as well as to man-made objects and the relationships between the two. She takes a daily walk, often gathering images from what she sees, and finds inspiration while traveling.
In a recent piece Moran was inspired by Suzanis, which are Central Asian embroidered textiles laid out in an orderly fashion of medallion shapes and surrounded by a vine motif. In that body of work, an observer might see images of flowers in various states, of nuts and images of manhole covers.
One method Moran uses more and more is stitching. On one project, she wanted to incorporate a collection of linens that had belonged to her mother’s aunt and found herself thinking of how her mother did a lot of darning and patching, and making blankets, and how stitching is a centering process.
Mending is a method of making something useful again. In our current time of living with a plethora of choices, it’s often easier to dispose of something than repair it. Stitching, for many, is relaxing and a rediscovery of mending has been taken up by people interested in creativity, environmental sustainability, meditative practice and fun. For more on this subject google “Visible Mending” or “Kate Sekules” author of “Mend! A Refashioning Manual and Manifesto.”
If you are curious about mending, join us at Center Gallery, rain or shine, on Thursday, Aug. 8 at 2 p.m. Bring along a project or just yourself and chat with a knowledgeable fiber artist and mending aficionados and perhaps engage in the process!
Moran’s art will be shown Aug. 2-8 and we will hold a reception for her on Friday evening, Aug. 2 from 6-8 p.m. She will also be one of the menders at our “Mend In.”
Center Gallery is located in the Lake Street Studios, 6023 S. Lake Street, Glen Arbor, Michigan 49636. We are open daily, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.
