Spotlight: Janis Ledwell-Hunt, Fiber Artist

Janis Ledwell-Hunt creates innovative sculptural pieces using macrame knots in her own unique way. She explores life and death through her pieces that are worked on custom welded scaffolding transcending traditional macrame.

How did you find yourself on an artist’s path? Always there? Lightbulb moment? Dragged kicking and screaming? Evolving?

I was on stress leave from my job as a University College Professor and at the relative beginning of a career that I’d completed many years of schooling to be able to do. One of the ways that graduate programs tend to indoctrinate their students is by making them feel “lucky” to even have a job in their chosen field. I’d wake up every morning telling myself “you’re lucky” as a way to assuage my sense of unhappiness about what had become very strong misgivings about the corporate university structure and the culture of the particular administrative body I was working for. And that eventually ate away at me. 

In an attempt to pick up a new hobby and to learn a creative skill outside of an academic context, I signed up for a beginner macrame workshop. Being able to shut my mind off and work repetitively with my hands flooded my nervous system so positively that I didn’t want to stop tying knots. And I didn’t stop!

6 months after learning macrame, the small Etsy shop I’d opened to sell my creations was really picking up. And with 10 orders lined up for completion, I walked into my Dean’s office and told her I would be resigning from my position to pursue macrame. She was a lifelong crafter herself (someone who’d inspired me to make things to begin with). She made what could have been a very difficult decision/conversation as supportive as it possibly could have been. 

From there, I just kept making things. I kept pushing myself to be more inventive with my designs and to make macrame like I’d never seen it done before. My training is in Arts and Humanities, and I think having learned to research and write academically, I came into macrame with a healthy respect for art, but also with an understanding of the discipline it takes to create with voice–whatever the expressive medium may be. 

Why macrame? Crochet? How do these mediums best express what you want to communicate in your art?

This is such a good question, and I hope my answer will keep evolving over time because I think that artists should always be intentional within their mediums. 

Initially, I just dove into macrame for no greater reason than I loved it; it kept me busy; and I didn’t feel hungry to work with fibre in any other way. 

Eventually, I found myself motivated to use macrame against itself (in a way). I was playing against type and rebelling against the dominant “boho” and geometric design aesthetics that are largely responsible for macrame’s most modern revival. Instead of employing structured patterns constituted by differently ordered knots, for example, I was using knots to create organic-looking surfaces with the intention to mask the knots as knots. 

Now, I try to approach knots a little less adversarially. While I work, I think a lot about the properties of knots. I think about knots as devices; as surfaces; as sculptures; as clusters; as verbs and nouns.

I contemplate the capacities of rope and string too. What are their intentionalities? What are their capacities? In what ways can I work both with and against their grain?

One of the pieces I’m working on right now involves a drip that drops and pools. I’m trying to show the singular moment in time when a drop has just been impacted by a surface so that the effect is of a momentary suspension in time. That prospect is really exciting to me because I think it’s a perfect encapsulation of playing with the expectations of my medium. Rope hangs. It dangles. It tangles. It can be made to billow. It can suspend an object. It can be made to look fluffy, plush, smooth, fringy, etc. But it doesn’t look like continuous drops of liquid.

Are there recurring themes in your work? What is it about a subject that inspires you to continue exploring it?

I’m all about repetition and difference, so I love nothing more than to take the same theme and grapple with it over and over again….like until my partner is so tired of talking to me about it that I have to move into a different room. Lol. 

I like taking living things, making them dead, and then bringing them back to a different sort of life. I see this as an ecological fixation with the ways in which natural (and imagined) relationships are both compositional and decompositional. 

I find solace in knowing that breakdown, or illness, or dis-ease, or death can serve an ecology: a system of relation. That sense of brute materiality is the closest I can come to a system of faith. And so, if I’m to stand back from my work and assert why I do it, it’s that. Otherwise, faith is hard to come by. 

What do you do differently? What is your signature that makes your work stand out as yours?

I would say that, visually, from very early on in my macrame journey, my signature has been the use of a colour gradient with a contrasting white element. I work in gradients more than palettes and I keep returning to stark contrast to convey foreground/background or death/life. 

Another signature I’m developing is the expression of narrative or argument in each of my pieces. When at the early stages of learning academic writing, you are taught to craft an argument–a “so what?” statement that organizes your reflections.

