Kalamazoo Lively Arts
Prairie Ronde Artist Residency: Melissa Webb
Clip: Season 8 | 6m 27sVideo has Closed Captions
Melissa Webb is a fiber artist!
Melissa Webb is a fiber artist while also including video, performance, and photography into her site-specific installations.
Problems playing video? | Closed Captioning Feedback
Problems playing video? | Closed Captioning Feedback
Kalamazoo Lively Arts is a local public television program presented by WGVU
Kalamazoo Lively Arts
Prairie Ronde Artist Residency: Melissa Webb
Clip: Season 8 | 6m 27sVideo has Closed Captions
Melissa Webb is a fiber artist while also including video, performance, and photography into her site-specific installations.
Problems playing video? | Closed Captioning Feedback
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Learn Moreabout PBS online sponsorship- My name is Melissa Webb, and I am the current Prairie Ronde artist resident in the big Vicksburg mill.
(upbeat music) I work in textile.
My schooling is in fiber, fiber art, and I do large scale installations that respond to specific spaces that their history and the architecture in it with a fondness for decaying properties.
And I integrate textile and video and projection in these spaces.
I'm really interested in juxtaposing textile and its softness with industrial, you know, brick, steel, large space versus the intimate space of the domestic space.
Very sort of masculine, hard, cold versus like a soft, feminine feel to it.
And I work with imagery around nature and nature taking back a space and growing over a space.
And so I imitate, and I mimic that feeling and that aesthetic through my textile work.
My way of working does lend itself to being able to make smaller objects that I situate in the space.
You know, I'll be also doing a lot of filming in the mill, around the mill, in the area and making layered video that I'll then project.
So projection takes up a lot of space.
It engages a lot of space.
The person who is doing this whole project is very connected to that space specifically, historically through his family, and this town, and wants to make it so that it does not fall into the earth and wants to celebrate it.
And it's very similar to how I think about my work where I'm using things that were abandoned, neglected, given very little value and discarded and sort of revivifying them and using them in the work.
So specifically textiles that are from the 30s through the 50s or 60s generally that were crocheted for domestic spaces like doilies and tablecloths and bedspreads and things like that.
So usually cotton, which is another through line 'cause we're talking about cotton rag paper that was made in the mill.
So I document those things and try to figure out who made them.
And sometimes you can't figure out who made them because they're just being sold by a reseller.
But other times you get them from a family, say at an estate sale where someone has passed, and then you actually have a idea about the maker, usually a woman, who I would like to celebrate all of these makers in the same kind of way that they're celebrating this building and the history, and the people that worked in it.
So I do take donations of textiles that were made in the past and that I'm sort of revivifying, and those textiles often resemble, I like to point out how they really do resemble patterns in nature.
So that's the connection there between the domestic and the natural and the industrial is that these, like if you look at a doily, you know, a lot of these patterns are natural like flowers or leaves and things like that were crocheted into these objects and, you know, passed down and passed down.
So I am putting them back in a situation where they, really together they reflect the natural world as far as like a feeling of overgrowth.
When I was in grade school, I knew that I wanted to be an artist, and I was very creative, but everything was very focused on drawing and painting.
And it's funny 'cause I knew that what I wanted to do.
I knew I wanted to be an artist, but I actually hated drawing and painting.
But then I went to Maryland Institute College of Art to study and then got immediately into sculpture, immediately into found objects, then just gravitated right to fiber because the professors in that major were amazing women.
You know, fiber art really lends itself to existing materials.
Like, whereas maybe with clay you would be taking something that has no definition and no identity except, well, clay has a wonderful history, and there's a lot there, but like, you're taking something and making something from scratch.
But you know, with textile a lot of times, you know, there is a lot of, you know, thinking about where something has been and what it means in society.
And so I really gravitated right to that.
I see my way of working as a way of connecting to people.
I like to really engage people for as long as I can.
And that's part of the sort of delivery of the work that I do is that the people will stay for a long time and really engage in the space, and there's a lot to look at.
So I just love seeing people see my work, and then I love when they talk to me about it and tell me what they see.
And that always just feeds into the next thing and just sort of adds to what I feel about the work too.
So it's the interaction with people, but it's also the making, and just the therapeutic nature of just like crocheting or I'm actually learning macrame right now.
And then also just engaging with the space.
There's not really any part of it that I don't like.
I love every part of it, and I kind of feel like it's never done, you know?
It just keeps going.
The ideas keep going.
(upbeat music) - [Announcer] Support for Kalamazoo Lively Arts is provided by the Irving S Gilmore Foundation, helping to build and enrich the cultural life of greater Kalamazoo.
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Kalamazoo Lively Arts is a local public television program presented by WGVU