Like all great arts, textiles recreate our visiton of the world. We hold them up as exemplars of skill, ingenuity, creativity, and ambition. Textiles are poetic metaphors woven from ideas just as much as they are physical items woven from fibres.

Joy Boutrup is a textile engineer, chemist, and historian from Denmark. Catharine Ellis is a textile artist from North Carolina who specializes in combining weaving and dyeing. They first met at Penland School of Crafts in North Carolina. They have worked and taught collaboratively for many years.

In this lecture Amy Putansu will discuss how notions of spirituality have influenced her own hand-woven artwork. Inspired by Buddhism, Zen design precepts, and the minimalist art movement, Amy presents a powerful way to reimagine textiles as an invitation to the divine.