The needle that artist Sue Cavanaugh wields is more than six inches long.
It’s menacingly sharp and bends slightly as she punches it through yards and yards of cloth. In mere seconds, she has walked the length of her 10-foot work table, gathering cloth and creating stiches three, four, five inches long. It’s as if she is sewing – at lightning speed – for a giant.
Local artist Cavanaugh, who got her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from The Ohio State University, makes fabric sculptures that gather, fold and tumble in the air. They remain static, but the suggestion of movement is compelling. It’s as if her work defies gravity.
“I learned to sew when I was probably 5, 6 years old,” she says. “So cloth has always been really important to me.”
Cavanaugh explores gathering in all its meanings. One of her popular works is a portrait of author and journalist Helen Thomas. Made with rabbit fencing and wadded – gathered – newsprint, it stands about 12 feet wide.
“It really was news gathering … and the person who gathers news,” she said. “I’m gathering actual newsprint here, and then, at the base, we had laid papers” as someone would have gathered them at home.
In A Hundred Yards of Red, Cavanaugh repurposed donated fabric. Each installation of the piece is crafted to fit into a particular gallery, and all come together in bigger pieces or are split into smaller ones, allowing the sculpture a meaningful relationship with the space it inhabits. She calls them “Incarnations” and each one is dramatic.
With her textile works, Cavanaugh has used her experience in the Japanese Shibori tradition to explore new realms. Shibori is a technique whereby stitched cloth is dyed and, ultimately, the threads are clipped, revealing intricate patterns. Cavanaugh starts with stitching and creates a new technique.
“I’m now leaving those threads in,” she says. “By keeping them in, I gain a lot of control later on where I want texture, how tightly I wanted it gathered or loosely gathered in various places so I can sculpt more.”
Sometimes she dyes the cloth, sometimes not.
The Greater Columbus Arts Council selected Cavanaugh in 2012 for an artist residency in Dresden, Germany. During her time there, she started working with wire and expanded her vision to sculpt for large spaces.
Inspired by a factory used to repair railroad cars, she sculpted in dimensions she had never tried before. Ultimately, Cavanaugh came back to Columbus and rented studio space in Franklinton artist space 400 West Rich because, she says, “I wanted this big space, with tall ceilings,” to continue her larger works.
While she is pushing the dimensions of her sculptures, she finds it gratifying when patrons study her work close up.
“We’re kind of rewarded if we take the time to look more closely at anything, dig in a bit,” she says.
She has also started to use recycled cloth.
“Most recently, I’ve done a couple of pieces that appear to be like waterfalls and rivers,” Cavanaugh says. “I get a lot of inspiration from rivers, so I like that, but then you get up close and you realize, ‘Oh, that’s a man’s shirt, that’s a woman’s pair of khakis, and there’s a tablecloth and some curtains.’”
Knowing that each piece of cloth has a history sparks her imagination. About a tablecloth, she says, “People have eaten important dinners around this cloth.”
She recently obtained cotton curtains from an old convent. “They’re in terrible shape,” Cavanaugh says. “I don’t care about that. They have a history.”
Her award-winning work has shown in galleries in Oceanside, Calif., and Minneapolis, as well as in our own Columbus Museum of Art. Locally, the Muse Gallery in German Village represents her.
Cindy Gaillard is the Executive Producer of WOSU Public Media’s Emmy Award-winning program ArtZine. Find new episodes on Facebook.
