(Editor’s note: Photographs from this story were published in Tuesday’s Salisbury Post with copy from the wrong story.)

 

Karen Kistler

karen.kistler@salisburypost.com

SALISBURY — “It’s a labor of love,” said Heather Cohen, a textile designer and artist who has been designing textiles for 47 years.

Cohen will be the May Featured Artist of the Month at Pottery 101, 101 S. Main St., Salisbury. A reception will be held at the gallery on May 2 from 5-7 p.m. during which time the community can come and meet Cohen, talk with her and see her work. Refreshments will be provided.

Cohen said it was a real privilege and she was very honored when Rachel Gunsch, owner of Pottery 101, invited her to be one of the featured artists at the gallery. 

“I said I would love to,” she said. “It’s really nice to be in galleries. It’s an honor because people who come into galleries really appreciate art. They know what it’s all about.” 

Originally from Zimbabwe, Cohen draws inspirations for her designs from surroundings growing up there, it was noted in some biographical information shared in an email from Gunsch.

Cohen’s craft is a very detailed process of artwork, hand painting natural fabrics using different techniques such as Batik and Shibori which she then sews into shawls and women’s tops.

These techniques, she said, are not just a matter of one step and it’s completed, but “each piece that I do, there’s at least 15 steps from beginning to end.”

Batiking, she said, is when she paints with wax and this actually takes “up to 25 steps because getting the wax out of the fabric is a lot of work and preparing the fabric. People don’t realize how much labor goes into each piece that I do.”

Cohen said that her aunt, Leonora Kibel, a Batik artist, taught her this technique.

As for Shibori, which is an ancient Japanese method of dyeing fabric that includes pleating and scrunching, and gives one “more control over the dye,” she said, is something she learned years later “when I was just dabbling in different ways of dyeing fabric.” Cohen said she used to read a lot and saw Shibori in different exhibitions and basically taught herself.

While she doesn’t make the fabric, she does make clothing from it after the painting process. The fabric, she said, is her base, as she has “to have something to paint on and to make into clothes” and therefore orders yardage of certain kinds of fabric that she can paint on. 

Her work requires natural fabrics, she said, and therefore she uses silk, cotton, linen and sometimes, rayon as it “depends on what I’m doing and what season it is, but it has to be natural fabric or otherwise the fabric will not dye and will not take color. I hand paint with dye,” Cohen said.

And the fabric must be white with nothing on it, she added.

Cohen explained that the dye is “sunken into the fabric because it gets absorbed.” She also uses textile paints for all the detailing on the garment.

What she does requires lots of work, she said, but said it’s definitely a labor of love. 

“I’ve done it basically all my life. I just love color so much and I just love working with it. It’s therapeutic for me,” said Cohen.

Having done art all of her life, she said that her aunt noticed that she had a good eye for color.

“I basically grew up in a studio watching her do all her work,” said Cohen of her aunt Leonora. And when it was time to think about going to college, she didn’t know what to do because she had talents in art and music, noting that she also played the piano, her mother was a piano teacher and her uncle was an opera singer.

She didn’t know which direction to take, so when her aunt told her she had that talent with color and design, she suggested she attend textile school and Cohen said her parents sent her back to South Africa where she attended textile school specializing in textile design and color after which she returned to the United States and worked for a large company in Los Angeles.

She and her husband David Cohen currently reside in Mocksville, and has her work at the Piedmont Gallery in Winston-Salem and is a member of the Piedmont Guild of Craftsmen.

Cohen said that her husband travels with her wherever she goes to shows and is a big supporter.

“He’s amazing. I could not do this without him,” she said. “He’s a big part of my business. He doesn’t help in the production part of the work but he does everything behind the scenes. He comes to every show with me” and customers love to chat with him, she added.

At the reception, the community will have that opportunity to speak with them. She said she thinks that customers appreciate talking with the artist and being able to ask questions and if there’s something they don’t understand, it can be explained. 

When asked what got her first interested in art, she said, “I think it’s because I inherited it,” and telling that it was from a very early age that her parents noticed that she was talented in art, “and because I studied it so much all the way through school. It was innate in me. It just came out and basically stuck with me.”