Stories in Sculpture with Carol Shaw-Sutton
Fiber Workshop at Willow Pond SLO with Carol Shaw-Sutton, June 2024
Exploring Form and Connectivity with Fiber
During her long career as a university professor starting at UCLA and then at CSULB, Carol Shaw-Sutton has taught workshops around the U.S. where the topic of fiber’s role in world culture and experimental sculpture were the focus. The fiber arts, historically overlooked as women’s handicraft or menial labor are now having their renaissance. Bearing strong accessible themes of domesticity while encapsulating intergenerational ingenuity, fiber art continues to be sacred and revolutionary and Carol Shaw-Sutton is no exception to revolutionary. In June 2024, we felt her bold presence at her Willow Pond workshop where she embodied these themes both with her ingenuity as well as a curiosity-driven invitation to explore.
“You will learn the basics with encouragement to explore, combine and develop a strong sense of grounding and fluidity as we practice and play together.”
Sutton’s first goal was to empower the students to work sculpturally with new tools, materials, and ideas which she quickly exceeded and surpassed. As a long-time professor, her intrinsic teaching methods are inspiring and infectiously fun. Next, Sutton beckoned a call to play, demonstrating with organic material the processes of lashing, netting, wrapping, knotting, twining, coiling, and weaving while focusing on giving individual form a strong presence and vitality. Making through experimentation, the artist students experienced opposing forces that govern a tension of dualities.
“These ways of making can be found throughout the world, while forming the basis of human's survival and allowing for the early formation of communities. I believe this knowledge is embedded in our collective DNA, and we will tap into it.”
Sutton asked the artists to explore those forged tensions we carry between strength and fragility. Questioning our relationship between structure and release, growth and decay, and stillness and movement. One could say we got our hands dirty in the best possible way and ended the day a little clearer, lighter, more hungry, and free, ready to raise a glass and devour a good meal.
About the Artist
Carol Shaw-Sutton began exhibiting her fiber sculpture in the U.S. and internationally since the 1970's including the California Design Exhibitions in Pasadena, the Young American Award exhibition at the Museum of Art and Design in NYC, three Lausanne Biennales in Switzerland at the Museo de Beaux Artes and the International Fiber exhibition at the Kyoto Museum of Art, Japan. Her work is included in numerous major museum collections including the Oakland Museum of Art, The DeYoung Museum, and The Museum of Art and Design, among others, as well as corporate and private collections worldwide. She is currently Professor Emeritus from the School of Art at CSULB where she headed their vibrant Fiber Program for more than thirty years.
