Sarah Swett

A tapestry artist tells stories, builds images and captures moments in time, according to Sarah Swett, our featured artist. Her vivid, fun tapestries convey picnics, trips to the beach, books, wine, friends … everyday events.
		Jane's Picnic II (2000)

Swett at work

TCR: How did you first become interested in and get involved in working in your medium, and how did your work evolve from where it started to the work you create today?

SS: My weaving teacher bribed me to take my first tapestry class. Though I had been a textiles person since I was very young — learning to knit when I was 7 or 8 — it was not until I was at the University of Idaho in the late 1980s, taking physics, two chemistry classes, calculus and drawing, that I decided to try introductory weaving.

Although I was supposed to be getting a degree in chemistry, within weeks I had dropped calculus, fallen passionately in love with weaving, and spent every spare moment on the third floor of the home economics building — an enormous room with glowing oak floors and giant windows and filled, end to end, with looms. I wove miles of cloth that first semester.

Miss Havisham's Gardener (2005)

I was utterly uninterested in tapestry, however, until my teacher urged me to take a workshop that was coming to town. "No thanks," I said, but she continued to encourage and finally offered me extra credit — always welcome. Little did I know that within a few months I would be weaving tapestry full time.

As a storyteller, my attraction to tapestry was primarily as a medium with which I could combine narrative, image and yarn. Pencils are wonderful, as is paint, but yarn, with its rich, saturated colors, is unmatched, I think, for depth and intensity — the ability to almost sink into an image or series of colors. With no glass or hard surface between the viewer and the color, there is an increased intimacy between the two, something that is more difficult with a hard or reflective surface.

My work is often described as painterly, and I suppose that the greatest evolution in it has been an increasing focus on working within the grid prescribed by warp and weft, in celebrating what it, and only it, can do. To that end, my work has become simpler, over the years. The images more focused as I attempt to work with, rather than to defy, that grid.

Indigo Bath (2003)

As much of my tapestry yarn is hand spun, (and all is hand dyed with natural dyes), I am deeply enamored with the yarn itself. In order to celebrate both the yarn and the structure, I wove, at one point, a series of tapestries in which the warp yarn is visible — the "Jane's Picnic" series and "Indigo Bath" among others. Though most of my work is more traditionally weft faced, I find it refreshing, now and then, to "weave out over nothing" and see what happens.

In the past year, in an effort to better understand the relationship between image and that essential underlying grid, I have been teaching myself to paint (using egg tempera which is about as tapestry-esque as paint can get). My hope is that, in freeing myself, temporarily, from the grid, I will be able to gain a better understanding of the possibilities and potential of yarn and how it differs from paint. To that end, I have even been using needlepoint, which has, indeed, a far more rigid, grid-like structure than tapestry, as an experimental vehicle for "total grid immersion."

As for where I am going? Who knows? That, of course, is the joy. One warps the loom, starts to weave at the bottom and works ones way to the top, never knowing quite how the images and colors and shapes will evolve until that last weft thread is in place.

Back to Front (2000)

TCR: How have you pursued your career? Can you provide a brief timeline of when you got started, and how your career has evolved?

SS: Like the tapestry itself, my career found me. As I wrote above, since I began to weave tapestry in the late 1980s, I have kept my fingers constantly in my warp, weaving and drawing and weaving and drawing and weaving and spinning and dyeing and weaving some more.

When someone asked me to teach a workshop, it led to another and soon I was teaching several times a year. I wrote to a magazine (Spin Off, from Interweave Press) asking for more tapestry articles and they said, "write one," which led to shows and more teaching and more articles, to a profile in the book “Knitting in America” to lectures and still more invitations to teach. In this I have been fortunate.

The River Wyrd (2004)

Over the past few years, however, I have slowly decreased my teaching load, having come to terms with my dislike of travel and the enormous pleasure that I find in uninterrupted hours, days, weeks, months in my studio. While I continue to give lectures, I now do not teach at all.

Last October (2005), however my book, “Kids Weaving” (Stewart, Tabori and Chang) was released, and I hope that it will go out into the world and do some teaching for me. It is a lovely book and I am proud of it … pleased that its projects and clear instructions are available to weavers of all ages. Recently it received a starred review from the School Library Journal.

TCR: Who is the market for your work? What is your strategy for reaching that market? Where can people buy your work?

