by Kelly Rogge, KCKCC
The latest art show at Kansas City Kansas Community College’s The Gallery is featuring premier regional fiber artist Valerie Doran Bashaw.
The show runs from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Monday-Thursday until May 6 at The Gallery, in Lower Jewell building on the KCKCC main campus, 7250 State Ave. An opening reception is from 4:30 to 6:30 p.m. April 7. The Gallery is free and open to the public.
Bashaw owns Woven Wind Studio in Kansas City and has almost 30 years of experience in printing, dyeing and embellishing silk fabric.
According to her website, www.wovenwind.net, she uses the Japanese shibori resist method and bamboo resist techniques to create garments, wall pieces and silk scarves. She is also an educator at the University of Central Missouri and has had pieces featured in the Strecker Nelson Gallery in Manhattan, Kan.; the Shirley Stiles Gallery in Westwood, Kan.; the Campanella Gallery at Park University and at locations throughout the region including William Woods University, Shawnee Mission Medical Center and the University of Kansas Medical Center. In 2007, she was commissioned by KCKCC to create “Four Seasons on the Kaw River.”
In her current work, Bashaw uses fiber reactive and acid dyes on various silks. The bamboo is used to resist the dyes to produce the graphics. In the Japanese technique of shibori, cloth is wrapped around a pole, scrunched, bound and then dyed, bleached and dyed a second time. This creates images that are reminiscent of shadows in nature, wood grain and water flowing, among others.
“I am attracted to the accidental results, sometimes predictable, often not. It is that duality that I find so compelling,” she said. “Colors get richer as the dyes and patterns are layered too. It does not always have to be pretty; contrasting unrelated patterns gives the viewer more information and can be more interesting visually.”
Bashaw’s wall pieces are about landscape and references to weather. She said she watches the sky and the changing features of the land to find inspiration.
“My family is from the Flint Hills of Kansas, beautiful gently rolling grass lands, full of changing colors as the seasons pass,” she said. “Watching storms roll in and the clouds moving through profoundly effects my work.”
Bashaw’s newest line of collages is called “Zen line.” Made from luminescent fabric, her own hand-printed paper, wood veneer, botanicals and other recycled materials, the work embraces quiet, meditative art that is meant to remind audiences to sit, relax and unwind.
“It’s a way to retreat from the busy world and redirect and refresh the soul,” she said. “I feel that our nervous systems are so over-stimulated by the constant onslaught of computers, television, video, driving and more, it is not as easy to relax as it used to be.”
To schedule a private showing of The Gallery, contact Barbara Clark-Evans, director of the Campus Art Gallery, at 913-288-7504. If interested in joining the Campus Art Committee, it meets at 2 p.m. the last Wednesday of each month.
Kelly Rogge is the public information supervisor at Kansas City Kansas Community College.