LEA FEINSTEIN
WEBSITE: leafeinstein.com
IG: @leafeinstein
EMAIL: leafeinstein@gmail.com
ARTIST STATEMENT
textile eyes-- When I walk, I notice grids, threads, filaments, texture--but I don’t make traditional textile art. I have woven felt and paper, shells and sand. I have made wall-sized paper “kimonos” collaged with tin can labels and photo copies of grocery receipts. I saved blue plastic NY Times bags for five years and wove them with persian wool. Twenty-two feet became two pillows and a rug. For a “coming of age” performance , I made a coat from paper drawings and burst out of it. I have used textiles to tell stories-- about my life--coming of age, mothering, shopping, cooking, washing, childcare...the sacred and the mundane tasks of being a female human being.
Tyvek enabled me to change the scale of my work..to enlarge it, and make it more visitble. In 1998, I bought a 40”wide x 50’ roll of Dupont Tyvek Housewrap from a Home Depot in Towson, Md. I like its crisp whiteness, the fact that it is acid-free, that it doesn’t stretch or shrink when wet, like paper, and that I can cut long swaths of any length for my art practice. After using it as a 2-d paper and canvas substitute for many years, I decided to push what I could do with it. So I dyed it, folded and crumpled it, cut and burned it. and am still working to expand its expressive potential for art making.
Through it all, since 2000, my works on tyvek have had a distinct textile sensibility. Friends suggested my paintings would be beautiful rugs. Grids, stripes, and filaments feature in my paintings--long swaths are cut into 1‘wide strips. Pleated, dyed, woven and folded they are 3-d constructions. Burning creates holes like wounds. Heated, the material crumples like wads of gum.
BIO
Lea (Vaughan) Feinstein (b. Boston, MA) lives and works in Los Angeles. Her studio community at Keystone Artspace is an inspiring springboard for her work. She has taught at RISD, MICA, CCA, Georgetown University, and George Washington University.
A widely respected art writer in the Bay Area, she has written for Artnews Magazine, ArtLTD Magazine, SFWeekly, Artpractical.com, and The Daily Serving. And in the past, she has also written for the Baltimore Sun; Link: A Critical Journal on the Arts (Baltimore); Providence Business News and QuixArt Quarterly (Providence).
She has exhibited her work in galleries in Washington, DC, Baltimore MD, Providence and Newport RI, and in the San Francisco Bay Area, and is in many private collections. Public installations of her work are installed at NYU Neuroscience Center, The Lieber Institute of Brain Research (Baltimore), and have been exhibited at Stanford University.