Woven Into the Fabric of The Catskills

By Christein Aromando

CATSKILLS REGION — Tabitha Gilmore-Barnes is a founding member of AMR and acted as Open Studios Tour Coordinator for many years. She continues to stay very involved in her current role as Secretary on the AMR Board and was excited to see so many new and returning artists on this year’s tour. She was especially pleased that AMR was able to include area high school students as emerging artists this year, an effort she has championed in her time with the organization. AMR has been a “very organic” endeavor since its founding by Alix Travis in 2012, and Gilmore-Barnes credits the hard work of current Executive Director, Rebecca Andre, President, Deborah Ruggerio and Marketing Manager, Rob Brune for almost tripling the Studio Tour participation since that time.

It was such a pleasure to see where Gilmore-Barnes makes the magic happen with her weaving work. Her studio is as much a showroom as a workspace, displaying dozens of intricate tapestries as well as some of her past work in textiles, table runners, scarves, blankets, and shawls. Since her retirement in 2016, she has been able to focus primarily on her tapestries.

There were two series shown in her studio during the AMR Tour. The first is ‘Bring Home the Colors of The Catskills’, tapestries based on some of the sketches she made with the local plein-air group depicting various colorful nature scenes. The other series is based on Scripture. Those tapestries “focus on keywords, woven in the calligraphic Hebrew alphabet, or Latin and Greek”, and celebrate scripture with symbolic colors and imagery.

For some pieces, Gilmore-Barnes uses commercially spun and dyed wools, giving consistency in their color and thickness. For others, she buys locally sourced wool which she will spin up and dye herself, giving a more erratic look and feel with variations in the color and thickness adding texture to the work.

She joyfully demonstrated her technique on the current piece on her loom and explained that she recently spent some time ‘frogging’, a term used when something is not working and you are ripping out the rows and undoing parts of the weave. You “Rip it! Rip it!”, she laughed, mimicking the sound a frog makes.

Along with exhibiting in juried shows or as a member of a group, she is enjoying receiving invitations to show her tapestry work, as she did in the recent show “FABRICATION” at the Olive Free Library in West Shokan.

Currently, Gilmore-Barnes’ tapestry Lost is on display at the 89th National Juried Exhibition at The Cooperstown Art Association Galleries through August 16th (cooperstownart.com). You can also see her work featured in an upcoming group exhibition of the East Branch Delaware River Plein-Air Painters in September at ArtUp in Margaretville (@artupmargaretville), as well as in AMR’s 3rd Annual Exhibition this fall at Margaretville’s Galli-Curci Theater. For more info follow @tgbweavingstudio on Instagram or go to tabithagilmore-barnesstudio.com.