grew up, and wholeheartedly dove into mural painting. Watching
a group of neighborhood kids play one day in an abandoned parking
lot, Pannepacker resolved to brighten the space by getting them
involved in a mural on the surrounding low walls. After that she
was hooked. To hone her technique, she apprenticed with Diane
Keller, an established muralist. Some of the guerrilla tactics often
involved in street painting have begun to appear in her weaving.
This past year she’s embarked on a project that finds her leaving
small four-by-four-inch weavings made out of jute and pipe clean-
ers around town. The Scatter Gather pieces follow her on her
travels and are woven surreptitiously into balustrades and fences.
In May she’ll take the project to Kansas City, Missouri. Late to
register for Surface Design Association’s “ O ff the Grid” confer-
ence, Pannepacker decided to participate anyway and, like a graf-
fiti writer with a can of spray paint, “tag” the streets of
k . c .
There is always something provocative, even insistent, in
Pannepacker’s artistic dialogue with the city—a demand to make
a link between global politics and an activity generally associated
with women’s work. Over the summer, during the heat of the
presidential campaign, she set up a pipe loom on the street near
where she was working on
W all o f Rugs #2
and asked residents
to help weave scavenged red, white and blue plastic bags into an
American flag tapestry.
Nontraditional materials like Q-Tips, matchbooks and alumi-
num are frequently incorporated into Pannepacker’s work. They
are used for both their aesthetics and message—especially the
matches featured prominently in her Peace Project series—weav-
ings with flags and icons from war-torn and conflicting countries:
Sudan/Darfur, Israel/Palestine, United States/Iraq. In the series,
hundreds of paper matches have been incorporated into two
weavings entitled
Ignite Our Hearts for Peace,
which she created
for the 2004 Philadelphia Fringe Festival.
052
american craft
apr/maj'09
