Interview: Sarah C. Swett, Weaver, Artist, Teller of Stories
“It’s Just a Paper Shirt”
Cathy Koos
(all photos courtesy Sarah Swett)
Introspective. Dreamlike. Whimsical. Soul-baring. Playful. Story maker. These are the thoughts that danced through my mind as I studied Sarah Swett’s vast body of work which began in 1994.
I spent a delightful April morning in a broad-ranging chat with tapestry artist Sarah Swett, she in her home studio in Moscow, Idaho, and I in mine in Northern California, separated by 800 miles, but Zoom put us both in the same room.
Swett hails from Brooklyn where she attended and quit university twice. In 1979 she migrated to Idaho with not much more than a backpack and an adventurous spirit. She spent five years in the Idaho wilderness knitting sweaters and teaching herself to spin.
Sarah moved back to town and back to school for veterinary science, but one semester she took a weaving class to learn plain weaving and tapestry. And the rest, as they say, is history.
Tapestry weaving has been a full-time vocation for the past 30 years. Starting out in a tiny 8 x 10 studio shed with barely enough room to turn around, Sarah now has a roomy, light-filled 16 x 20 studio to pursue her exploration and experimentation.
Like a Lincoln Log set, Sarah uses pipes of various lengths and diameters for her looms. Mainly PVC for the uprights, she goes for the stability of metal pipes for the feet.
A couple decades ago, Swett entered a tapestry of her interpretation of a prehistoric string skirt described in Elizabeth Wayland Barber’s Women’s Work. When the very prominent judge stopped in front of her submission, he muttered, “unfortunate fringe,” and moved on. Oh my!
Stepping away from commissions, shows, and teaching in 2018 has allowed Sarah time for exploration and experimentation. Always a wool tapestry weaver, a gift of an old strick of linen prompted a “what-if” moment. She has now dived into the proverbial rabbit hole investigating alternative bast fibers such as dogbane, milkweed, mulberry paper, cotton kitchen twine, and even … coffee filters. The milkweed was scrounged from a friend’s compost pile. These alternative bast fibers eventually found their way from Sarah’s spinning wheel to her backstrap loom and then onto her shoulders as a lovely woven shirt.
Swett has an uncanny knack for portraying everyday life in her tapestries, but with a twist.
Using the “inner hierarchy in my head,” she likes to portray her “wild twin as story maker and loominist” with her delightful daily life dialog guides.
Using the art of comics as her tool, Sarah has created publications that are not so much strictly how-to guides for setting up a backstrap loom or knitting slanted sweaters, but dialogs outlining her explorations and side quests. The “how-to” is there, along with charming illustrations.
Along the way, a Convergence class in bookbinding was the impetus for creating Coptic-bound books with tapestry as both the cover and inner pages. “Not being overly fond of glue,” Sarah favors this binding for producing a nice, flat-opening book.
And of course, her final, playful words:
Over the decades, Sarah’s weavings have become progressively smaller with both woven text and imagery. When asked about the sizing down, Sarah simply and delightfully says, “I am amused by it.”
You can see Sarah’s archived work at: https://www.afieldguidetoneedlework.com/
and read her new blog here:
https://sarahcswett.substack.com/p/its-only-a-paper-shirt