For Laky, experimenting helps to rein
in the manual dexterity she has acquired.
Above left:
Global-
ization
IV : C ollateral
Damage,
2006, on wall,
and
ill: lied Ink,
2005,
on table, ash branches,
commercial wood,
paint, building bullets.
Above right:
Globalization 11:
Homogenization,
2004,
branches, commercial
wood, plastic soldiers,
screws, offers anagrams
o f WAR.
plastic babies. She constructed
Bottom Line,
2005, and
Nonsense,
2007, two wall pieces shaped liked dollar signs, from charcoal and
toy soldiers. Last spring Laky began drafting designs of monetary
symbols—the Japanese yen, Chinese yuan, Saudi riyal, Russian ruble
and British pound. The character that has most captured her atten-
tion, however, is the ampersand. Since 2004 she has made half a doz-
en of them, from highly stylized to increasingly abstract to nearly
invisible. For Laky, the ampersand represents a continuum, a col-
lecting of ideas and a connection between past, present and future.
It’s an apt symbol for her recent reflections.
When I interviewed Laky just over a year ago for Smithsonian’s
g
Archives of American Art, she contemplated her early textile, design
v
and architecture studies at the University of California, Berkeley.
£,
Certain professors—Ed Rossbach, Katherine Westphal, Trade
|
Guermonprez, Peter Voulkos and Sim Van der Ryn-inspired her
£
with their expertise, curiosity and a “willingness to jump into the
I
fray with a kind of delight and openness” that Laky found lacking
!
in more traditional arts. Through Rossbach’s mentorship in particu-
j
lar, and Laky’s own wide-ranging international travels, she devel-
“
oped an extensive knowledge and appreciation of the diverse his-
J
tory of fiber art, from camel harnesses to ikat fabrics to boats
3
woven from reeds. Laky once compiled a list of the basket’s multiple
>.
uses over centuries. These included catching fish; cradling infants;
>
fording snowbanks; and holding bread, laundry, lacrosse balls,
g
eroding embankments, boiling acorn mush and early aviators pilot-
~
ing hot-air balloons. Both the computer and the modem suspension
bridge have their underpinnings in fiber art (in the Stone Age prac-
tice of spinning and the 19th-century Jacquard loom, respectively).
What distinguished—and vitalized—the fiber arts in Northern
California in the 1970s, however, was what Laky referred to during
a lecture as a “richness of ethnic diversity, interest in other cultures
and other traditions, [which] was mixed right in with contemporary
art explorations and endless experimentation.”
Experimentation has been an integral part of Laky’s working
process from the start. It’s a practice that she admires in other artists
as well, notably Ann Hamilton and Martin Puryear, the latter of
whom also described the “making process as a generator of ideas.”
For Laky, experimenting helps to rein in the manual dexterity she
has acquired; left unchecked, such excessive virtuosity can result in
work that’s technically dazzling but otherwise dead. Over time,
Laky has discovered that the best way to shake things up is to head
to the outdoors.
Laky has worked outside in Europe and North America. She
has suspended line drawings between trees and spread grids over
hillsides. She has stacked logs into a circular tree house and twisted
twigs into a tube. Exterior installations “stretch my mind, abilities,
ideas, everything,” she says, “They’re so different from the studio
process. Inside is a safe place to be. The magnitude of the outdoors
is almost incomprehensible in comparison with customary hands-
on scale.”
In 2005, Laky participated in an international art project in a
remote village in Bulgaria, working with branches, discarded bits
of lumber and whatever tools she could find. Assistants—mainly
children-came and went. There was little in the way of common >
apr/maj'09 american craft 059
