Kay Sekimachi

A recent addition to our small but growing collection of fiber art, this miraculous box serves as wonderment and inspiration to our students and public, especially when they discover how it was made. Sekimachi was inspired by Japanese forms familiar from her second-generation Japanese-American background in San Francisco. She wove it on the loom as one four-layered piece, called quadruple cloth, using soft, single-ply linen. The sides and top were patterned by printing on the warp to emphasize structural planes in the finished piece, which she unfolded into its box shape once it had been taken off the loom. The clarity of the resulting box is deceptively simple, yet sculptural, translucent, and elegant. Master designer Jack Lenor Larsen commented in a recent catalogue essay that the form is "impossible of reduction in any way."