Walker Saville sat at her first loom when she was 12 years old — at summer camp in Michigan — and has been weaving ever since.
“I just fell in love with it,” the Greenfield artist says. “It is a passion, for sure.”
Though she also works in watercolor, acrylic and paper collage, Saville says she always returns to the tactile process of weaving.
Saville has work in a two-person show, along with potter Richard Foye, titled, “In Beauty It Is Finished: Elements of Home,” on view through December at The Greenfield Gallery, 231 Main St. in Greenfield.
The show takes its name from a Navajo prayer. It includes Saville’s woven rugs and smaller items, such as throws, pillows, placemats and scarves. Also on display are some works on paper, including paper collages that often serve as color studies for her weavings or as ways to, “bump my mind into a new idea,” Saville says.
The colors of Foye’s ceramics resonate nicely with Saville’s textiles, and the warm lighting provided by his lamps adds to the sense of home both artists were seeking, without detracting at all from the clean elegance of the gallery presentation.
A centerpiece of the show is one of Saville’s woven tapestries, entitled “Stones of Home.” The tapestry’s composition is built of blocky shapes stacked on one another, rising to pointed rooflines. The colors are muted earth tones drawn from her knowledge of and love for the Southwest. The Greenfield artist has spent much time in Texas and New Mexico.
“I was beginning to explore home and what it is and what it means to me,” Saville says. “I’ve been kind of a gypsy. And I wanted to understand why. So I started with this image of stones building on top of each other, coming up into an abstract roof, just to get my mind in the idea of a home architecturally. That’s the most basic idea of home.”
Saville worked from a watercolor she’d painted to try and sketch out her ideas.
As she worked on the piece, “I realized that, obviously, my needs for understanding ‘home’ went way beyond architecture,” she says.
Nearby on the wall is a rug entitled, “Home. Away.”
On a predominately white field, one black block teeters on the edge of another. A thin strip of light blue at the top suggests sky, creating an abstracted landscape within the rug’s functional, rectangular shape.
Saville says, “I was thinking about how I can’t go to my home and just stay there. I’m still too restless to do that. When we’re home too much, it drives us crazy,” Saville says. “We want to go out. Come back. …Where do you find the balance between being home and being away?”
Saville’s exploration of home continued into her weaving of more traditionally based designs. She transposed traditional Native American designs into modern colors, and experimented with varying the stripes inside of what looked at first like consistently striped patterns, or created purposefully asymmetrically striped patterns.
“I started making rugs with a different attitude behind them,” she says. “And that was that just the act of making the rug by hand was creating a balance of understanding and beauty that I could put in my home. And that’s what made it home, not the place itself.”
Handing me an alpaca throw woven in tones of black, gray and white, Saville says, “The idea is it’s not just decoration, it’s a commitment to beauty and the environment. Making things by hand or having things that are made by hand changes the whole atmosphere and it wakes people up when they come into your home.”
The throw is so soft it practically invites you to wrap yourself up in it.
She could have made the throws in one width, Saville says, but she chose to make two narrow widths and then stitch them together because, “I like to have the hand on it.”
Scarves woven using cotton, linen and naturally dyed Japanese silk feel light but are surprisingly warm, Saville says.
For the past 25 years, Saville has worked as a financial counselor, with an emphasis on increasing what she terms on her website, “financial intelligence.” Lately, she has shifted more of her focus onto her art. She moved her loom from a studio space in Easthampton a year ago last summer to a large studio space in the second floor of The Greenfield Gallery.
Saville said that she’d seen that gallery owners Kate Hunter and Rachael Katz were creating the studio spaces, “And I wanted to be a part of the impetus of getting that going. I thought it was important. If I was going to live here, I wanted to have more art recognized downtown.”
Greenfield is increasingly becoming an art destination, Saville says, and the gallery has played a large role in that.
“I think people have been a bit surprised at how much good work is being done around here. They’re really just starting to find it. It’s great.”
Where to see it
The Greenfield Gallery, 231 Main St., Greenfield. Contact: 413-772-9334 or find the gallery on Facebook.
Saville can design custom rugs or tapestries to suit your tastes and décor. Contact her at: walkersaville@gmail.com. Find out more about her financial counseling services at: www.walkersaville.com