Lynn Bennett-Carpenter: Handwoven Drawings
February 10 - March 30, 2024
Lynn Bennett-Carpenter
Handwoven Drawings
February 10 - March 30, 2024
Opening Reception: Saturday, February 10, 5-7 pm
(Cass Corridor Location)
Matéria Gallery is pleased to present Handwoven Drawings, a solo exhibition of new works by fiber artist Lynn Bennett-Carpenter.
Bennett-Carpenter’s Handwoven Drawings are created through an innovative method the artist has developed that unifies drawing and weaving. In these works, she draws on the surface of soft wood, cuts the wood into thin strips, and then weaves the painted wooden slats back together on a floor loom. A new, integrated composition emerges.
Bennett-Carpenter’s compositions function as Rorschach-esque paracosms referencing disintegration, abandonment, restoration, and organic growth. Unlike an abstract Rorschach ink blot, these images are drawn from specific trees that can be located on a map.
For the artist, trees are true to their time and place, have a long history, and are powerful players in people’s physical and psychological survival. Her focus on the deep significance of trees and direct connection to human wellbeing echoes in a particularly relevant way in our present planetary predicament.
Lynn Bennett-Carpenter’s Handwoven Drawings opens at Matéria’s Cass Corridor location on Saturday, February 10, with a reception with the artist from 5-7 pm, and it is on view through March 30.
LYNN BENNETT-CARPENTER
Marcelyn (Lynn) Bennett-Carpenter is an interdisciplinary fiber artist and educator. Bennett-Carpenter earned a Masters of Fine Arts (MFA) in Fiber from Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2003. She served as the Artist-in-Residence of the Kingswood Weaving Studio at Cranbrook in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan (2003-2023). The Kingswood Weaving Studio is the largest, most beautiful hand-weaving studio in North America with its 60 floor looms. Bennett-Carpenter also taught at Haystack Mountain School of Craft in Maine (2023), Penland School of Craft in North Carolina, attended the Open Residency at Haystack (2018) and was a recent Good Hart Artist-in-Residence (2022). Lynn is also co-founder of the Namtenga Soundo Babisi Studio, an active weaving co-operative in Burkina Faso, West Africa that was established in 2007.
Bennett-Carpenter maintains an active practice through her studio in Pontiac, Michigan, and has exhibited extensively throughout North America including the solo exhibition Singluars at the Crooked Tree Art Center in Petoskey, Michigan; Landscapes Real and Imagined at Site: Brooklyn, New York; Extreme Fibers: Icons and the New Edge at Muskegon Art Museum; and The Social Fabric at Textile Society of America, in Vancouver, British Columbia. Her work is part of several private and public collections, including the Applebaum Family Foundation in Birmingham, Michigan.