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[[image]] Threads stand at the ready on a rack in the artist's loft. [[image]] "Entablature," right, Tawney's linen weaving with collage. her "Cloud" series, which entailed knotting hundreds of threads, to assemblages in which she juxtaposes textures of paper, bone and feather, it is not surprising that a visit to her home engages each of the senses. Irises and perfumed oil lace the air with fragrance. The glass of water Tawney proffers tastes of freshly squeezed lemon. To stockinged feet (shoes are left at the door, by the elevator), the floorboards feel at once silky and firm. The same can be said of Angel, her orange tomcat, as he accepts a scratch behind the ears and a caress down his back. His purr acts as a counterpoint to the undulating notes of chanted mantra and to the feast of texture, line and color that fill the eye. Most startling among these is the 9-by-9-foot black weaving that anchors her living space, which, already large, is amplified by the sunlight ricocheting off whitewashed walls, ceilings and floors. "What inspired me was the Greek letter Tau," says Tawney, pointing to the weaving. Her voice is low, her diction precise, her cadence unhurried. "It's also like the Great Eagle Dance" of Native Americans, she adds and spreads her arms, moving them in grace- [[image]] "Blond Bell," left, by Tawney's friend Toshiko Takaezu, stands at the center of the loft. By the front door is Tawney's "Boy with Bird" mixed-media assemblage. 56 • AMERICANSTYLE SPRING 1998 Things simply "came together," Tawney says. "The collage came into being. That's how a lot of things happen in my work." ful arcs. This is the first indication of her love of dance; later, sitting on a couch with her legs tucked up to one side, she tells of having recently returned from visiting her brother in Virginia, where they listened to Benny Goodman and danced all night. Her eyes may not see as well as they used to, but they have not lost their sparkle. With enjoyment, Tawney walks her visitor through the loft. Potted plants line the north window sill, while a collection of pottery, animal skulls, jawbones, stones, wooden combs and turtle shells fill wall-mounted shelves. At her bedside in the partitioned sleeping area, on the walls of her bathroom, under cabinets in the kitchen alcove and by the doorway to the laundry room are photographs of her late guru, the Indian Swami Shree Muktananda, and his successor, Gurumayi. Elsewhere, chairs and loveseats cluster into seating areas, a shelf houses row upon row of milliner's hat blocks, and shoemaker's lasts of varying sizes mingle with pots by Tawney's longtime friend, Toshiko Takaezu. Behind the television set, the oblong drawers of an old-fashioned medicine cabinet hold all manner of bottles, papers, flasks, and bones. In stacks, on shelves and scattered upon tabletops are books on art and religion and catalogs from Tawney's shows. Shelves, drawers, cigar boxes and baskets overflow with eggshells, stones, feathers, beads, rose petals, raw cotton, you name it. "I pick up these objects all over," Tawney explains. "It might be 20 years before I use them." They may turn up in a collage—of which there is an armoire full, each carefully wrapped and labeled by Tawney's studio curator, Kathleen Nugent Mangan. Or they might appear in a boxed assemblage or in Tawney's latest work, the "Shrine" series, which she constructs with the help of an assistant. This kind of collaboration has forced her to change her way of working. When she created open-weave works and sculptural weavings in the '50s and '60s, she explains, "I never had a sketch. I had an idea. I'd put on three or four yards, then use the whole thing to make a whole piece that came out of me." The process remained the same even after she stopped weaving in 1976 and devoted herself exclusively to the collages and assemblages she had been doing for more than a decade. Things simply "came together," she says. "The collage came into being. That's how a lot of things happen in my work." Today, failing eyesight forces her to map out the piece ahead of time in her mind and communicate the vision to her assistant. She, in turn, drills holes in the sides of Plexiglas cubes and creates with colored threads what can only be described as intricate cat's cradles into which, before the box is closed and sealed, Tawney herself places one of her found objects. On completion, she perches them atop pedestals which cluster near the only column in the loft that is not white. Richly gilded, it sports a checkered pattern that recalls both Renaissance pageantry and Byzantine mosaics. "My temple," Tawney calls it, patting its rounded flank. In other ways, however, the shrines embody several persistent themes in Tawney's life as an artist, a life which began with the death of her husband, George Tawney, in 1943, less than two years after SPRING 1998 AMERICANSTYLE · 57
