hanging by a thread
... the fiber art of Polly Matsumoto and Michelle Sales
BY NANCY STETSON nstetson@florida-weekly.com
"There aren't any rules," fiber artist Polly Matsumoto declares.

COURTESY PHOTOS Above, a close-up of Polly Matsumoto's "Glass Handles;" upper right, Michelle Sales "Accumulations 1," both at The Alliance for the Arts.

"You can do whatever you want. It's art. You can make art out of broken pottery.

"Look at Rauschenberg. Look at the goat," she says, referring to his famous freestanding combine, "Monogram," in which he corseted an angora goat with a car tire.

Neither Matsumoto nor Michelle Sales incorporate taxidermied goats in their art in "Hanging by a Thread," their twoperson exhibit at the Alliance for the Arts, but plenty of other found objects find a second home in their work.

Matsumoto's pieces include children's alphabet blocks, bobbins of varied colored thread, Chinese tins and soaps, carpet fiber samples, orange Bakelite dominoes and antique blue and yellow light bulbs.

"Yellow and Blue Bulbs" is an older piece that once appeared in "Voltwerks: The Fine Art of Electricity," at Edison College.

PHOTO CREDIT Above, Matsumoto's "Yellow and Blue Bulbs" and below, Sales' "Identity 6" both on exhibit at The Alliance for the Arts.

"I found the old light bulbs in Arcadia, in an antiques store," Matsumoto says. "They must have thought I was the craziest person to buy a bucket of old light bulbs. It's stuff that no one would want. [But when I see it,] I know I can do something with it eventually. I buy it thinking, 'I can use that, in the future.'"

"Yellow and Blue Bulbs" is an abstract, with a piece of weaving attached to a painted canvas. Shelves - one on top and one on the bottom of the canvas - are lined with yellow and blue light bulbs.

The weaving's "just an abstract weaving," Matsumoto says, but it looks like the head of a swan or another large bird. The curves of the light bulbs echo the beautiful curve of the bird's head, and splotches of yellow, blue, and some red recall sunspots, or the afterimage of flash photography.

Her "Fireworks" places 46 carpet fiber samples, each one looking like exploding fireworks, on a red, white and blue rag rug. Hanging from the bottom of the piece are 29 other carpet fiber samples, still bundled up, like fireworks waiting to be lit. Fort Myers artist Sherry Rohl had given her the samples, she says, and the white cylinder tubes were electrical gizmos she found in her attic.

"We bought an old house, 100 and some years old. They were in the attic in a box from when they had changed the electrical wiring," she says. "They have something to do with electricity, I don't know what. I washed them, bleached them, and they came out really nice."

Matsumoto doesn't always know what she's going to do with objects when she purchases them, but trusts she'll find a use for them in a future work.

"The color of things speak to me, and the texture," she says. "It's fun to take these old things and use them. It's recycling, making something nice, rather than having them in a dusty antique store."

Her piece, "Glass Handles," was recently bought by someone who attended the Alliance exhibit. It's an intricately woven piece attached to a frame by string and includes crystals from a chandelier, a dozen silver handled paintbrushes, buttons, buckles, rickrack, and gossamer fabric. On the top of the frame are two glass doorknobs; on either side, a glass handle.

"I didn't do that on a loom, it was done on a stretcher," she says. "Some friends of ours went to the Amazon, and brought back this handmade yarn. The Indians made it out of some kind of natural fiber. She had to trade one of her husband's shirts for it. A big ball of yarn. Must have taken them forever to make it. One friend gave me the old chandelier pieces. The handles came on an antique cabinet we bought. Can't remember where I got those doorknobs. I always liked glass doorknobs."

 

Another friend moved into a house and found a five-gallon bucket of buttons and gave them to Matsumoto.

"I still have half a bucketful," she says. "When I die, there will probably be a quarter left. You can do a lot of interesting things with buttons. Even ugly buttons, the big plastic ones."

While many of Matsumoto's works are mixed media - weavings on painted canvas with found objects on top or bottom of the piece, she does have two large, fiber wall hangings. "Cardinal" has a flash of scarlet, as if a cardinal is hiding in foliage. "Clouds," is a wildly textured, subtly colored, double corduroy weave with felted balls.

Matsumoto began weaving in the '60s or '70s, she says. Her sister in-law, a weaver, was going back to Japan with her husband, and Matsumoto kept her loom for her for a year.

"I thought, 'I have this big thing, I might as well use it,'" Matsumoto says. So she went to a weaving guild and learned the basics.

After making her weavings, she began gluing them on canvas, then painting the canvas to continue the pattern.

 

"There's always this thing, that weaving's not considered as much an art as a craft, so putting in on the canvas gave it more presence, a step up from hanging it on a rod," she says. "And once I mounted it on the canvas and saw the space around it, I thought, 'Hmmmm.' One thing leads to another."