SS: I do not actively market my work. Tapestry, particularly detailed, narrative pictorial tapestry like mine, being the labor-intensive process that it is, does not allow for production on a massive scale. Seeking out markets, then, has always seemed unnecessary since once my work began to be known, people came to me. While I have had work in shows across the country and around the world, it tends to be individuals who find me to purchase it.

Red Nuns (2005)

TCR: Where does the bulk of your business come from…is it wholesale shows? Direct to gallery sales? High-end retail shows? Commissions? How do you make your living from this art?

SS: Most of my work is sold to individuals — people have come to me. I do not attend wholesale shows, nor do I sell directly to galleries.

There was a period when I accepted commissions. All of them turned out well both for the clients and myself, and I am proud of those tapestries, but I no longer accept commissions. Given the nature of tapestry I find that there is only time in this life for so much and, at the moment, rather than attempting to second guess someone else's ideas I'm focusing on the ones with which I seem, at the moment, to be overflowing.

This has not been a problem in terms of sales — they continue to be slow but steady.

TCR: Have there been major turning points in your career? If so describe what they were and how they affected your craft and your success.

SS: The biggest turning point came in the last few years while I was writing “Kids Weaving” and shortly afterward, as I began to explore other media along with tapestry. So far, this shift has not had any affect on my show or speaking schedule, though what the future will bring, who knows?

Change can be fascinating, compelling, challenging, terrifying.

On the other hand, since I am deeply interested in the direction that my work is going, I am enticed by what is yet to come. I can hardly wait to get up every morning to see what is going to happen that day, it can only be good, even if, sometimes hard.

TCR: Do you see any business challenges specific to artists who work in your field? How have you overcome these?

SS: Tapestry walks a fine and interesting line between art and craft. This is not, in general, something about which I worry too much, but I know that for some weavers it is an enormous challenge — how not to be seen as a creator of mass produced "tapestry fabric" with which one might upholster a chair, for instance. How, indeed, does one market something so labor intensive, so un-reproduceable that historically it was affordable only to Royalty?

The Hut on the Rock, the Sea (2004)

Personally I find it impossible, and deeply undesirable, to draw any such line in my own work, as I like to move freely between knitting, spinning, dyeing, needlepoint, tapestry and painting. Though I rarely overlap them (Mixed media does not, in general interest me, for I love the clarity offered by each on its own.), I relish having the opportunity to use whichever medium best suits a particular idea.

TCR: What has been the most difficult thing you have encountered in your work?

SS: The time/money factor. Tapestry is, by its very nature, expensive. I would wish that it were otherwise, that my work could be affordable for all, but it is not. Keeping it reasonably priced, so that it is sellable and yet I can afford to continue to work, is a tricky balance.

TCR: What, in terms of business insight, have you learned to do or not to do over the years?

SS: The most important thing has always been to keep working. Nothing is more discouraging than to see the same pieces over and over because an artist is spending too much time marketing, and not enough time actually making and evolving. How can one sell work that does not exist?

In addition, of course, it is essential to get things done on time (if there is a timeline), to send appropriate paperwork to galleries, to be reliable, to do what you say you will do.

The worst thing I have done is tried to weave for a market. The work, almost instantly, becomes stale and colorless if I am producing it to please some theoretical collector, rather than myself. I have found that it simply does not sell.

TCR: How has the Internet affected your business?

Swett at work

SS: My Web site has been a wonderful vehicle for exposure and even some sales, but generally collectors like to see the work in person before they buy. Certainly it is easier (and cheaper) than sending slides out all the time if someone is curious.

It is, of course, how you found me, and what could be more delightful than that?

TCR: What is the next step for you?

SS: Who knows? I do expect to keep making things — beautiful things, useful things, compelling things, for, no matter what happens, I am, and always have been, a person who creates. As I write in my artist statement: when I was 7 I turned scraps of yarn into magic carpets. I am still at it.

TCR: What is your show schedule…if you have one…and where is your work available and through whom?

SS: During October I will have a number of pieces in The Bank Left Gallery in Palouse, Washington.

And there is always e-mail and the Web site.

TCR: If you would like, please share your personal situation: married, kids, etc?

SS: I am married and have one son.

Sarah Swett
Moscow, Idaho
swett@moscow.com
www.sarah-swett.com

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