“Building Woven Landscapes” with Maris Van Vlack
With Building Woven Landscapes, interdisciplinary textile artist Maris Van Vlack will provide insight into her artistic practice of creating woven and knitted landscape tapestries using floor looms and jacquard looms. Van Vlack is an interdisciplinary artist who uses weaving to build images of architectural spaces that explore themes of time and memory. She will talk about her inspirations, the development of her process, and the way that she creates her work by combining tapestry, jacquard, industrial knitting, and paint. Much of her visual inspiration comes from architecture and geology, and she will describe how traveling to places such as Hawai’i and Iceland has influenced her work. She often combines many different ways of working within one piece, and will break down her process of using techniques such as warp printing, double weave, jacquard, and surface knitting, and how all those things can be interwoven to create a cohesive image.
Maris Van Vlack (b. 2002) grew up in Massachusetts surrounded by the historical textiles practices in the Boston area. She received a BFA in Textiles from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) with a concentration in Drawing. Her work combines weaving with painting processes to create architectural landscape tapestries. Maris has exhibited her work in the USA and Europe, including shows at the Icelandic Textile Center (Blönduós, Iceland), the U.S. Capitol Building (Washington, DC), the RISD Museum (Providence, RI), and the NADA New York (New York, NY). Maris is a recipient of the Kennedy Center’s 2024 Emerging Artist Award, the St. Botolph Club Foundation Emerging Artist Award, and the RISD Textile Department Award for Innovation in the Textiles Field. Her work has been published by the Boston Globe, Google Arts & Culture, Fiber Art Now, and Warp + Weft Magazine.
Instagram: @marisvanvlack