For Dee Clements, who makes beautiful hand-woven goods out of her Chicago design studio, Herron, sustainability is key. “I know it’s an overused buzzword, but it’s really important,” she says. Though she’s talking about the environmental impact of large-scale textile production and why she mainly uses small-farm fibers that aren’t chemically or unethically produced, sustainability, in a creative sense, is also on her mind. She’s refreshingly honest about all of the time, effort, risk, and other not-so-Instagrammable realities it takes to keep a practice going, to make meaningful work and put it out in the world.
That said, her Instagram feed is lovely, full of works-in-progress and pieces that have a comfy feel to them while maintaining an edge and sophistication: a muted, dusky palette punctuated with just the right hot pink or bright yellow, soft textures balancing out the precision of intersecting geometric planes. Locals have been able to check out her wall-hangings at spots like the Winchester, where they add to the restaurant’s airy, want-to-sit-there-all-day atmosphere; to the home shop Humboldt House; and to the new Roman & Williams–designed Freehand hotel. This past year, she’s partnered with retailers willing to support her vision of responsibly-made textiles; for CB2, she designed a rug and created a sold-out run of pillows, along with designing two more rugs for The Land of Nod. And lately she’s been busy sampling for her own line, which should be available on her site in September.
Originally from upstate New York, Clements came to Chicago in 1998, to attend the School of the Art Institute. She put herself through college and then worked as a seamstress for the Joffrey Ballet before moving into costuming for theater, film, and TV, while doing her own work on the side. She started Herron five years ago, with a collection of scarves, though what she really wanted to make were “textiles you can use, but that can be really artistic. I was always interested in rug weaving because rugs can be real statement pieces and you can be painterly with them, but I had to work up to that. So I started taking my drawings and putting them towards pillows and blankets and that’s when my work started getting noticed — when I stopped doing the thing that I didn’t really want to do but that I thought people wanted, and started doing what was really natural to me.” If that sounds like a do-what-you-love truism, Clements has earned the right to it through persistence and hard work.
“I’m aware that the mission I’m trying to pursue can come off as preachy and I don’t ever want that to be the vibe,” she says. “I want to make things that people love and that aren’t pretentious, that I’m connected to and that people feel connected to.” Clements is serious in intent but light in mood, with a whole lot of heart, and when we visited her studio on a recent Monday morning, we left wishing we could start every week that way.
“The first time I ever sat down at the loom, what was most magical to me was that every inch of the thread runs through your hands before it’s ever woven into a textile. This is before I learned about production weaving, but the way I dress my looms, I use a warping wheel (shown here) which is a different method than a lot of production weavers use. I still touch every part of the thread before it becomes a fabric and I hand thread all of these looms, so there are flaws. But it becomes a design element rather than a flaw. I just love that your hand is imbued in the piece. It’s human. It has life.”
On the wall: a rug sample inspired by the falling tiles in Tetris, and a wall hanging commissioned by a private client. Clements uses four-harness looms for her work. “Often when you’re doing production weaving you’d use a dobby loom but I use simple weave structure so my looms have these beams which are called sectional working beams, they’re designed so that you can put a lot of yardage on all at once and just weave, weave, weave for a month or two months and not have to stop and redress the loom.”
Clements works with a variety of yarns but mostly sources her wool from Meadowcroft Farm in Maine, and Cestari Sheep and Wool Company in Virginia. The organic cotton she uses comes from California. Direct involvement with farmers is a part of the process Clements finds especially rewarding. She’s invested in “the relationship between the land, the farmer, the weaver, the stitcher, the end product, and the consumer. In that whole relationship everybody supports each other around a central product.”
For her own line, Clements initially had plans for blankets, pillows, table runners, and napkins, but she couldn’t quite raise enough funding for all of that through a Kickstarter campaign, so she’s focusing on blankets for now, some of which are made using this luxurious Merino wool from Maine. “The more your skin touches it, the softer it gets.”
