Featured Artist: Laura Stacy’s medium is batik, the ancient Indonesian art of hand-dying fabric. In batik design, hot wax is placed in specific areas on the fabric using a tjanting tool. The wax acts as a barrier allowing the remaining non-waxed fabric to absorb the dye that is applied. Laura's love for batik began in the early seventies while spending her summers as an apprentice for a batik artist. This led to a textile design major at Auburn University. After raising three sons she rediscovered the magic of batik and took up designing once again. She is obsessed with colors and patterns and can’t wait to see her designs come to life. Geometric patterns in bold contrasting colors, bright florals, and whimsical birds and butterflies are some of the more popular batiks Laura has created. Her batiks are mostly created on canvas and velvet which she then sews into durable, functional, purses in a wide variety of shapes and sizes. Laura is a juried member of Alabama Designer Craftsmen and served in 2009 as vice president of that organization. She exhibits her unique batik creations at numerous art shows and galleries around Alabama.
Laura Stacy
February - March
Once the dye dries more wax is added, followed by more dye, repeating the process over and over for each color used in the design. When the process is complete the wax is removed leaving a design locked into the fibers. Most batiks take three weeks to realize.
Her home studio is in Birmingham, Alabama, where she spends many long hours at her drawing table, waxing out patterns and meditating with her Australian Shepard, Ellie, by her side.
Featured Artist:
Ruth Marie Fledermaus
September - October
Ruth Marie Fledermaus was born on Halloween, 1959, in a tiny town in New Hampshire. She was coerced into learning many fiber processes (sewing, embroidery, lacework) by her mother and grandmother. She is now very grateful for all those tedious childhood hours she spent with a #10 crochet hook.
Her formal art education was at Massachusetts College of Art in the early 1990's, where her concentration was in Studio for Interrelated Media. This department allowed her to explore many different avenues of creativity, while keeping fiber as the foundation of her art.
In the years since leaving school, this exploratory approach and curiosity about all types of art has fueled her creativity. Ruth Marie believes strongly that everyday life and objects should be infused with art, and that everything has the potential to be made into an artwork. This has inspired her to create artworks with eggshells, bird's nests, scraps of fabric, bent spoons and dead insects.
She is also interested in magical and ritual objects and the exploration of dolls, not merely as children's toys, but as an art form in and of themselves. Her jewel-toned palette, hand-dyed fabrics and complex embroidery elevate her dolls to works of art.
Ruth Marie shares her studio with a large, white rabbit named Petey. When not creating art, she is an active member of Huntsville Friends of Rabbits, a group dedicated to helping domestic rabbits in the shelters of Madison County. She is also an avid gardener. She is enjoying the 22nd year of her honeymoon with husband Bruce Stallsmith, and they share their home with 15-20 foster bunnies and five cats.
Featured Artist:
Beverly Corbitt August - September
Beverly Corbitt is a Birmingham, Alabama based artist with a passion for creating fused and lampworked glass. She focused for many years on fused and sculptural glass but re-discovered lampworking a year or so ago and is now so in love with her torch that the fusing aspect of her work has virtually vanished. Beverly works full time at University of Alabama in Birmingham in medical research to support her glass habit but dreams of one day being able to focus more time, attention and love on her glass.
With an educational background in science and engineering she is both tickled and awed by the chemical reactions and structural possibilities of working with various colors and types of glass, but it’s holding up a bead right out of the annealing kiln and seeing the way light plays with the colors and shapes that keeps her hooked.
The bead making obsession is also opening up other avenues that she is pursuing as time permits, including silver smithing, felting, mold making and working with resins.
Beverly’s studio is at her home, which she shares with the love of her life and their menagerie of a puppy, a parrot, 5 cats and too many aquariums. She will begin teaching lampworking and fusing in her studio in 2010.
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