Liz Collins

Weaving is a slow medium, a discipline of gradually accumulated structure. But what if you could wield it like an action painter does a brush, or a punk musician plays a guitar? Something like this is at work in the art of Liz Collins, which has a gestural freedom and energy unlike anything else in textiles. Collins has had an extremely varied career, having explored knitwear design, public sculpture, large-scale drawing, and performance art, among other genres. In her current work, she both exploits and disrupts the textile’s inherent grid. Collins begins with a machine-woven fabric and then intervenes in a series of decisive, expressionist gestures.

The result is a collage of textures: passages of plain and complex weave, patches of horizontal “floats”—weft threads that pass in front of the vertical warps—and also cut warps, which hang loose from the front of the work, equally suggesting rivulets of paint, curtain fringe, and dripping stalactites. “I think of the pieces as paintings that are just made by other means,” Collins says, and as manifestations of dualistic energies: “Chaos and order, refinement and decay, opacity and transparency.”¹ Textile is traditionally an art of intersecting tensions. Collins carries this forward, but in the realm of metaphor.

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