John Polak Photography

Chakra #1: Fire Girl

An organic ebb and flow eases through the warp and weft of Lynn Kline's paper weavings. Pulsating colors—green beside red and pink, purple played against yellow, orange juxtaposed with blue—increase the impression of inherent animation. This sense of each paper weaving as an intuitively evolving entity is not entirely illusion, because, as the Ashfield-based artist explains, "I am making it up as I go along."

Initially, necessity was the mother of her inventive process. Sensitivity to printmaking's oil-based inks and ubiquitous turpentine (plus other chemicals) made her seriously ill, and she sought alternative, less toxic art materials and methods. In a book on fiber art, she saw simple paper weavings, and "a light went on," she laughs. Cutting up papers lying around her studio, she experimented, improvised, and invented her process of paper weaving. At first, she says, "I didn't know what the medium could do, and I didn't know what I could do with it." But one aesthetic discovery led to another, like a series of questions and answers.

One of the first questions she asked was, how small can I cut it? (The answer: one-sixteenth of an inch.) Varying shape, she found, could be as important as size and scale. "You can change the shape of the warp, alter the shape of the weft, and vary the weave structure, not just under and over." She started layering paper strips and then found another way to add visual depth, by creating textural designs on paper using acrylic pigments suspended in cornstarch paste. A significant next step was to piece together separate segments of woven papers, like a patchwork quilt. Kline first used stitching simply as a way to join pieces together. Then she got excited about the stitching itself. "There's always a new idea," she laughs. Her latest work involves multi-hued layers of thread that enrich color.

"Each color has a different energy, almost a life of its own, and I respond to that," she says. "I'm led by the piece itself. When I don't pay attention to what the piece is trying to tell me, the energy goes out of it, and I know I've taken a wrong turn." She recalls one piece that just did not work. "It was keeping me up at night," she admits. "All of a sudden, it came to me, like a revelation: I needed to cut it." First thing the next morning, she cut it up—and "Chakra #1: Fire Girl" emerged from the recombined parts.

Does she ever hesitate before slicing up woven paper she has spent weeks, even months, assembling? "I can't worry about it," she says. "If it doesn't work, it doesn't work. And my subconscious usually knows what's going on, even better than I do." She cites another work that stubbornly resisted her efforts to finish it. An additional problem was that Kline had used up all her papers except for two sheets she considered unsightly rejects. "One was pallid lavender; the other had garish green handprints," she shudders. "A little voice was telling me, 'Weave these two together.' I said, 'No way, they're ugly, it will be a train wreck.' But the voice kept insisting, and finally I just threw up my hands, said okay, wove them together—and it was beautiful!" These interwoven papers became the border that completed "Chakra #3: Will Power."

Chakras, based in the practice of yoga, are centers of spiritual power in the body, each associated with a different type of energy. The chakra for will power also deals with self-esteem and self-image, and the over-woven central section of "Chakra #3: Will Power" is a photocopied image of the six-year-old Kline on her first horse. "I felt so powerful," she recalls. The paste papers utilize another kind of self-imagery, with the fingerprints dotting the lavender paper and handprints decorating the green. In "Chakra #4: Heart," Kline wove paste papers into a woodcut she made of her great-grandparents and, in a different area, into another woodcut of her husband's parents. "Heart" moves her use of stitching to a new level, with French knots enhancing the three-dimensionality of the work, and the main color, green, comes alive against its complement of red and pink. Each chakra is associated with a particular color, and Kline likes to include the opposite color as well, which creates a visual pop as well as a spiritual pull.

"My artwork is a spiritual process," she says. "I have always been intrigued by how the spirit or the divine expresses itself in the natural world. One way that I see the divine is in pattern and proportions, and I like to incorporate that into my work." This can be seen in her recent paper weavings based on the elements of feng shui and the Fibonacci series (a mathematical sequence that also occurs in nature, seen in the pattern, she points out, of stripes on a snail shell and the swirl of the shell's spiral).

In "Folded Space: Metal," Kline uses thirty to forty different paste papers, with overlaid threads conjuring up the luminescence of silver, gold and copper. There is an Oriental sensibility in this work—not a direct representation, but an oblique influence. Intrigued with the fabrics of Japanese kimonos, she covered her walls with photocopies of kimono patterns. "I live with it and a little feel of it comes out," she says.

Similarly, her attraction to the patterning and palette of African Kente cloth emerges in "Folded Space: Earth." Here, overlying stitches alter red-toned paste paper, changing it to deeper red, purple, blue, ochre and orange. "It's like mixing your own paints," she says.

Both "Metal" and "Earth" hang like long, vertical banners, and the proportions within the panels are derived from Fibonacci numbers. "Water" lies on her studio table, based on a blue color scheme but still unfinished, and Kline plans two more pieces in this series, with the same proportions. "At least, that's the plan for now," she says. "Sometimes I make a mistake, and that turns out even better than the original plan."