Artworks

56 x 50 in
142.2 x 127 cm

Ziek and her husband, the painter Mark Goodwin, spent 16 months on the road from 1982 to 83. They were in India for half of that time, an experience that inspired Ziek to depict chakras, the energy points in Hinduism. “I was reading about chakras, but then I asked myself, ‘Do
I really feel them?’” Ziek says. “Weaving is a focusing for me, so I thought, ‘I’ll understand it through weaving.’”

Ziek first executed warp paintings in 1979 at the University of Kansas. “I was so ignorant that I thought I had invented it (and ironically, my teachers thought so too),” she writes. “But of course the more I learned the more I saw it has been done in many cultures in many ways. In the beginning I would thread my loom with a long warp, then pull the warp I wanted to paint out front onto a table, and paint it with fiber-reactive dyes.”

She continues, “By leaving the warp wet for 24-48 hours (now people call this ‘cold batching’) the reaction between dye and thread would happen so the color is permanent. Then I would use many buckets of water and wash the warp (if not washed, the dust from the dye is unhealthy) and let it dry. Because the threads were already aligned through heddles and reed, they kept the shapes I would paint.”