KAREN HAMPTON - WEAVING HISTORY

 What inspired you to be an artist?

I grew up and my mother sewed and my grandmother has been a seamstress in New York, and had supported her family so all of her daughters sewed so when I was a young child she first taught me to sew by hand to sew my doll's clothes.

By 8 years old I had to be on the sewing machine that began a long period of time of me making clothing up until midway through high school. I didn't want to wear these nice clothes I was making. What I wanted to do was be a hippie, but I was too young to be a hippie so I started embroidering clothes, doing lots and lots of macrame.

Then in my last semester of high school, when I was trying so hard to figure out what I was going to do when I grew up I made the decision to take some of the classes that I loved which were art classes. My last semester of high school I took a design craft class, I took life drawing, and I took woodshop. That was the beginning of the formation for me.

"In design craft I learned to weave. I was halfway through my first weaving when I had an epiphany and I said ‘oh my God I could do this for the rest of my life.’ "

Did you face any hardships getting your art featured?

Yeah, I grew up in L.A. and I was one of the first 27 kids in voluntary bussing. I grew up in the Washington and La Brea area, but I went to elementary school in Bel Air so I was used to a lot of different communities, lots of different people and I felt like I knew how to move in a lot of different environments. Later long after I studied, I had a type of entitlement and I felt like ‘I can go anywhere’ ‘I can live anywhere' 'doing art heals me.' I didn't see the levels of racism until I was smack in the middle of it. People didn't accept the work that I made, that I could have made it, like I had to be fronting for someone else.

"It's like this whole thing where you can only have this mental picture of who you are and that's the only person you can be ..."

I completely cut myself off at that point from the textile fiber world and just worked within the broader group that had painters and people that were into new genre and conceptual art.

Why did you choose cloth as your medium?

It really was because I started with it so young. My first 25 years all I did was weave, then I started doing my first stitch pieces.

"It was more like the medium took me over rather than the concept of being an artist."

What do you hope people will get from your art?

I hope it makes them think. I hope that one of the driving forces is that when people spend time with my work, their consciousness as well as their unconscious is captured by it and that it makes them think about how history is so much more than what is before your eyes than what you're getting out of a textbook.

Due to the global pandemic, many artists have either experienced a cap in creative or have found it a wonderful opportunity to dive further into their work. How has your relationship with your art changed during this time?

It’s been really interesting and I understand that cap with creativity very much. Like I can make samples, but it's very difficult to make new work and part of it is because I look at these topics that are right there in our faces now and these are topics that I deal with all the time in my work. This just felt like such an extremely heavy period, but what I've been doing this whole period since April/May is I have been asked to speak a whole lot. I've been speaking on a lot of webinars and I'm producing a series of four webinars where I'm in conversation with other black fiber artists.

You know it's like all about remaining flexible and figuring out 'okay what's the best thing for me to be doing right now.' [Webinars] feel like a medium I can work in. I like to talk so its a good thing and I get to help showcase other people and their talent.

"For me it's all about community. That was one of the things that I gained when I was really young when people took me under their wing and so I try to help as many people as I can."

FOLLOW KAREN HAMPTON:

Website: https://www.kdhampton.com/