Artwork Details
- Title
- Coil Series III – A Celebration
- Artist
- Date
- 1978
- Location
- Dimensions
- 66 1⁄2 x 83 1⁄8 in. (169.0 x 211.0 cm.) diam.
- Credit Line
- Museum purchase
- Mediums Description
- natural hemp and wool
- Classifications
- Object Number
- 1984.163
Artwork Description
I wanted to see how far I could stretch the fiber and still have it say fiber.
--Claire Zeisler
A Celebration is a free standing and free flowing structure that declares fiber art is fine art. The artwork is made from 136 ½ balls of hemp and forty skeins of "jockey red" yarn. Using off-loom knotting and wrapping techniques, it took 597 hours for Claire Zeisler and her assistants to meticulously wrap the threads around galvanized wire.
Zeisler collected art before she created it. She was particularly enthusiastic about modern paintings by German Bauhaus luminaries from the 1920s and Indigenous American and African masks, baskets, and textiles by unnamed artists. In the 1940s, her artistic practice began at the loom, where she made wall hangings inspired in part by the ancient textiles and baskets in her collection. In the 1960s, she abandoned the loom but not threads.
Exhibitions
