Seeing the wiring on the wall
Artist uses her medium to express views on Iraq war
Bombs and missiles have inspired Adrienne Sloane to use a weapon of her own: 30-gauge craft wire. The Watertown resident, who spent a decade creating whimsical hats in colorful yarn, is expressing her views on the war in Iraq by knitting sculptures such as "Body Count" and "Faces of Good and Evil" in wire and linen.
Her studio, inside the Munroe Center of the Arts in Lexington, houses an eclectic mix of messages and mediums. A wire tutu adorned with carpenter nails is titled "The Pain of Growing up Female," and 14 anatomically correct male bodies, made of linen, are tacked horizontally to the wall to make up "Cost of War II. "
The original "Cost of War" won the Director's Award at the Fiberart International show in Pittsburgh last spring and is traveling across the United States through April 2010.
In the far corner of Sloane's studio is a clothesline with 12 knitted hands and feet hanging lifeless. She calls the piece "Dirty Laundry."
"It's our dirty laundry over there" in Iraq, says Sloane, 57. "That's what we're doing; we're killing people."
When asked to discuss the meaning behind some of her work, Sloane answers, "It's not for me to interpret these things; I would prefer that the reader did with it what they wanted."
Of course not everyone absorbs the emotion that Sloane works to evoke. She recalls the time a woman came up to her during an opening where "Cost of War" was being exhibited and said, "Oh, what fun!"
Given the intensity of Sloane's art, one might assume she spent her 20s at antiwar rallies, protesting Vietnam, but that wasn't the case. Sloane admits she wasn't politically active during that time, distracted by her own personal story, her parents' divorce.
At peace with her past, Sloane is focusing on the present. "Our national policy is causing ripple effects in our personal lives and will do so for years to come," says Sloane, who has a teenage son, Asa. While she says she hasn't directly thought about her son and the war, she is reminded of the Vietnam-era lottery draft.
Sloan says she knits to rejoin "the frayed and unraveled places around her" by turning a single strand of yarn into fiber building blocks with form and function, texture and color. In addition to her shows, Sloane has worked with several small advocacy groups running workshops. She has gone to Bolivia with Strategies for International Development, and to Peru with Alma de los Andes (Spirit of the Andes). She also teaches knitting workshops at the Arsenal Center for the Arts in Watertown and the Munroe Center in Lexington, and this fall will add Worcester Center for Crafts.
Sloane picked up her first set of knitting needles at the age of 10, a skill she learned from her mother. For a decade, Sloane made unusual sculptural hats, selling them at high-end juried craft shows. Some of the more prestigious venues, such as the Philadelphia Craft Show run by the Philadelphia Museum of Art, would ring up to $20,000 in sales in a weekend.
In 1999, Sloane's studio, then at the Kendall Center for the Arts in Belmont, burned down and she spent the next several years immersed in arts advocacy, as a founding member of the Arsenal Center for the Arts in Watertown and as a chairwoman for the Watertown Cultural Council, the local grant-awarding arm of the Massachusetts Cultural Council.
Barbara Epstein, board president of the Arsenal Center for the Arts and the program administrator for the Allen B. Slifka program in Intercommunal Coexistence at Brandeis University -- a program devoted to studying peacemaking and conflict resolution efforts -- met Sloane during the inception of the Arsenal Center project. Epstein says she was struck by Sloane's determination. "Once she locked on to an idea, she was not going to let it go," says Epstein. "She was a great ally to have in this project, pressing forward and looking for ways to overcome obstacles."
Sloane is also on the board of Weave a Real Peace, an international organization that works to improve the quality of life of textile artisans in communities in need. Next June she will be a curator of an exhibit of sculptural knitting at the San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles.
Currently, Sloane is preparing for a collaborative exhibit between the Massachusetts Cultural Council and Arsenal Center for the Arts called "In Sights: Photography by Award-Winning Massachusetts Artists." It will open Sept. 11 and run through Nov. 18.
Sloane settled into her Lexington studio in 2004. The bulk of her work is done on a knitting machine with patterns she creates, carefully manipulating the materials into three-dimensional forms.
Sloane's interest in world culture took root in college, where she majored in anthropology at the University of Pittsburgh. After graduation, she spent three years traveling the world.
"This was way before cellphones and e-mail," says Sloane. "It was really like being on the moon."
Sloane says she lived in India for a year on $1,000. For many months, that included a home on a small houseboat in Kashmir. "I was in Nepal at the start of the Bangladesh War," she recalls.
She also lived on the island of Penang in Malaysia for half a year, toting around a Malay dictionary. She prided herself on being able to speak some Indonesian.
After three years of crisscrossing the globe, Sloane moved back to the United States, earning a master's degree in English as a Second Language at the University of Vermont; then settled in Cambridge working with the World Affairs Council in Boston, helping foreign students acclimate to the area.
After her son was born, she began to knit again.
"I've taken [Asa] to a number of places," says Sloane. "I want him to know from a young age that the world is not what he sees outside; it's a huge privilege that he has."
For more on Sloane, visit adriennesloane.com.
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