Cayce Zavaglia, a 50-year-old mother of four who lives in the Midwest, will be the first to joke about how she has the cool factor. Maybe the anti-Instagram aesthetic in her life has helped her escape the need to care about what people think of another label: fiber artist. After years of being relegated to mere hobbies or quirky crafts, fiber art is emerging from the shadows of Michael’s aisles and into the light of galleries.
“A line is a line, whether it’s wool or oil,” said Zavarria, who trained as a painter. “The art world is finally embracing it. They are breaking down the hierarchy of art and craft.”
With the popularity of artists like Sheila Hicks, Brent Wadden and Annie Albers, Zavaglia said, “fiber is no longer a bad word.”
She takes portraits of those closest to her, but doesn’t want to be boring like her mom scrolling through her camera roll. She knows you probably won’t be interested in her son unless you can’t tell whether his image is made of string or paint. Unless you feel the need to look more closely.
“What keeps me inspired by my family is that if you look back historically, the famous portraits that Van Gogh created were all portraits of people he knew, the postman or his friends. Close friends, once you spend that long you don’t think, ‘Well, this is someone he knew and it’s kind of boring. It’s a portrait in itself.'”
She sees it as a challenge for those who don’t like figurative work. How could she stop them in the middle of the show, hold their gaze longer, get them to take a step or two closer and ask the question: What the hell is that?
Through her realistic embroidered portraits, she not only captured the faces of family and friends, she even captured Giorgio Armani—another fiber artist—on a magazine cover. She started small, with the patience of a pointillist, using just one of six strands of DMC embroidery floss.
It is difficult to tell that this piece is embroidery. Even though she sometimes places the work on a pedestal so it can be seen from both sides, people still sometimes say they don’t know what they’re looking at. They ask, “What is this?”
According to Zavarria’s research, the answers vary. It cycles between embroidery and painting, ink and illusion, all inspired by her love of the meditative process of craft.
In embroidery, where other artists might outline loose shapes with pencil, Zavarria starts with broad string strokes about an inch or two long, somewhat like the gestural drawings of fiber artists. She won’t rip out the stitches because someone might erase the pencil mark. As she made the piece, she stitched them tighter and tighter, eventually adding stitches so small that they looked like a dot to adjust the tones of the limited menu of colors available.
I’m as interested in mark making, rhythm and method as I am in the final product. “
“I feel like the people who are most successful are the ones who stay loose,” she said. “So I feel like I’m always trying to get back to that, but the nature of the work kind of fascinates me because there are just thousands and thousands of sutures.”
She likes the look of the backs (reverses) of her pieces so much that they have become the same piece as the traditional fronts. She was so inspired by them that she actually painted the reverse side, using loose paint that resembled loops of thread.
Through her realistic portraits and reverse works, she focuses her attention on a square, working on details there before moving on to the next and the next.
“It’s like the Chuck Close method,” she said. “At the end of the day, I know what I’m going to get if I work step by step.”
