Lin Bentley Keeling: Weaving ‘as a form of visual music’

“I think I was always interested in art, not as a practitioner at first, but I always gravitated to art images,” said weaver Lin Bentley Keeling. “My grandfather started painting when he retired, and he was quite good. And, growing up in Arizona, I was exposed to the weaving and basketry of Native American artists.”

Keeling and her husband moved to El Paso in 1978. She has been a member of the Las Cruces-based Mesilla Valley Weavers Guild (MVWG) since 2006. 

“As a child, I embroidered and did other needlework, and my mother was a quilter, but I became serious about working in fiber art around 1980,” Keeling said. “I played piano growing up and studied music at Arizona State for a couple of years. I experienced wonderful images of color and movement when I played or listened to music and tried to compose music, but it didn’t work. So, I turned things around and began to create works in fiber inspired by music – jazz, ambient and classical – and the colors and movement of the natural world. These inspirations continue in my work today. 

“I sketch in pastels and colored pencils and I’ve worked in acrylics, but I prefer fiber as a medium,” Bentley said. “I love the feel of the yarns, the way colors behave in different fibers. And, I think people respond to works in fiber differently than they do paintings. There is a strong desire to touch and experience the work physically that you don’t have with other art forms,” she said.

“I create coiled, sculptural vessels as a form of visual music,” Keeling said. “Vibrant, flowing colors are a hallmark of my work. Each piece evolves as it is created, spiraling upward and outward, coiling and growing from its inspiration … a color, a movement, a phrase of music.”

Keeling said she has had “a little formal art training -- a few semesters at UTEP – but her primary art training has been “experiential, as well as reading about and studying the works of other artists, especially what other artists write about their work and the creative process.

“I find it helpful in clarifying my own thoughts about the work, which for me is very non-verbal and visceral, so I have to find a way to express in words what I do and what it means to me,” she said.

Keeling said the inspirations for her art include not only music, but also the yarns she uses, as well as nature: “the birds, wind, trees, etc. I think of visual art in the same ways a musician or composer feels about music: it’s the emotion, the feeling I’m trying to express, something outside of language, a different form of communication.”

Keeling’s art has been featured in several shows with the El Paso Art Association, the Arts International exhibition in 2014 and 2015, a small group exhibition at Unsettled Gallery and Studio in Las Cruces in 2013 and another at the Tombaugh Gallery in La Cruces in 2014 and several MVWG shows, including this year’s Local Color exhibition at the New Mexico Farm and Ranch Museum. 

“I really enjoy having a local weaving guild, even if it is 35 miles from my home, because there is no substitute for gathering and sharing your work with others who do what you do,” Keeling said. “Although our name says ‘weavers,’ we are an eclectic and open group with spinners, knitters, basket makers. Some members are more traditional, and some are very contemporary and experimental, so it’s a wonderful mix of approaches to fiber.”

Keeling said she uses “traditional coiled basketry techniques with contemporary materials in which a thick but flexible material is wrapped by a finer material. While wrapping, the core is coiled and stitched into an ever growing spiral. The resulting basket can either be an open bowl shape or the coil can be moved on top of the outer ring of the spiraling disk to build sides and form a vessel.

“I use macramé cordage, usually jute or sisal, for the core material of my vessels and weaving and knitting yarns to wrap and stitch the coil together,” she said.

For more information, contact Keeling at lbkfiberarts@gmail.com. Visit www.LinBentleyKeeling.com and www.mesillavalleyweavers/member-pages/lin-bentley-keeling.