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| Associate Professor Laura Strand, head of Textile Arts has a comprehensive back-ground and formal training in weaving, surface design, papermaking, bookbinding and basketry through a BFA from Georgia State University and an MFA from the University of Kansas, Lawrence. She has exhibited widely and lectured throughout the country. As a working artist her interests include the interface between feminism and visual culture, exploring the connection between the textile field and our Western cultural understanding of "women's work." As an artist and a person she engages in an effort to link the rich heritage of the textile arts with contemporary theoretical discourse. I work with textiles as a language with which to talk about the human condition. My engagement with my artwork has always been to make objects that allude to myself as a woman and the position of women within western culture. Textiles are particularly appropriate to that goal since through the familiar fabrics noted above, textiles are a formal language that comes to us as an oral tradition through a long line of women. The traditional languages of painting and sculpture come to us through generations of formal intellectual critique -- a language formed and explored primarily by masculine culture. I continue to look for a feminine voice in art making and find it most often through the language of textiles. |
