Leanne Streit
I am a fiber artist and if you want to know a little about my art work, the first thing to know is that I love texture, colors, and nature. I also enjoy figuring out technical and design challenges. I grew up learning crafts and later received formal training in architecture - one flexible, one more structured. Weaving is more structured and I love to push the bounds of it by incorporating interesting things like rocks, fused glass and jewelry.
Fiber arts gives me the opportunity to combine these objects into pieces I call “Rungs” which are series of woven panels with steps of connected interesting things.
These pieces may reflect an experience, a mood or a challenge that I need to solve. A challenge can be simple, like “do these colors work together?” or more difficult like taking an experience that has affected me and figuring out how to represent it in a piece of work.
In my pieces with rocks, their characteristics guide the design where aggregate types, shapes, colors or lines elements are incorporated in the woven panels. Rocks are really amazing when you look at them closely. The pieces with vintage jewelry always start with research, what time period was the jewelry from, should they be kept whole or should they be broken apart and why? I have similar processes for other objects that I use and often start off with sketches and at times just let go to see what develops. It does not end there as I like to apply other fiber art and craft methods like encaustics, stitching and beading on top of or within the woven fiber.
Oh, and don’t forget the warm woven throws. I have fun with colors and am always excited to see the patterns that emerge during the finishing process.