Gyfingy Laky’s fiber constructions have been exhibited in interna-
tional galleries and museums as well as parks in England, a meadow
in Austria, a mountain village in Bulgaria and on various hillsides
and forests in the United States. Fiber art has never been strictly an
indoor story and Laky’s work reflects the porous borders separat-
ing interior from exterior. Laky’s outdoor installations have al-
lowed her to investigate ideas on a larger scale, in public venues
open to unanticipated inspiration and complications; they’ve also
vitalized her studio practice by allowing her to bring various ele-
ments from the outside back in.
Over the course of her 40-year career, Laky has built baskets,
grids and word constructions with wire, toothpicks and screws, but
her material of choice continues to be twigs. On any given day,
bundles of apple, pear, plum, madrone, manzanita, walnut, eucalyp-
tus and apricot branches can be found in her San Francisco studio.
Laky scouts for twigs in parks and collects them each fall from Cali-
fornia farmers who are happy to recycle rather than burn them.
“Twigs are among the most beautiful linear elements in exis-
tence,” Laky has said, more than once. Unlike a straight line, a twig
advances in a stop-and-go style, proceeding in one direction but
suggesting half a dozen altcrnati vews. Each nub implies a potential
leaf, a new branch, a flower. Twigs hold potential.
Laky twists, binds, drills, nails and screws twigs into freestand-
ing, free-falling and wall-mounted objects. Her baskets resemble
sieves, nests and three-dimensional molecular diagrams. Many are
substantially more air than twig. They won’t hold water or rice,
but they hold something. “Some refer to baskets as containers for
the human soul,” Laky said a few years ago during a lecture she
gave in England. “I like to think of baskets as containers of human
intelligence as well.”
In 2005, Laky retired from the University of California, Davis,
where she taught fiber art and environmental design for 30 years.
With retirement has come the opportunity to mull over the multi-
plicity of interests, experiences and processes that have shaped
her work: a love of nature, architecture, language and the expansive
history of fiber art, as well as a working process rooted in experi-
mentation, often undertaken with an activist’s sensibility stemming
from Laky’s childhood experiences as a refugee from Hungary in
the aftermath of World War 11.
Since retiring, Laky has focused full-time on making art and
much of it demonstrates her opposition to the Iraq W ar. As is often
the case with Laky’s word constructions, the Globalization series
is built around three letters, which are literally and figuratively lay-
ered.
Globalization II: Homogenization,
2004, spells out
w a r
in
blocky capitals. The shades of green and brown suggest camouflage
and jungle, and the hollows between the apple branches are crowded
with plastic soldiers. One photo depicts
w a r
reshuffled to spell
a r m , r a m , M AR
and
r a w .
Globalization ill: Red Ink,
2005, does, in
fact, read
r a w .
In
Globalization IV: Collateral Damage,
2006, the
word
w a r
is visually split in half by a scarlet letter
a ;
all three of the
red and white letters are squeezed together with blue screws.
Over the years, Laky has experimented with paper, string and
brass drawer labels. She built one of her recent works,
Dada
,
2007,-a soldier’s silhouette crouched over a machine gun—from >
05
6
american craft
apr/may09
Protest
Photo/Gyöngy Laky,
Connect
Photo/Kim Ocampo.