Clements moved to this studio about a year ago. “Prior to that I was working out of my home, to keep overhead and expenses low, so that all the focus could be on the quality of the work. And I don’t want to say things exploded but I started getting bigger jobs and I just had no more space and needed to make the separation between my home life and my work life. I needed to make a clear separation and choice to do this full-time even though it’s really risky and scary. I’m really grateful to be here. It’s the nicest studio I’ve ever had. There’s a great community of other makers here.”
Going all in, on her own, Clements has had to become increasingly savvy about marketing. “It’s not my strong suit,” she admits. “But I’ve been really pushing to branch out and reach out to other places I’d like to work with or carry my work. I don’t always get a ‘yes’ and I don’t always get an answer, which for me, is a big learning experience, to not take it personally, because I feel pretty personally connected to this work.” She hopes, eventually, to have help with the business side so she can focus on the creative aspect.
As an undergrad, Clements initially enrolled in SAIC’s painting program, then switched to sculpture, and then, as luck would have it, she took an intro to fibers class. “There was a two-week unit on weaving. The loom was set up in our class with a long warp so that everyone could try out weaving and I was like, Oh I’m not interested in that at all.” But when her turn came and she started weaving, “I was like, This is amazing! This is for me. So the following semester I completely dropped out of sculpture and took all weaving classes and that’s where I stayed.”
Though she didn’t formally pursue it in school, Clements was always painting on her own and continues to take a painterly approach to her weaving work.
“Everything I do starts on paper first. All of my ideas start as drawings or paintings in my sketchbook, or I’ll work with colored pencils and gouache. From there, I make the plan for the actual textile work and that includes figuring out how many threads are in a piece, how much yardage is in a piece, how many pieces I’m going make. There’s a ton of planning that happens after the drawing process. But the drawing process is the most fun because it’s just totally experimental, totally free.”
On color and form: “Sometimes it’s just playing around with my paint and pencils and seeing what goes well together. I do it really instinctually. I put things together, I cut up my paper and move different colors around to see what combination works. Maybe this brings out the orange, this makes the blue recede. How does this shape pull out this color?”
Once she has the design on paper, Clements then tries to get her yarn to match. “I work with an incredibly talented dyer in Maine. She can match anything. I’ll send her a picture and she can do it. But sometimes the material has its own mind and it wants to do its own thing and I kind of move with it. Sometimes when I get to the loom it totally changes. The yarn or the fiber just translates differently. So I have been known to completely change a design as soon as a I get to the loom.”
When she’s ready to start weaving, it takes Clements a day or two to dress the loom. “I try to design so that several different pieces can be on one warp.” For big projects, she hires local weavers through the Chicago Weaving School to help out. “We work together and create the sample and a weave recipe.” When CB2 asked Clements for a limited edition collection of pillows, she and another weaver, Judith Querciagrossa, wove all 150 of them by hand and Clements sewed them herself.
Tacked to the wall above her desk are works on paper and various objects that might serve as inspiration for larger woven pieces.
It helps to have such a light-filled, homey space when you spend “crazy hours” alone in your studio. “I’m here every day. I almost never take a day off. My boyfriend’s on sabbatical for 15 months and he’s abroad. We’re planning trips and I’m like, ‘I never take time off!’ I’m here every single day. Sometimes I start to realize how long I’ve been alone because I just get weird.” On the wall is a painting by Clements.
“I put up a lot of my work on the walls just to have it and think about it. I take it down when it’s run its course. These are some rug samples and ideas for the future, hopefully.” Clements would love to be able to produce rugs on her own. “I’m just not big enough yet. I don’t have the manpower. So, licensing work, at this point, is good. It gives me a little credibility and it gets some work that I really want to make out into the world but can’t necessarily produce in quantity on my own.”
