By DAVID DUPONT
BG Independent News
Artist Loraine Lynn made splash over spring break.
Through Toledo’s River House Arts, her work was included in Spring/Break, an art show held in New York City in conjunction with Armory Week, a marketplace that attracts hundreds of galleries from around the world.
Included were the Northwest Ohio artist’s rugs – tufted fabric creations with vivid colors and evocative designs that tweak the imagination.
Paula Baldoni, the owner of River House, said Lynn sold out the pieces she brought.
She also garnered significant notice when Nadja Sayej writing in Forbes designated her as one of eight artists to catch at Armory Week. “If anyone knows how to do art rugs right, it has to be Loraine Lynn,” Sayej wrote. “Her works are made with a tufting gun, and look like a combination between abstract paintings and drawings made of yarn, which have a child-like quality.”
“Yeah, yeah that was super exciting,” Lynn said in a recent telephone interview. Despite “the hiccups” of the pandemic year, 2020 has given her career momentum. She also had a solo show in Pennsylvania.
Those “hiccups” included losing her job as an adjunct instructor at Bowling Green State University as part of lay-offs of qualified rank faculty. “That wasn’t fun for anyone involved.”
She feels for her colleagues for whom this was their means of earning living. “That’s what their career was.”
But, she said, “I’m over it. I’m wanting things to return to some sort of normalcy.”
The “upside” for her is that “it’s given me more time to work and think about what I want to do in the future.”
That’s create and exhibit her artwork.
“Scheme,” an exhibit of her rugs, all from 2020, and a few glass pieces is now on display at River House Arts at 425 Jefferson in downtown Toledo. The gallery is open by appointment only. Call (419) 441-4025. The work can also be viewed on artsy.net.
The rugs are meant to be touched. Lynn said that a show gives her a chance to sit on them and talk about them and get to know viewers.
The bold designs evoke the work of the inner child of Jackson Pollack, the legendary American expressionist. And with their shaggy, tufted textures the rugs are reminiscent of home décor from the 1950s and 1960s.
One looks like a clown’s face. Several others look like McDonald’s arches, except in a rainbow of hues. Another is a quiver of arrows, aptly titled “Direction.”
“Adaptive Unconscious” is displayed prominently on the floor of the gallery. It’s easy to see a child there among what seems to be an abstraction of a plat for a suburb with the child’s imagination running wild through the streets.
That’s not what the artist has in mind, but she’s tolerant, even invites the suppositions about her work.
“Adaptive Unconscious” was an experiment, she said. The artist wanted to see how large a rug she could produce. She had to rely on her intuition more. She had a plan, but as the pieces came together she had to adapt. The goal was to make it as “tactilely and visually stimulating as possible,” she said.
“That one was an experiment in how far I could push it.”
Lynn’s interest in “tufted textiles” started while she was an undergraduate at the Cleveland Institute of Art. She worked in glass and installation art, and had done weaving. Then a video showing someone using the tufting gun popped up on one of her social media accounts. She was fascinated, so she decided to buy one. “I took a chance on something that look interesting to me and was a different way of working with fiber.”
This work continued when she came to Bowling Green State University for graduate work. She enrolled in the glass program, but she ended up studying with Leigh-Ann Pahapill, doing site specific installations.
The connection between the tool, mechanization and factories led Lynn to create work that drew on industrial imagery.
That work, she said, “found different homes” at Armory Week.
Lynn “cast a wider net” for imagery in her newer pieces. These push the abstraction into new heights.
She starts with reference photos. She uses repeated forms because repetition allows her to abstract those images and make viewers see something familiar in fresh ways.
She sketches these before translating them onto the loom, working back to front, so she creates the picture backwards. She shoots the yarn through with the tufting gun.
She has to build the frames herself. Lynn said she enjoys this element of process and craftsmanship. “It goes back to glass blowing and the way it’s labor intensive and process oriented. … It goes back to being really hands on with the material and figuring out a process.”
The ideas change as they are translated from sketch to rug. “I’m always kind of surprised how it turns out as a carpet.”
In “Mapping,” she uses strong contrasting colors and disparate parts “that shouldn’t quite go together but they do.”
“I let it form as I’m working on it. It’s not totally unplanned, but I leave it open enough so it can adapt and change.”
Lynn grew up in Toledo, and attended Maumee Country Day School, graduating in 2006. She explored photography and two-dimensional work, and during the school’s winter term made films. Then she discovered glass. She did her undergraduate work at the Cleveland Institute of Art before coming to BGSU, and settling back in Northwest Ohio.
She maintains a studio on an upper floor in the Secor Building, which houses River House Arts, artist studios, and offices including the Toledo Opera.
Lynn aspires to do more installations using the tufted textiles. “I would really like to make bigger and bigger pieces,” she said. “I’m interested how people move through space” and what can be done with art to change that social space. “One of the draws of this work is being able to touch it and relax and sit on it. … It’s something cozy and visually stimulating.”
