Cayce Zavaglia & The Haphazard Beauty Found behind Her Fiber Portraits
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.”
As her works have gotten larger and larger, with bigger needles and thicker thread, she’s not only had to move up from the standard embroidery skeins to yarn, she’s also had to lose the hoop for tension machines of her own invention, frames to staple the fabric to, then a large stretcher that allows her to work in three-foot sections. This means she can’t see the entire image until it’s done, a process that can take six months. This feels a bit like a chef who’s not allowed to taste until the dish is complete, a handicap which makes the outcome all the more impressive.
“I feel like I never want to get pigeonholed as a fiber artist, but I am a fiber artist, so I’ve done this to myself,” she says. “And so instead of rejecting that, I’ve really thought about how this medium has so much potential. I believe in it so much and I’m not tired of it yet, so instead of trying to distance myself from it, I really tried to turn my eyes toward it. I started trying to think, ‘What else can I mine from this world of craft and needlepoint and embroidery that I could spin in a more modern way?’”
The verso works (on the other side of the linen) also show the other side of Zavaglia. She says that though she’s deeply invested in realism and the realistic figure, there’s a part of her that wishes she were more of a wild artist, someone who does abstract figurative work, such as Jenny Saville. When she realized her tightly controlled front images also automatically created something she could mine as source material for abstract works, it sparked her creative energy, inspiring her to not only display, but also paint what she saw there.
“It’s been interesting to see how, with the embroideries, they look like a painting from a distance, and then when you get close, you discover they’re embroideries,” she says, “but then the giant paintings that I’ve done of these verso images, the opposite happens.”
Now she’s blurring all the lines. During quarantine Zavaglia created “Unspoken,” a five foot square piece with as much paint as embroidery, with pom poms and sequins that look like a figurative abstract painting from a distance. It’s only by getting closer that you see what’s real.
they look like a painting from a distance, and then when you get close, you discover they’re embroideries…”
“For me, it was really important because we were all lacking touch over COVID,” she said. “The people who saw it were like, ‘I just want to touch it.’ So I was trying to give them that feeling, with the pom-poms and stuff like that—that you were trying to resist not touching it.”
The pompoms are a fairly recent addition, which ironically scream craft, but they come from a history of decoration, not the description of color or a subject. Zavaglia values them for how approachable they are. It’s hard to be intimidated by something you made as a kid at camp.
On a trip to Art Basel where she was finally able to see Tracy Emin embroideries in person, the scrap silk sewn into the work sparked an idea in Zavaglia to expand out with found materials. She started buying old needlepoint pillows and scraps and dyeing them to subdue the bright colors. Then she snipped them up and sewed them in. It gave her a way to incorporate her love of antique thrift stores into her work with another accent of embroidery, speaking the same language.
“I still have so much respect for the person who just still loves to make those. Like, buys the kit at Michael’s that has been produced since 1970,” says Zavaglia. “Incorporating those scraps is kind of like holding hands with the work that they made. They never would have thought it would be in a piece, in a gallery, so that’s kind of fun to reuse those pieces in that way.”
Though she’s not into cross-stitching herself, the seduction of all those x-shaped motions lured her into painting ink portraits from rows of tiny blue x’s.
“I’m as interested in the mark-making and the rhythm and the method, as much as I am in the final product that’s figurative, or a portrait, or something like that,” Zavaglia says. “So for me, I’m always trying to keep those things competing for your attention.”
It’s knotted and messy, it’s complicated, it’s hurt. It made me content to stay on the path that I’m on: of investigating this other side…”
In her pieces, the linen becomes a metaphor for the literal skin, or at least the liminal space between what we hold inside and what we share to the world, the thoughts spoken or unspoken, the scars visible or emotional, the self-confessed or hidden. Rather than the front and the back, it’s the external and the internal.
In the time of COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter, as Zavaglia felt small and helpless, as she was turning fifty, as millions of people died in a plague, as people trauma-bonded on a global scale, she dove deeper into experimentation, the self-approved love of this craft, and the kind of meaning behind it all that ensures it is, indeed, this human thing called art.
“What I came out of COVID with is: For me, this verso image is really, really important. Because a portrait of my family may not speak to everyone, but this verso—this other side that we all possess—is something that we can all relate to,” she said. “It’s knotted and messy, it’s complicated, it’s hurt. It made me content to stay on the path that I’m on: of investigating this other side, and hopefully through my work, speaking more universally to who we are on this side no one sees. That we’re all a mess and scared and feel small.”*
This article first app[eared in Hi-Fructose Issue 60, which is sold out. Get our latest print issue as part of a new Hi-Fructose subscription here and support our independent arts coverage.
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