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Appalachian Center for Craft hosting artist Lisa Klakulak exhibition through Feb. 9
Tennessee Tech University’s Appalachian Center for Craft is currently hosting an exhibition of artist Lisa Klakulak entitled “Room for a View,” which will run through Feb. 9.
Klakulak is a fiber-based artist and educator who has maintained a home and studio for her business, STRONGFELT, in Asheville, N.C., since 2006. She works the medium of wool into figurative sculpture and body adornment through intensifying processes of wet felting, natural dyeing and free-motion machine embroidery.
Her work has been featured widely in print publications, fine craft exhibitions and acknowledged through American Craft Council Awards of Excellence. With a reputation for technical precision and its opposite, wanderlust, her career and aesthetic have been marked by worldwide travel to conduct workshops.
She completed a master’s degree in sculpture in 2020 at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, and her recent work investigates the correlation of concepts of space in material, environments and the psyche.
Graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in fiber arts from Colorado State University in 1997, Klakulak accepted a position as the natural dyer for a fiber supplier in Taos, New Mexico.
The following year she was given the opportunity to assist a two-month weaving concentration at Penland School of Craft in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Western North Carolina. That introduced Klakulak to the intentional matting or fulling of wool yarns strategically spaced in a woven grid to create differential shrinkage and undulation from the 2D plane.
Klakulak then participated in a three-year artist residency at the Appalachian Center for Craft from 2002-2005, as she was passionate about the craft school experience and the possibilities of sculpting wool fiber.
Simultaneous to becoming conscious of her own affected being, Klakulak began what has now been a nearly 20-year investigation of the invisible, microscopic workings of wool, how it responds to external conditions and means for expressing herself through its attributes and the wet felting process.
The Appalachian Center for Craft is located at 1560 Craft Center Dr., Smithville, TN.
