About the Artist: Sharon Alderman

Issue Art

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Sharon Alderman has been weaving cloth by hand since 1969, specializing in apparel fabrics, upholstery, and color studies. Her work has won many awards, and she lectures, gives keynote addresses, acts as a juror, and leads workshops for guilds, art centers, colleges, and state, regional, and national conferences. Her writing and work have appeared in Shuttle, Spindle & Dyepot, Interweave, Textile Artists’ Newsletter, and Handwoven, and her books include Handwoven, Tailormade, A Handweaver’s Notebook, and Mastering Weave Structures, all published by Interweave Press, Inc. She lives in Salt Lake City where her fabrics are on exhibit at Phillips Gallery. More information is available at http://www.sharonalderman.com/.

The Artist’s Statement:

Color is my passion. While I occasionally weave a cloth using only one color, the joy of combining colors in the cloth is the major reason I am a weaver.

These pieces are double woven (two layers of cloth everywhere) from cotton sewing thread which provides me with a large palette and the fineness to make a smooth optical mixture. I “gather” the colors I use from many sources but mainly use the natural world as my inspiration. I carry sewing thread color charts and a notebook with me when I travel and record what I see, the place, date, and the time of day of these observations. Sometimes I sketch a shape or the landscape so that I can remember the proportion and placement of the colors.

When I am in my studio, I assemble the colors I have noted, arrange and rearrange them until I have something that pleases me and evokes the original observations. There are nearly 200 threads per square inch in these pieces and nothing happens fast. As I weave them, I revisit their sources in my mind. In a sense, I am weaving memories.

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