One thing also led to another for fiber artist Michelle Sales, a native Chicagoan whose work is also featured in the show alongside Matsumoto's.

She'd been making art her whole life, but didn't go to art school until she received a scholarship in her 40's to Chicago's prestigious School of the Art Institute.

"Prior to that, I was an x-ray technician when I first got out of college," she says. "I had to get a job. My parents said, 'You're never going to make it as an artist.' It was the most non-creative thing I ever could've done."

Then she went to beauty school. After she became a hairstylist, she began taking art courses at night.

"Hair dressing, it's just another form, another medium," Sales says.

She painted into her 20s, then became interested in collage and mixed media. Finally, she moved into sculpture.

Most of her works on display at the Alliance are headless torsos and uninhabited dresses. Sales uses a synthetic material called Tyvek that is often used to insulate buildings, to get textures that look like alligator or iguana skin.

"It's an industrial material used in building and also used in medical outfits that people wear in hospitals, to prevent chemicals from penetrating the skin," Sales says. "It's synthetic, not woven. It's spun bonded, which means it's a process where they extrude the plastic fibers out. They fall out, then they're all pressed together."

She found that if she heated the material, it bubbles up, creating an unusual texture. Sales dyes the material, then heats it, which also creates veins. It's a toxic process, so Sales installed a strong, restaurant ventilation fan in her studio ceiling and wears an airline respirator while working.

"It's extremely safe," she says. "When the pieces are finished, they're no longer toxic."

The result is highly textured material that looks like reptilian skin with black webbing reminiscent of veins or spiderwebs.

"The material was a totally serendipitous thing," Sales says. "I was fooling around. I wanted a material that was totally different, I wanted to make something that was truly my own. I was burning things in my studio one day.

I had gotten this material from a recycling place. It was beautiful. Without dye, it's white. When it's burned, it looks like lace. [If I don't use it], it goes into the environment. It just sits in a landfill, it doesn't dissolve. If I can save it from there, it's something. It's an object of art."

Each work is made up of 500 or 600 tiny pieces of fabric. The intricate, painstaking work is evident up-close.

Her Paladin series looks like tornado figures; they're broad in the shoulders and chest, but wither down to a small swirl at the base. Sales says paladins are medieval protectors or guardians.

"They're almost like a reservoir for memories," Sales says. "I'm interested in hanging onto memories and creating little diaries. They're like abstract diaries for memories. I build them from the top down, and each layer is like an archeological reservoir. They're about layers. Each layer has a new type of memory in it. Or you can compare it to rings on a tree; you cut down the tree and see the rings, each one tells you when the tree was ill, or had more water, or there was a drought."

Sales incorporates pieces of china and glass in her work.

"The stones are in there," she says. "Sometimes you may have a memory that's very unpleasant, something you can't forget. Sometimes it comes up to the surface of the skin. You can't expel it, it just sits there.

"I'm interested in memory. Memory makes us who we are. If you have no memories, are you really a person? Do you really exist? And in what way can you exist? I accumulate all these memories and try to hang onto the ones that I know are important to me."

Sales has loved texture ever since she was a child. Her mother tells her stories of taking her to a store , and she'd run to a rug with fur on it, and caress it.

"I'm interested in feel, and physically touch the surface while I'm working on it," she says. "With painting, you can't do that. I wanted the tactile feel."

As a child, Sales visited forest preserves, returning with branches, twigs, roots and rocks. She'd decorate her room with them and make sculptures with the objects.

In "Preservation," a figure has an open chest, like a giant wound or like a hollowed tree trunk, revealing stones and twigs inside, along with little colorful knots of embroidery that look like soft moss or tiny wildflowers.

And her piece "Abundance" is a golden, greenish sleeveless dress with brown lotus pods incorporated into the skirt. It looks like a spring dawn, with the sun coming up over a green forest.

People's reactions to her work vary. "Some people look at the pieces and see death," Sales says. "I've had a few people say to me that it scares them. I've had people see it as very life-affirming and wonderful, growth and earth and the floor of the earth. I've had people see them as comical - the standing ones remind them of Batman.

"The field of fiber art has pretty much exploded onto the scene. I think people saw it as a very commonplace material. They'd think, 'Oh, it's just fiber, it's nothing.' I think that's why it's taken so long for it to get its true honors.

"Think about fiber: we're born and we're wrapped in fiber. When we die, we're wrapped in fiber. It's something that's with us our whole lives. It is very tactile. It's all around us."

.. if you go

>>What: Hanging by a Thread: The Fiber Art of Polly Matsumoto and Michelle Sales

>>When: 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday - Friday and 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday, through April 4

>>Where: The Alliance for the Arts, 10091 McGregor Blvd.

>>Cost: Free

>>Information: Call 939-2787 or go to www.artinlee.org