Vanessa Filley

I am interested in the energetic threads that orient and connect us, ground us in place and time, yet tether us to our ancestral past and future—the lines that bring us home. In the Delicate Meshes is a project of wayfinding that grapples with processing contemporary questions of living, observing and mulling them, while delving into the practices of female artists of the past whose work was based on craft or spiritualism. It is a conversation across time and a way of communing with the visual insights of women who came before. It is a way to make an impossible photograph, to capture what is not consolidated in a given moment, but exists over time, a process of drawing in while reaching for what is beyond.

Thread and sewing are the foundation of my creative voice, having first picked up a needle to make doll clothes in childhood. Working this way has been a meditation and solace through which I have sought refuge and found understanding and insight, close observation, and voice.  I have long been inspired by quilts, embroidery and garments of the past and how they carry the labor of unrecognized hands, how they tell a story full of hours and days, but also how fiber and craft have been historically lesser recognized as art, as women’s work. 

I am particularly interested in the work of Lenore Tawney, Sophie Tauber Arp, Francoise Grossen and the Gees Bend Quilters. I am also inspired by women whose artwork was grounded in a spiritual practice of divining and communing with energies beyond themselves, like Emma Kunz and Hilma Af Klint.  Each piece in this series is a quilted conversation, a way of taking the disparate questions and feeling of a given moment and mingling them with inspiration from the outside world and the work of those who came before. The synthesis creates a new form, an imagined cosmic map or quilt on paper that coheres these disparate pieces into a grounding, geometrical structure.