Montminy exhibit traces the fibers uniting Mizzou students past and present

We tend to speak of coordination in terms of the hand and the eye. And certainly the work on display at the Montminy Gallery exemplifies this connection. Taut/Taught, an exhibit featuring University of Missouri fiber arts students past and present, materializing their visions in tapestries, fiber paintings, sculptural vessels and more.

But the exhibit also illustrates a wholly different level of coordination, noticing the invisible thread running between the hand and the soul as these artists convey interior realities — desire, fear, belonging, limitation — through intensive processes such as paper-making, stitching and dying. These creative labors also work in reverse, the hand talking back to the soul, clarifying what it can only murmur.

Exhibiting artists were nurtured at MU by the likes of professors Jo Stealey and C. Pazia Mannella, an opening card explains. The title "homophone ... suggests this mentor-mentee relationship" cultivating skills in "many fibers processes" that involve a physical tension, a tight stretching, the card adds.

Vessels spread throughout the Montminy testify to the resilience of these materials and those who create with them. Cynthia Evans uses everything from cast paper to steel, rust solution to found objects, copper to yucca, to craft remarkable containers — resembling goblets, jars and more — as well as human forms that arrive like an ancient remnant.

Newly-installed gallery director Betsy Knabe Roe contributes several pieces from her "Core Remains" series, which examines human damage wrought upon various ecosystems and expresses a deserve to preserve what was for the sake of what is to come.

Using paper, wool and thread, Roe creates tenuous, tissue-like networks that seem as though they might dissolve at any moment — yet they hold strong and sure.

Mannella works at varied scales, with impressive tapestries as well as smaller works that create vital, beautiful patterns using handmade paper, drawn and painted elements, and even flower crowns and seeds.

Also looming large are wall hangings by Farëna Saburi, whose work explores the confining effects of cultural gender constructs and immigration experiences on a person's interior and physical mobility. Saburi's work articulates a longing to occupy space, an artist's statement notes, and the pieces are marked by gestures toward opening up and moving through.

Narratives find the viewer in fabric paintings by Breanna Mitchell. Employing an abaca base and abaca pulp paint, Mitchell shares scenes of domesticity — in several pieces, the artist centers the very furniture that cries out to offer us rest — and small-town childhood.

Sophie Pickering's "Forgetful Day in Yuba City" tells a poetic tale in three parts. A sort of triptych made of paper, wood and glass, the piece expresses relationships between a girl, her father and their dog, emphasizing, erasing and slivering elements in each successive piece to complicate our seeing and knowing.

A playful series of pillows by Annie Helmericks locates cats moving through various scenes and stories, acting as the main characters they know themselves to be.

Kailyn Hill offers several distinctly powerful bodies of work. Prints on paper — some in vivid color, others in grades of black and gray — portray the same female visage; the repetition, variation and even overlap of her face suggest the elusiveness of knowing and being known. In another series, Hill preserves flowers with resin and paper, contemplating what disappears and what lasts (and why).

A profound unity runs through Taut/Taught, something no smaller than a common educational lineage, yet suggesting much more. These pieces convene to beautifully, sometimes painfully, illustrate purpose: how we are always remaking ourselves; how we tether ourselves to cultures, people and places we love and fear losing — this is especially profound in the work of Marina Cano — or unhook to be woven into a more forgiving fabric.

We come alive through touch and materiality, and these artists supply abundant evidence of that crucial relationship.

Taut/Taught remains on display through July 15. The Montminy Gallery is located inside the Boone County History and Culture Center. Visit https://www.themontminygallery.org/ for hours and details.

Aarik Danielsen is the features and culture editor for the Tribune. Contact him at adanielsen@columbiatribune.com or by calling 573-815-1731. He's on Twitter @aarikdanielsen.

This article originally appeared on Columbia Daily Tribune: Montminy exhibit traces the fibers uniting MU students past and present