MARTHA CLIPPINGER
Textile | 2020
Through the support of a Fulbright grant, Martha Clippinger spent 2014 studying the Indigenous textile traditions of Oaxaca, Mexico. There she met weavers Licha González Ruiz and Agustín Contreras López of Teotitlán del Valle, a Zapotec village renowned for its woolen tapetes (Spanish for “rugs”) that are woven on upright pedal looms. The couple agreed to translate one of her designs into wool, and they’ve been working together ever since.
Clippinger created this series of tapetes for her solo exhibition Vibrating Boundaries at the Elizabeth Holden Gallery at Warren Wilson College in Swannanoa, NC in 2021. There she presented her work alongside plates from the college’s first edition copy of Josef Albers' Interaction of Color, a collection of the color exercises Albers developed while teaching at nearby Black Mountain College.
The relativity of color is central to all of Clippinger's work. By creating palette variations of the same woven design, she is able to explore different color combinations while paying homage to Albers and the Variant/Adobe paintings that he began on his sixth trip to Mexico in 1947.
Size
49 x 31 inches
Materials
Hand dyed wool, woven by Agustín Contreras López and Licha González Ruiz
Untitled
MARTHA CLIPPINGER
Textile | 2020
Through the support of a Fulbright grant, Martha Clippinger spent 2014 studying the Indigenous textile traditions of Oaxaca, Mexico. There she met weavers Licha González Ruiz and Agustín Contreras López of Teotitlán del Valle, a Zapotec village renowned for its woolen tapetes (Spanish for “rugs”) that are woven on upright pedal looms. The couple agreed to translate one of her designs into wool, and they’ve been working together ever since.
Clippinger created this series of tapetes for her solo exhibition Vibrating Boundaries at the Elizabeth Holden Gallery at Warren Wilson College in Swannanoa, NC in 2021. There she presented her work alongside plates from the college’s first edition copy of Josef Albers' Interaction of Color, a collection of the color exercises Albers developed while teaching at nearby Black Mountain College.
The relativity of color is central to all of Clippinger's work. By creating palette variations of the same woven design, she is able to explore different color combinations while paying homage to Albers and the Variant/Adobe paintings that he began on his sixth trip to Mexico in 1947.
Size
49 x 31 inches
Materials
Hand dyed wool, woven by Agustín Contreras López and Licha González Ruiz
