ART SPACE
SAMANTHA BITTMAN
Sometimes the right things come to you at the perfect time.
For the artist Samantha Bittman, it was weaving, which she
first discovered as a freshman undergraduate student at the
Rhode Island School of Design. A friendly teaching assistant
was a textiles major and used to share her projects. Bittman
started to spend more time at the textile studio and was immediately
hooked. “When I saw all of the yarns on the shelves
and the loom room with rows of hand-weaving looms, I knew
right away that it was exactly what I wanted to do,” she says.
To make her bold and intricately designed pieces, Bittman
first weaves a textile on a handloom in her East Williamsburg
studio, letting the weave structure and limitations of the loom
dictate the patterns. Once finished, she stretches the textile
and paints over parts of the design, filling in gaps and making
additions not possible with the loom. “This way of working allows
for more improvisation and decision making that is more
responsive to the work as a whole,” she explains. “The result is
something that is both weaving and painting and, oftentimes,
it is difficult for the viewer to distinguish between the two
surfaces in my work, especially in reproduction.”
After a year in which so much activity, artistic or otherwise,
was put on hold, Bittman says her work is starting to pick up
again. She recently prepared pieces for a solo show at Ronchini
Gallery in London that opened in March and is working
on a wallpaper installation for the Everson Museum of Art in
Syracuse, N.Y. —Craig Hubert
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All works, 'Untitled,' 2020. Photos by Samantha Bittman.