Connecting Threads - Visions Museum of Textile Art

Octopus and Crab, detail by Beth Blankenship

How I Wonder Where You Are, detail by Beth Blankenship

Tide Pool (Green Anemone), detail by Beth Blankenship

Connecting Threads

Beth Blankenship

January 16 – April 4, 2021

Website

Artist Q+A

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

Beth Blankenship grew up watching the ocean’s tides, turning over rocks to surprise scurrying shore crabs, and digging in the shoreline for tiny shells to collect and draw. Her home in Steilacoom, Washington, on Puget Sound, was a short walk from the beach and provided ample opportunity for marine inspiration. When she moved to Anchorage, Alaska, in 1981 to work as an ad agency art director, her love of nature’s immense beauty and bounty continued to grow, as did the sense of discovery and wonder she felt on the beaches of her childhood.

Scientists often look at specimens through microscopes to see nature’s details in all their glory. For Beth, “stitch” is her way of examining the world around her. As she puts it, “Thread and beads tell stories that focus on the vulnerability of the natural world and our place in it—how all earthly things are linked by the smallest of threads, and how we can, willfully or unwittingly, alter those often-imperceptible connections.” Her sewing machine is the pencil with which she draws on water-soluble fiber. When the stitching is complete, she bathes the artwork and lets the fiber dissolve away. Beth describes this technique as “an unsettling leap of faith” because it involves letting the foundation wash away to reveal only the connected threads.

For Beth, the unpredictability is “a wonderful risk” that offers the perfect metaphor: one thread is indeed fragile, but many threads, holding together, make the world. “Humankind dominates and destroys this magnificent planet, often blindly, sometimes intentionally. But today it has become inescapably clear—in the era of climate change and COVID-19—that we, too, are hanging by a thread.”

Beth received degrees in fine arts from the University of Alaska and the Burnley School of Professional Art (Seattle Art Institute). She has received many awards, honors and fellowships, including grants from the Alaska State Council on the Arts and the Rasmuson Foundation. Her work has also been featured in numerous publications, including Art Quilt Quarterly, Shuttle Spin and Dyepot, Bead International and Beyond Basketry (Ohio University Press, 2008), and Beadwork Magazine. She was also featured in Creative Alaska: A Ten-Year Retrospective of Support for Alaska Artists, 2004-2013 (University of Alaska Press, 2016).

A member of the Studio Art Quilt Associates (SAQA), Surface Design Association (SDA), Alaska Bead Society, and Creative Art Forum Alaska, Beth also teaches workshops for other artists.

Financial support is provided by the City of San Diego.