Laura Owens collaborated with FWM to fabricate hand-embroidered, handsilk-screened prints. Owens created seven identical large-scale prints on Indian tussah silk, with cotton floss embroidery. When she completed the initial printing and embroidery, she made additions to each piece, creating seven unique variants. Each variant depicts a tree, and through it, the graceful passage of time—flowers bloom and wilt, leaves fall, worms crawl, spiders spin webs, and clouds pass.
In each piece, Owens displays her elegant sense of composition and design. Owens’s series includes hints of Asian landscape painting and printmaking, Renaissance tapestries, and Early American decorative textiles, as well as nods to painters such as Henri Rousseau and Edward Hicks. Owens’s strong sense of individuality leaves her unfettered by these various traditions and sources; she can synthesize this range of information into her unique painterly language.
This FWM residency took full advantage of Owens’s openness to collaborations. Working with FWM’s studio staff, she was able to handle the technical challenges of screen-printing and embroidery with the same level of confidence and sensitivity to the media she has shown in her painting. Citing Owens’s embrace of intuition and intellect, and her careful attention to both technique and content, curator Paul Schimmel called her “one of the most important painters to emerge from Los Angeles in the past decade.”
