Autumn Splendor

Autumn Splendor (2011)
Hand-dyed, handwoven silk and wool, embroidered silk applique

Autumn Splendor began with an image I’ve carried since childhood: leaf bookmarks brought back from Taiwan, treated with acid to burn away the soft tissue and leave only the skeletal veins. Beauty in transience. Delicacy in what remains after the living part is gone.

That image drove eight months of work and more than a dozen major pivots – in weaving technique, garment silhouette, and construction method – before the coat found its final form. Appropriately for a piece about transience, the original idea shifted drastically and now only manifests in the embroidered leaves that embellish the fabric.

Two color gradations make up the fabric. One side shows the brilliant colors of early autumn, the blaze of all the trees changing at once. The other shows the more sober colors of late autumn. Where I live, the sweetgum trees are the last to lose their leaves, shades of purple and maroon gradually fading into the brown of dead leaves.

This design is about transience, the threshold season where ordinary things flare into beautiful brilliance, that fades and disappears until the following year.