Janice Lessman-Moss
Janice Lessman-Moss maintains a weaving studio in her home in Kent, Ohio where she is Emeritus Professor at Kent State University. She was awarded a United States Artists Fellowship in 2019, the Cleveland Arts Prize Lifetime Achievement Award, the Governor’s Award for the Arts in Ohio, an Arts Midwest/National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Crafts, and nine Individual Artist Fellowships from the Ohio Arts Council throughout her career. Her work been presented throughout the United States and internationally, including a recent solo exhibition at the Kent State University Museum.
Artist Statement
As a weaver, I am intrigued by the binary vocabulary of the process. Grid based the vertical and horizontal axes, composed of numerous threads are raised or lowered to create small units of structure. Like molecules or cells, these are the basic building blocks of the textural patterned plane of art/meaning. Myriad patterns can expand, divide and establish different directional movements in a choreography of networks. That duality provides the visual and conceptual/poetic foundation for my work. With the warps installed on the loom the wefts are introduced in an accumulation of line that evolves into an ordered field of tactile patterns, orchestrated through the systematic movement of the hands and body. This rhythmic activity closely parallels that of walking; slow ways of engaging with the world.
At Tusen Takk
Weaving and walking are two activities that form the core of my engagement with the world and my voice in it. Like weaving, walking progresses in a linear path of steps, marking time through accumulation. While the activity revolves around physical movement, it also occupies the mind and senses. It provides a slow unfolding of the world around me, while simultaneously allowing my mind to wonder and dream. I walk every day with or without a destination, rain or shine, and enjoy the opportunity to be outside; to experience the natural world and built environment in a direct way. I enjoy the details and the dramas of this engagement as it opens my mind to new ideas and relationships, informed by my surroundings; observed, absorbed, or imagined.
Because Tusen Takk will present a dramatically different landscape from the one with which I am most familiar, I anticipate that it will stimulate new visual ideas; alternative ways of considering space, color, etc. The rhythms of the water, the quality of light, the feel of the air should permeate my mind and body in a distinct way. Surrounded by a new environment, new geography, I look forward to creating weavings that honor this experience.
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