"The core of her happiness"
Mary Tooley Parker's hooked rug "Medieval Tapestry" revisits her grandmother's garden. Her show "The Crystal" is at LaiSun Keane.
A luscious conversation has been going on recently between textile art and painting. Needlework is traditionally an undersung domestic art that is the domain of women. Painitng is historically the vaunted domain of men held up as geniuses creating masterworks that reshape the way we see. That binary sets up juicy territory to explore in between. Mary Tooley Parker’s hooked rugs spring from there. They play with the perspective, vibrant color, and narrative of painting and the tactile comfort of textiles. She makes them entirely by hand, including dyeing and mixing colors and cutting dyed strips in varied fabrics to hook into her linen matrix.
Her works are view through March 31 in her solo show “The Crystal” at LaiSun Keane. Mary walks us through her creative process below:
In my recent work, I find myself searching for a happier place and time. The medium I have worked in for the past 24 years is a 19th-century rug making technique called traditional rug hooking. It is a slow, meditative process and, during all the turmoil of recent years, with the pandemic, social upheaval, political insanity, and new wars, I have found solace in my work. The physicality of the intentional focus of hooking calms me, the softness of the materials is a balm, and the subject matter I've turned to are the places and people I have known and loved that are gone. With this work I rekindle memories of safety, kindness, caring, good food, and joy. Nostalgia is often now dismissed as sentimental and trivial but bringing these forever-fixed-in-time experiences back to mind during these difficult, frightening times has been refreshing, restorative, and healing to me.
I began this recent body of work hooking several pieces centered on my grandmother's farmhouse in Wisconsin, where we spent every summer as kids, and was such a welcome contrast to the New York City suburbs where I grew up. These were places I wanted to put myself into again. I wanted to feel myself in the space, to turn in any direction and see what was there. After thinking about my grandmother Ruth during the weeks and months of hooking, I wanted to then pay tribute to the core of her happiness, which was her garden. There she grew strawberries, grapes, cucumbers, beets, chard, cabbage, green beans, and rows and rows of flowers. She transformed much of this into incredible jams, pickles, pies, and more. This was her “Art” and became the subject matter for “Wisconsin Medieval Tapestry.”
So that’s the thinking behind this piece; now for the process.
It starts with a sketch. Ruth lived on the farm and worked in her garden until she was 93. The pose she takes in the sketch shows how she was still able to bend, move and work at that age. Her striped gardening pants were these cool, straight legged, ‘50’s style pants which I admired, so she gave them to me, and I sported them around the East Village, where I was living at the time.