When she died in 2007 at the age of 100, Lenore Tawney had gained renown for her magnificent fiber works that expanded the possibilities of what textiles could do. Her abstract woven sculptures teetering on the edge of figuration and Cloud thread installations that seem to vibrate in space had secured her legacy as a groundbreaking innovator. 

Less well known, however, are the American artist’s intimate collage postcards and assemblages, poetic indices of her inner life, which she regarded as inseparable from the fiber pieces. Tawney sent this mail art to friends and acquaintances, seeking to express an undefinable message. “I feel that is a very deep, deep part of this work. I’m communicating. Even as I speak it touches me so deeply. So that’s why I send these postcards,” she said in a 1971 oral history interview. 

Now a presentation by Alison Jacques at Independent 20th Century will display Tawney’s fiber sculptures alongside the collaged works on paper and assemblage sculptures, demonstrating the multidisciplinary richness of her practice and casting light on this under-explored aspect of her work.

Unceasing curiosity drove Tawney to continually adapt and challenge her practice. After briefly studying with Lili Blumenau in 1961, she began incorporating the gauze weave technique widely used in ancient Peru. This allowed light and air into the fabric while providing stability by twisting together the warp threads, as seen in the rhythmic filigree of Untitled (1961). Tawney was moving towards her signature “woven forms” of the 1960s that grappled with space sculpturally, hanging freely rather than against a wall.

By designing an “open reed” for her loom, she could depart from the rectangular form to create fantastically irregular shapes, varying the density and direction mid-weave and opening up the middle, as in the two untitled works from 1964. She took inspiration from the East River flowing outside her window and even from the gulls and pigeons, embellishing some pieces with feathers and other matter. 

Tawney only stayed on the Slip for a few months, afterward taking up residence in a three-storey former sailmaker’s loft on South Street, equipped with a working hoist. The vastness of her surroundings expanded her horizons. A more monochromatic palette placed the focus on formal structure, and the pieces grew to an ambitious scale. The ethereal 1962 weaving Dark River was purchased by the Museum of Modern Art but, at 14 feet high, it has never actually been displayed there because of its size. 

It feels appropriate that Alison Jacques’ show of Tawney’s early work is taking place at the Battery Maritime Building, a stone’s throw from the artist’s first New York studios. Tawney later described how creatively frenetic that breakthrough period was: “I worked about six months, oh, I worked just day and night, it was just flowing like a river.” Viewed together, her vertically hanging sculptures evoke cascades of water.

Tawney’s inventive textiles were making waves, exhibited in a 1962 solo show at the Art Institute of Chicago and an influential group show in 1963 at the Museum of Contemporary Crafts in New York, which gave her work an entire floor. Both were titled Woven Forms.

But soon she alighted on a new creative endeavor making drawings, which found their way on to the pages of rare old books in Italian, Greek, Japanese, and Latin. Tawney would affix stones, feathers, bones, and other ephemera to the paper together with fragments of found images and text, and send the cryptic arrangements to friends. 

The collages expanded into three dimensions as boxes and assemblages, constructed with objects she collected from nature. Such amalgamations were in the air: think of Joseph Cornell’s “shadow boxes,” Robert Rauschenberg’s “combines,” and even Carolee Schneemann’s burnt assemblage boxes. Living in New York, Tawney attended openings and absorbed what was happening around her; nonetheless her work was distinguished by a spare aesthetic, informed by her spiritual practice and extensive foreign travels: to Mexico, Europe, Morocco, the Middle East, India, Japan. 

Udjat (1968), named after the ancient Egyptian Eye of Horus, a symbol of protection, comprises a text-covered box inside which small tusks sprout up around a central image of a mummified cat. The show’s titular work, Time Trembling (1969), is a small wooden cage containing a clay pot and an egg. Tawney left interpretation of her enigmatic works open, but said of her collages, “if you just want to take a glance then this isn’t for those people.” Time Trembling hints at Tawney’s elastic conception of temporality. A recurring motif in her collages and weavings is a circle bisected by a cross, which she said denoted the meeting of linear and eternal time at “the moment of being.”

Art and life were one in Tawney’s largely ascetic existence. Visiting her studio felt like walking into one of her assemblages on a grand scale, according to Kathleen Nugent Mangan, Executive Director of the Lenore G. Tawney Foundation. It was her sanctuary, filled with light, space, and serenity. “You felt like you were not on terra firma anymore,” Nugent Mangan says. 

From the earliest days of her revolutionary woven forms in the early 60s, Tawney’s work had a transporting effect on its viewers. Agnes Martin evocatively described the sensation in a text she wrote for her friend’s first solo show in 1961: “It can be said that trembling and sensitive images are as though brought before our eyes even as we look at them; and also that deep and sometimes dark and unrealized feelings are stirred in us.” 

There is that word “trembling” again, pointing to an emotive force that was perhaps rooted in the artist’s spirituality. Martin continued, “There is an urgency that sweeps us up, an originality and success that holds us in wonder.” They are sentiments that have only grown truer with time.