I have to know my “so what?” statement when making a macrame piece. I don’t need anyone else to know it, but I need to know that it’s there. Because in knowing it’s there for me, I have a shot of inviting others to feel curious too.

I’ve read macrame artists discussing knots as language; I’ve heard macrame artists contemplating macrame in relation to psychic states–and I’d like for my work to be able to build on that by offering not just a word, not just a feeling, but by using knots to unpack meaning, or to invite a question, or to pose a possible “so what?” 

A final key signature in my work is my increasing development of fully three dimensional pieces. While knots are themselves sculptural and dimensional, and while my work could always have been called sculptural, I’m moving more into the realm of sculpture itself. And I love the challenge of creating a piece that can adequately represent its subject from every possible angle. 

Do you plan your work out ahead of time, or do you just dive in with your materials and start playing?

I plan my pieces extensively before beginning.  I start with a rough sketch and usually it sits around hung up in my studio for a while so that I can contemplate it passively while working on other pieces. When I feel ready to commit, then I spend a day or two with my partner who is a welder and fabricator. We develop a metal scaffolding based on my sketching of the subject to scale. Once the scaffolding is ready, then I set to work on the piece. 

It’s at this stage where the planning stops mattering, mostly. I find that however much I’ve prepared, a piece can take any direction and my job is to help it to evolve intuitively. In a way, the prep time is only important insofar as it makes me committed to immersing myself in the piece. Once that immersion is underway, I both have control and lose it. I’m at the whim of whatever I feel will make the piece its best self. It’s a process of preparing for total unpredictability. 

How do you manage your creative time? Do you schedule start and stop times? Or work only when inspired?

I wish I was the sort of person to adhere to a strict schedule, but I’m just not. I love this work and always want to be doing it. When I’m not making macrame with my hands, I’m pretty much always visualizing it or researching it or thinking about it in one way or another. 

I encounter limitations with my back in the sense that I can’t always macrame for as long as I’d like to without facing physical repercussions. So, in a way, that leaves me constantly driven to maximize the time I do have working. 

Are you a “finisher”? How many UFOs do you think you have?

Hahaha! I’ve never heard the term UFO used in this way. Ok, currently I have 4.5 UFOs in my studio. And then I have a problem of considering some absolutely finished pieces to be in fact finished.

I’m a “never-finisher” no matter what. If a piece is in my presence, and I really love it, I’ll be plagued with ideas about editing it or adding to it infinitely.

I find that taking pictures of a piece and posting it on Instagram helps me with achieving a sense of closure. It’s by putting it out into my little virtual corner of the world that I can let go of its control in a way.

I am in the throes of finishing an addition to a massive piece I’ve now worked on for 2.5 years. Funnily enough, the piece is literally open-ended because its background spreads across discontinuous metal hexagons that are modular. A year and a half ago, that seemed like a hilarious joke to myself…but now I’m not sure that I should laugh. 

I know that if I take a photo of that piece and share it in full, I’ll be done. And I’m not quite ready to let it go just yet. 

Do you have a dedicated space for creating? If so, what does it look like?

I do! I have the most glorious home studio space that I feel grateful to have every moment of every day!

It’s located in the open mezzanine floor overlooking our house. And it has wooden cathedral ceilings with tall windows that overlook a forest. We live in the country, and that middle-of-nowhere-ness is something I’ve chased for my whole adult life. It’s not just a room of my own; it’s a floor of my own, and it’s the stuff that dreams are made of. 

At the same time as it’s definitely my working space, what I love is that I can also be a part of what’s happening in our home while I’m working. Evenings and nights are really productive times for me, and they’re also the times when my family gathers after the conventional work day.

While I work, I’m able to partake in evening conversation, or listen along with a movie my partner and step-daughter are watching, or look down as our dogs are doing foolish things–and these are all the little joys that nourish me. 

The other very key part about having my studio space set up to overlook our house is that I can hide my chaos. Some might call it “mess,” but I call it creative chaos. There are spools of differently coloured fibres grouped every which way. There are books open on inspirational pages. There are abandoned sketches and ideas. There are tools deposited in not-so-sensible places. There’s life. 

What is your favorite lesser-known tool for your trade? Have you taken something designed for another use and repurposed it for your studio?

