FIberarts magazine  features Diane's work  on the cover in its April/May, 2010 issue. 

For more, visit: www.fiberarts.com

The crochet and lace made by the hands of our grandmothers are sold at garage and estate sales where "people are willing to cheaply sell their family heritage." Once familiar tools of daily domestic life such as clothespins and garter clips have become artifacts of previous generations. For Savona, it is these old objects that are touchstones to our ancestors. By using discarded and forgotten garments, cloth, and objects, she "hopes to create a new awareness of these once-everyday items."

She refers to her work as bricolage, a technique that makes creative use of whatever materials are available regardless of their original purpose. A prolific artist who always has five or six ideas in her head,  she tends to work in series: "I know if it will be an oak or a maple, but not where all the branches will go." 

Savona passionately regrets that sewing as a skill is no longer a part of daily life; what knowledge was once passed down from mother to daughter for hundreds of years are dying out. Types of mending

are no longer general knowledge: "Most young people don't own a pincushion," let alone know what a darning egg is or what it was used for. "Unlike the Japanese tradition of 'boro' in which clothing is repaired over generations, we give no value to old, worn, or torn: everything is expendable and not meant to be repaired."

The museum collections are noted for their range of historic clothing as well as personal items and papers relating to the Rosencrantz family, which lived on the property for 163 years. The Hermitage has one of the largest collections of costumes and textiles in the area, numbering more than 10,000 items of men's, women's, and children's clothing including hats, shoes, parasols, belts, jewelry and neckwear dating from 1750 to 1943. The collection also includes table linens, bedding, and window coverings from 1790 to 1940.

Over the past several years, Savona has exhibited her work, which sometimes incorportates digital printing on fabric and phototransfer, in many well-known venues such as the New Jersey Arts Annual,  Craftforms, and Art Quilts at the Sedgwick (now ArtQuilt Elements). In 2009 she received Fellowships from both the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and the Center for Emerging Visual Artists (CFEVA) in Philadelphia, a two-year program that meets twice a month to teach artists how to promote themselves.  She is a member of both Studio Art Quilt Associates (SAQA) and the Surface Design Association (SDA), and she  considers fellow members of her local northern New Jersey fiber-art group, Studio Six, a great source for critique and inspiration.

Through her archaeological art forms, Diane Savona connects with a past that is quickly passing away. Her distinctive creative textile vision pays deep homage to the domestic arts of our grandmothers, which should not be forgotten.Tfacts—fossilized in cloth instead of stone—in the strata and dimensions of her work urges us to remember, preserve,  and honor the past. 

The Hermitage Museum's website is www.thehermitage.org. Closet Archaeology is on view at the museum from January 29 to September 26, 2010.

Through her artistic vision, Diane Savona has become an unusual sort of archaeologist. She uses salvaged cloth and garments, domestic found objects, and intense hand stitching to construct fossil specimens that present textiles in an archaeological context.  The viewer then becomes the discoverer and is encouraged to visually dig through the strata and unearth artifacts for examination. It is this extraordinary combination of quilted art and scientific investigation that has led to an intriguing exhibition of her work at The Hermitage Museum, a National Historic Landmark, in Ho-Ho-Kus, New Jersey9 through September 26). The show, Closet Archaeology, combines Savona's art with artifacts from the musum's collection for a new appreciation of both.

Savona says she feels "a DNA imperative to save the past and obsessively sew it." She learned to sew from her mother and learned some woodworking from her father. Growing up, she always collected things that fascinated her.  After earning a BA in fine arts from Montclair State University, New Jersey, she taught art for thirty years, continuing to collect appealing objects and working in isolation to find her own voice. 

The April/May 2010 issue of FiberARTS Magazine featured my work. This page has the full text of that article, as well as some of the photos. Additional photos have been added.

The Hermitage Museum in Ho-Ho-Kus, New Jersey, incorporates a stone house visited during the Revolutionary War by George Washington and was the site of the marriage of Aaron Burr to Theodosia Prevost in 1782. The museum has two main collections—The Hermitage, or State of New Jersey Collection, and the Friends of the Hermitage Collection—for which the museum acquires, preserves, and conserves objects from 1750 through the 20th century.

In 2005 Savona worked on a solo show with Richard Sgritta, Director of the Lambert Castle Museum in Paterson, New Jersey. When Sgritta became executive director of the Hermitage,  he asked Savona to curate an exhibit that would use their collection to put her art in context - to present history as embedded in art. The result is Closet Archaeology, which includes over forty of Savona's historically based textile artworks displayed with selections from the Hermitage collection.  New works she has created specifically for the show are inspired by artifacts in the museum's collection.  The exhibit reflects a new curatorial trend of presenting historical objets alongside new pieces of contemporary art inspired by collections, such as the recent Lace in Translation exhibit at the Design Center at Philadelphia University which features commissioned site-specific sculptural works inspired by the center's lace collection (on view through April 3).

Savona conceived the Closet Archaeology  installation "as a whole environment," in which three  series of her work reveal her inventive creative process. In  Fossil Garments (2008), deconstructed vintage clothes and segments of vintage crochet and linens are presented on tightly stretched hand-dyed cloth surfaces much like fossil specimens. She has carefully cut apart and arranged the garments to emphasize their human connection. Crochet and lace, showing through the almost transparent garments, appear skeletal. Overlapping layers of mending techniques sometimes obscure parts of the garments, sometimes cut through them. "The rigid framing I use exposes the somewhat sentimental clothing (several are infant christening gowns) in an unemotional perspective, allowing the viewer to examine the clothing as archaeology." Savona has constructed the Markers (2008) series on old metal pants stretchers, "their former function perfectly suiting the new form."

Each Marker examines a specific textile area—mending, knitting, lace, crochet, embroidery, dressmaking, quilting—with instructional text, tools, and salvaged examples all hand sewn together. In her newest series Strata (2009) and Domestic Markings (2009), Savona has sewn buttons, snaps, buckles, and sewing tools between layers of vintage linens—trapunto style—to form fossil-like impressions: "some appear to be freshly exposed artifacts; others are made to resemble columns of hieroglyphic symbols."

The new constructions Savona has created for the exhibit include girdles and corsets from the 1930s, 40s, and 50s from her own collection "preserved" in glass-topped Mason jars and various other artifacts presented in white-painted luggage and "treasure boxes."  Because the Rosencrantz family ran a textile mill on the Hermitage property, Savona printed the story of the family on fabric, cut it into ribbons, and wrapped the strips around bobbins and shuttles from her collection, and  these will be displayed alongside bobbins and shuttles from the museum's collection. "By wrapping the written history around bobbins and shuttles, I am trying to show how history can be read in the objects and textiles we save."