A fifty-year-old mom of four living in the Midwest, Cayce Zavaglia will be the first person to joke about how she has the cool factor on lock. Perhaps the anti-Instagram aesthetic of her life has helped release her from the need to care what people think about that other label: fiber artist. After years of relegating fiber arts to mere hobby or quaint craft, fiber arts are coming out from the shadows of the Michael’s aisle, into the light of the gallery.
“A line is a line, whether it’s wool or oil,” says Zavaglia, who was trained as a painter. “The art world is finally embracing it. They’re breaking down this hierarchy of art and craft.”
With the popularity of artists such as Sheila Hicks, Brent Wadden, and Annie Albers, Zavaglia says, “Fiber is no longer the F word.”
She makes portraits of the people closest to her, but doesn’t want to be as boring as a mom scrolling through her camera roll. She knows you’re most likely not going to be interested in her son, unless you can’t tell if his image is made of string or paint. Unless you feel the need to look more closely.
“What gives me encouragement to continue to use my family as inspiration is that, if you look back in history, the famous portraits that Van Gogh did are portraits of people he knew, the postman or his friends. Intimate friends that, once you get that distance of time, you don’t think, ‘Well, this is someone he knew and that’s kind of boring. It’s portrait, in and of itself.”
She sees people who don’t like figurative work as a challenge. How can she stop them at a show, attract their eyes for longer, make them take one or two steps closer with the question: What exactly is that?
With her realistic embroidered portraits, she’s captured not only the faces of her family and friends, but even Giorgio Armani—another kind of fiber artist—on the cover of a magazine. She started small, using just one strand of the six-strand DMC embroidery floss, with a pointillist’s patience.
It can be so hard to tell that the work is embroidery. Though she’ll sometimes set the work on a pedestal, so it can be seen from both sides, people will still sometimes say they don’t know what they’re looking at. They’ll ask, “What is this?”
With Zavaglia’s work, the answer varies. It loops between embroidery and paint, ink and illusion, all inspired by her love of the meditative process of craft.
With embroidery, where another artist might sketch loose shapes with pencil, Zavaglia starts with broad string strokes about an inch or two long, something like a fiber artist’s gesture drawing. She doesn’t rip the stitches out, as one might rub out pencil markings. She stitches over them in tighter and tighter detail as she works the piece out, eventually adding stitches so small they seem like a dot, in order to adjust tone of the limited color menu available.
I’m as interested in the mark-making and the rhythm and the method, as much as I am in the final product.”
“I feel like the ones that are most successful are the ones that stay looser,” she says. “So I feel like I’m always trying to get back to that, but the nature of this work has kind of made me obsessive–compulsive, because there’s just thousands and thousands and thousands of stitches.”
She’s fallen so in love with how the backs of the work look—the verso—that they’ve become as much the work as what would traditionally be the front. She’s been so inspired by them that she actually paints the verso, with loose flings of paint that resemble a loop of thread.
With her realistic portraits and the verso works, she zeroes in on a square, detailing there before she moves on to the next and the next.
“It’s like a Chuck Close approach,” she says, “where by the end, I know what I’m going to have if I just work incrementally.”