Yes! I have a vice! Like a literal vice. It’s got a swivel arm and detachable clasps.

It’s actually been a challenge to develop the right setup for 3D work because macrame is typically done from either a desktop with pin board or a standing rack. Once I got into needing to manipulate my work without overhandling it AND while finding a comfortable enough physical position to be given access to its hard-to-access nooks and crannies, I found that I needed something more specialized than sitting on the floor. 

Loren, my partner, has always been in/around a metal shop and it’s been pretty enlightening to see the ways in which “craftsmen” have tools, devices, setups, and systems that are built around their creative needs. On the other hand, “craftswomen” don’t usually have the same, even though textile production is just as connected to industry as say woodwork or metalwork.

I could go down a rabbit hole here about the different ways in which the term “craft” is used when applied to women’s and men’s creativity, but I suppose I’ll just say the following. As a woman who didn’t experience shop life growing up, I had no real point of contact with a vice until Loren said “you need a vice and here’s why.” He was right. Sure enough, I needed a vice. 

Our fibre supply business, Unfettered Co, sells tools specific to macrame that Loren has designed and created.

Watching me macrame, he’s had the chance to observe the sheer lack of tooling available to crafters, and he’s sometimes offended by what we don’t have. I’m used to a “work with what I have” strategy, whereas Loren is insistent on the practice of building the tools he needs in order to be able to work with greater ease.

If I were to try to put a finger on the issue, I’d say that Loren’s approach comes from having been taught that metalwork has value–enough cultural currency to be granted proper tools. Whereas, despite generations of women spending their lives developing skill with fibre and textile; despite fibre being something that we all interface with in our homes and on our bodies every single day–I still don’t think soft stuff is assigned nearly as much value. And that negation matters. 

Do you use a sketchbook or journal? How does that help your work develop?

I used to aspire to being able to house my sketches and ramblings in a single bound book that I could always find with ease.

For now, I seem to champion a system of marking up impossible-to-find-when I-need-them-bits-of-scrap-paper-stuffed-into-random-books. And, you know what? I’ve come to realize that there’s a method to this madness.

With so many things I could make, if I jot an idea down and forget about it, that’s because I’m more concerned with making something that I can’t bear to forget. Not only is this a valid form of sifting between creative notions; it’s also a way to trust my instincts and remain confident that if I have to re-write or re-sketch something I’ve lost, then it will always be better the second, third, and fourth time around. 

What plays in the background while you work? Silence? Music, audiobooks, podcasts, movies? If so, what kind?

This really depends on the day, the piece, the moment. I find that different pieces have different soundtracks. 

Lately, I’m taking in more and more audiobooks. I used to read so much in my former life and now I’ve lost that because I find that macrame strains my eyes after a productive day. I like listening to audiobooks of short-form essays. I find that biographies are easily digestible fare and they send me down fun tangents of discovery.

Currently, I’m listening to The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot. I can only listen to non-fiction in audiobook form and I enjoy the freedom of “reading” what I fancy (rather than what I think I should fancy…or what I think I should teach to students). 

Which part of the design process is your favorite? Which part is a challenge for you?

My favourite part of the design process is the initial contemplation and planning stage. The dreamery. I love how unhindered this stage is. Everything is possible at this point and there’ve been no let downs…yet. 

The finishing stage is, for me, both the most challenging and fulfilling. I strive to step away from a piece and have impressed myself. That’s the only metric that matters to me because it means that I did my very best at every possible juncture. There are times when I don’t have that feeling, though, and they’re the biggest challenge: the sinking sense that I’ve let myself down because I could have made a stronger piece. 

Tell us about a time when you truly stretched yourself as an artist? 

Well, I am planning to macrame a siren’s vagina dentata that’s loosely inspired by an angler fish and I figure I’ll call this a “self portrait”. But that’s the closest I’ve ever come 😉 

Where can people find you and your work?

You can find me on my (as of writing this) very bare bones personal website, www.janisledwellhunt.com  
You can find my macrame and weaving supply business on Etsy www.unfetteredco/etsy 
You can find some of my finished pieces (and some of my writing) on Instagram @janisledwellhunt 
You can find my far-less-curated self (and more intimate photos of my creative process) on Threads @janisledwellhunt