(1998, Publisher: Françoise Fry, 2729 Montgomery Street, Durham, NC 27705 USA)
ISBN 0-9663450-1-0 Available in English or German
Born in Switzerland, living abroad (in the U.S.) for nearly thirty years, and now returned to her parental home, Heyden has found an appropriate time to evaluate her development and progression as a tapestry artist. As if a cycle had begun, taken off on a spiraling flight, and reached a point that, from above, looks like closure.
Heyden begins her artistic journey at the School of Art in Zürich in 1948. Weaving spoke to her early on, and her independent body of work commenced with hooked and rya pieces. The year that she arrived in the U.S. coincided with her first tapestry, In Tyrannos, and it is from that year that the story truly takes off.
Yet a chronological staging of events is not what this book is about. In her love of both tapestry and music, Heyden chooses to give us a performance, and it is a unique one. It turns out that for her, the real beginning comes in 1971. Developed from simple woven units which repeat, like notes on a page, Triangular Landscape uses combinations of triangles, including diamonds and associated patterns, to build the panorama of valley, mountains and sky. She then introduces another note, the 'wave,' and talks about the "next" two pieces woven with wave forms. This introduces the subsequent step to an intermediate play between triangles and half-rounds (derived from the wave).
This means that each piece depicted has some attribute that shows an advance in complexity over the previous one, and the accompanying text helps convey these progressions. For example, in her commentary on Lifting (1979), she writes:
I became more and more fascinated with transitions from triangles to half-rounds and vice versa. Here, as is the case so often, the design evolved from the process of weaving. I noticed how I could vary the size and depth of the forms.
Each piece becomes an exploration, a discovery that takes place as she weaves. Heyden stresses this point again and again. The craft of weaving must be allowed to influence the art so that tapestry can be an art form in its own right (p.iii). Small sketches and collages might clarify or help her visualize the whole tapestry, but she does not develop them into maquettes or cartoons, preferring a method of creating at the loom. Thus, abstractions of color, form, rhythm, and pattern allow her to freely compose as an artist-weaver as they simultaneously build upon her solid foundations in music and design.
To convey the strength and delight of this weaverly approach to tapestry, she shows us how a simple beginning, i.e., a single form, easily and naturally gives rise to new ideas and multiple forms. Each step might suggest several variations and trigger several pieces. Heyden returns to ideas again and again, bringing an element or a pattern back into her repertoire two or even twenty years after she first wove it. Further complicating this theme-and-variation construction of the book is the fact that some pieces end up appearing before the ones they were clearly inspired by, so that a piece like Tribal Dance, woven in 1991, precedes Amzonas of 1973.
The beauty of this arrangement, though, lies in its non-linearity, in its spiraling movement that brings her back to the same spot that is never the same. If perceived through the lens of history, progression should move in a forward march to the horizon, like an advance to some great destiny. If so, then there is an end to reach, and an end to reaching. For creators, the end disappears into another beginning, barely distinguishable one from the other. For Heyden, it appears that the story is not over, but has reached one of many possible resolutions, written out in a memorable manifestation that gleams like gold.