Curled up by Clements’ desk is Penny, a beagle-dachsund-chihuahua mix who’s been with Clements for about 8 years. On the loom up front, the bright yellow loops are for a series of small one-of-a-kind pieces The Land of Nod asked her to do. The yarn comes from the Manos del Uruguay coop. “It’s all women-run and they hand dye all the wool. It’s a really amazing fair trade organization.”
On the loom is a sample blanket from Clements’ upcoming collection. She loves “wool because it takes dye really beautifully and it’s a little thicker than cotton, it has a different structure, a different drape, even. But she’s also experimenting with cotton blankets.
Clements confessed to feeling “so dorky” when asked about the name Herron. Still, she shared the origin story: she got interested in bird-watching and spotted a Great Blue Heron by the lagoon in Humboldt Park. “There was something so sophisticated and stunning about this bird,” something she hoped her own work reflected. On her right arm, she has a John James Audubon black crow, the Chicago flag, and a spool of thread and scissors she had tattooed after finishing a three-year long art project funded by a City of Chicago grant (all done by her friend Josh Howard). “The large design that connects when I put my arms together is a lithograph of a radiolarian, discovered by the German naturalist Ernst Haeckel, taken from his book of lithographs, Art Forms in Nature.”
What Clements ultimately finds satisfying about her textiles, especially her larger pieces, is that she’s creating “a product that anyone can have, it’s relatable, but it also fulfills this art side of what I do as well. I’m putting something out into the world that’s wholesome and it has integrity and it has a footprint I can trace and tell you where everything came from. It puts all those pieces together for me.”
As a fiber artist, Clements appreciates how “supportive and close-knit” that community is. She draws inspiration, in particular, from Adele Stafford, a weaver in California, who runs Voices of Industry. “She weaves fabric and then collaborates with designers and they make a clothing line. She works with Sally Fox’s farm, the same farm I get my cotton from, in Northern California. It’s such a wonderful labor of love and she does it so beautifully. I know the challenges that go into that. The glossy picture is not the whole story. I feel part of that community, like we get each other.”
It was a couple of years ago that Chicago-based artist Samantha Bittman first captivated us with her intricate, meticulous paintings on woven textiles. We’ve been transfixed by her work ever since, so when we had the chance recently to visit her studio and delve into her process, we jumped. Bittman creates dazzling surfaces of optically challenging patterns that draw you in to reveal greater depths, dimensionality, and unsteadying shifts in perspective. There’s an objective, mathematical precision to her pieces but there’s also a remarkably human warmth — the result, perhaps, of giving in to the parameters created by the loom while also resisting them.
Caitlin Mociun may have been the author of a cult-hit fashion line for only a few years, but the lessons she learned from that stint — about the way she wants a customer to feel, or about the way a body moves in space — inform nearly everything she does today. That first becomes clear when she talks about her massively successful fine jewelry line, which she launched almost as a palliative to her days as a clothing designer. “I never really liked doing my clothing line, and when I switched to jewelry it was such a different response,” Mociun told me earlier this fall when I visited her year-old Williamsburg boutique. “It seemed to make people feel good about themselves as opposed to clothing, which often makes people feel bad.” But it’s when she talks about her boutique that you realize that nothing in the shop could be the way it is if Mociun weren’t first a designer.
It's a quiet summer week here at Sight Unseen HQ. August is approaching, we're spending more and more weekends out of the city, and the time in between them is becoming increasingly shorter and less productive. But that doesn't mean we don't know from hard work — we've spent the last four years pouring inordinate amounts of time and effort into the stories on this site, and so we're all the more sympathetic when we see other blogs doing the same. Case in point: the ridiculously extensive, print mag–worthy interview with ceramicist Ben Medansky we spotted recently on the blog Los Angeles, I'm Yours, a city-centric cultural resource founded in 2011 by The Fox Is Black's Bobby Solomon with editor Kyle Fitzpatrick. We've excerpted part of it here, along with a selection of the accompanying studio photos.
