Arts & Culture Magazine - March/April 2008 - (Page 70) Interview : : By Elisabeth Stevens Sheryl Haler Creates Art From Fabric I magine a gorgeous piece of fabric—cotton, wool, silk, whatever. Must it be made into a dress, a suit, a curtain, a slipcover? Not necessarily. Cloth, thread, pins, needles and all sorts of other objects can also be transformed into impressive works of art. For Sheryl Haler, a professor at the Ringling College of Art and Design, cloth is only the beginning of independent creations that interweave feelings and memories to document her own life experience. “I’ve been involved with cloth since childhood,” Haler explains. “My mother taught me how to sew, and I saw handkerchiefs decorated by my grandmother with tatting, a form of lace work.” By the time Haler left her hometown of Grand Prairie, Texas, for Texas Tech University, she was used to wearing clothes which her mother, a civil servant during World War II, had made. “My mother knit sweaters and made fabric scarves,” she recalls. “It wasn’t fashion, it was reality. At the same time, though, I didn’t just look at cloth as clothes—it was something more.” When she enrolled at Texas Tech, however, Haler was disappointed to discover that fabric creations, which could be considered “women’s work,” were routinely discouraged. It wasn’t until she went on to the University of Houston, where she earned her M.F.A. in 1986, that Haler found a more sympathetic environment. “There was no fiber art department at the University of Houston,” she says, “but there was a woman teaching 70 : : arts and culture magazine www.artsandculturemag.com http://www.artsandculturemag.com
For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.