We recently connected with Loraine Lynn and have shared our conversation below.

Loraine, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Learning the craft is often a unique journey from every creative – we’d love to hear about your journey and if knowing what you know now, you would have done anything differently to speed up the learning process.

I learned what I do through a variety of methods. Currently my work can be described as installation using tufted textiles. The goal of the spaces I set up are to act as spaces for gathering and connection, whatever that looks like to the viewer.

I didn’t start out working with fiber. I started my journey in art through craft, studying glassblowing in undergraduate and part of graduate school. I’ve always been drawn to disciplines that require physicality — there’s something very satisfying about creating art using your entire body. Glassblowing demands your full attention and you’re constantly moving around. It’s a challenging yet rewarding way of creating.

I don’t do much glass work nowadays, but it led me to weaving, which got me to tufting. I’ve been making tufted work and installations using those elements for about five years now, which is wild to think about. I don’t know if I would’ve arrived at this point without starting off somewhere radically different, and at the same time, very similar in terms of the aspect of physicality.

The way I work is both rapid and also slow moving. There are times I wonder if picking up these craft skills quicker would’ve helped me. I always come to the conclusion that speeding things up would’ve detracted from my overall experience. If I didn’t take time to experiment, be comfortable making mistakes and learn through trial and error, I don’t think my work would be where it is now.

Slow and steady isn’t glamorous, but it’s a helpful idiom to keep in mind!

Loraine, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I’m an interdisciplinary artist who started off working in glass and found their way to fiber. I focus on making installations using tufted textiles I make, arranging them in different types of spaces to create places for gathering and connection amongst viewers.

I consider my tufted work a celebration of creative labor. The visual elements of each piece – compositions brimming with tactile joyfulness, bright colors, plush shag, and loopy loops – are meant to elicit joy and a sense of visual wonder. I feel like my most recent work, an installation for FRONT 2022 at the Cleveland Institute of Art, embodied this aspect.

Even though I am serious about my creative work, I want to make the experience of viewing and interacting with it less so.

Any resources you can share with us that might be helpful to other creatives?

I wish I’d known about artist residencies when I was first starting out. I think they are a crucial in helping artists break out of their routine and look at their practice in new ways. The communal aspect of residencies is pivotal to making this happen — the ability to meet people from all over with differing opinions who are on the same path is a wonderful privilege. Residencies usually lead to new bodies of work that wouldn’t have been possible without the opportunity to switch things up.

Definitely wish I had known their value sooner!

What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?

The idea of “mis-performance” is a concept that is one of the main drivers of my creative journey.

“Mis-performance” comes in many different forms, but the way it manifests for me is in refusal. Defying the rules and expectations of disciplines and seeing where that leads. I do this through exploring different materials to give tangible form to my curiosity on how identity, types of labor, and acts of categorization shape our perception of the world around us. Because of this, my creative practice sits at an intersection of multiple disciplines, existing somewhere in-between. In that undefined space there exists potential for discovery, tension, and failure.

Contact Info:

• Website: http://lorainelynn.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/loraineruetz/