Digital Improvisations

Digital Improvisations: The Geometric Shibori Textile Designs of Ana Lisa Hedstrom

When:  Fri., Sept. 12 – Sun., Nov. 2, 2008
Where: Duncan Gallery
Conversation with the Artist: Fri., Sept. 12, 4:00 pm

Piecing fabric together is like composing. There is a musical quality to how patterns and color come together and how my hands go over the cut pieces arranging, turning, observing, going back to a refrain. It is the process, rather than the finished piece that brings me back to the studio.
                                                                           -  Ana Lisa Hedstrom


Patterned textiles, quirky geometries and unpredictable asymmetries are qualities evident in the discriminating and individualistic clothing designs of Ana Lisa Hedstrom. With a longstanding reputation as one of the leading creative forces in the exploration of arashi shibori and other surface design processes built upon years of experimentation with those techniques, Hedstrom’s newer work remains resolutely abstract with a sense of the continual flow and flux of natural systems and processes.

Stepping into the digital world and the seemingly unlimited possibilities for designing with textile inkjet printing, Ana Lisa Hedstrom’s imaginative and daringly austere wall panels continue to explore new ways of working on fabric surfaces. The clothing examples Hedstrom has designed, not only respond to the movements and postures and to the shapes of the wearers themselves, but also become the vehicle in which they reveal their individual spirit apart from that of the artist. This symbiotic connection between textiles and the body is often taken for granted; yet it is here that the cultural and symbolic value of patterned textiles finds its fullest expression.

Ana Lisa Hedstrom’s mastery of the traditional Japanese processes, her contemporary adaptations of those processes, and her artistry led to her designation in 2003 as an American Craft Council Fellow, an award signifying an outstanding artist. Hedstrom’s art is in the collections of the Cooper Hewitt Museum of Design of the Smithsonian; the Museum of Art and Design in New York; the M.H. deYoung Museum in San Francisco; the Oakland Museum, in Oakland; Takeda Kahei Shoten in Arimatsu, Japan; and the Aichi Shibori Archive in Nogoya, Japan.

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