Skyline
Showing from April 30 - July 5, 2022
Jessie Bloom is a New Jersey-based artist who draws on atmosphere, landscape, light and color as the inspiration for her woven paintings. In her work, luminous dimension is created by layering yarns that merge and blend with hand painted fields of color.
The artwork becomes a woven landscape that is abstracted and simplified down to its most essential elements of line, form and color. This body of work engages with the place of the horizon or skyline as its foundation. This transient location can feel vast and ever-changing. It’s the place where earth meets sky or where air meets sea. It is the site of infinite interactions between air, light, earth and water. There is something about the infinity of an endless seascape, a cloud-laden horizon or a starry sky that feels majestic. These places form the subject matter explored in the work.
Meet the Artist
Jessie Bloom
Bloom received her Bachelor of Science in Fiber Science & Apparel Design from Cornell University and has studied Sculptural Fibers at Syracuse University.
Jessie Bloom first discovered textile art in a high school Fibers class taught by Adirenne Butvinik. She went on to study Fiber Science & Apparel Design at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. While at Cornell, Bloom focused her major in Apparel Design, but maintained a love and fascination for the art of textiles.
During her time at Cornell, Bloom expanded her knowledge of textiles and surface design. While working as a Fiber’s studio assistant at Peters Valley Craft center in 2007, Bloom learned more in depth hand dyeing techniques from artists such as Jean Cacicedo, Sissi Siska, and Kerr Grabowski. This experience really opened up a whole new world of textile art. The craft of fabric dyeing felt like a mix of art and alchemy that could be explored in endless ways. Bloom began exploring weaving several years later and has recently focused on hand weaving and hand dyeing in her woven artwork.
Artist Statement
“These woven panels are built yarn by yarn on a vintage floor loom built in 1977. Created at the intersection of fine art and contemporary woven craft, they draw on histories of pointillism, atmospheric landscape, color field painting and textile art. The tactile surface becomes the focus as colors cross and blend. Intersecting yarns form points of color that vibrate against each other and enhance the intensity of their neighbors. From a distance the viewer’s eye blends individual colors, but up close the yarns give up their detail and offer a different experience of the piece.
Hand weaving is a slow and methodical process. Before any weaving starts, the yarns are wound into groups of the same length. These groups are then hand painted with dye to form the foundation of the vertical color variations in each piece. Yarns are carefully counted and threaded onto the loom forming the warp or vertical yarns. During the weaving process order is built with each interwoven end. The structure of the woven grid organizes and balances hand-painted fields of color formed by gradients painted into the warp and weft. There is a great duality in the process. Order versus chaos, but less like chaos and more like serendipity. Hand dyeing helps to cultivate chance outcomes. Weaving is such a planned craft by nature and hand dyeing helps to bring balance. It allows the process to feel more free and uncontrolled, so that when the final cloth is unrolled from the loom, there is always something new to be discovered.”
—Jessie Bloom