For Merle Axelrad Serlin, that long-out-of-date plaid skirt in the back of your closet holds tremendous value, as does the should-have-been-pitched-years-ago frayed blanket relaxing in the spare bedroom. Same goes for those well-worn silk pajamas you’ve stashed away somewhere. To Serlin – a Sacramento artist who creates giant landscape images from old clothes and fabric samples – each tattered piece of cloth possesses more potential than its original use. A swatch of the wool plaid skirt, for example, could become part of a boulder. A patch of the blanket might morph into a mossy field, and a sliver of the silky pajamas will easily blend into a meandering stream.
Friends, fellow artists, interior design companies – even strangers – know that Serlin welcomes old clothes and fabric scraps.
“I refer to myself as ‘the last stop,’ before the garbage can,” she says.
Sometimes Serlin finds unmarked boxes of discarded dresses, pants, shirts, dust ruffles and more outside her door. Often, there is no note left behind. A few fabric representatives with whom Serlin has cultivated working relationships periodically box up their discontinued samples and ship them to her studio in Sacramento’s Art Foundry Building near downtown.
“There’s nothing more useless than a sample of a fabric that no one needs,” Serlin says. “I help interior designers clean out their closets, which helps them be green by recycling, and it helps me to be green by using recycled fabrics.”
The artist’s environmentally correct habits date back to the early 1990s when she first started making giant art quilts, well before being part of the “green scene” was mainstream.
At the time, Serlin was thinking less about the environment and more about securing the right color, texture and “ambience” in a fabric, all of which could be found in private closets, dresser drawers and cedar chests.
Today, the essence of her work is largely the same. She searches for a precise hue and feel in fabrics and creates magnificent landscapes or close-ups of nature that, in the end, look more like paintings or three-dimensional sculptures than carefully stitched old cloth.
Each collage starts with a photograph taken by Serlin. She then sketches the image onto paper. Next, she paints and dyes fabric (if it isn’t already part of her vast, carefully organized collection). Eventually, Serlin layers very small pieces of fabric to get certain visual effects, and then sews each piece to another piece and then again onto a canvas backing. All of this is achieved on the artist’s standard, no-frills sewing machine.
The finished masterpiece typically requires between 200 and 400 hours of concentrated labor. One completed image usually includes thousands of tiny pieces of fabric, sometimes just a quarter-inch in size.
Before creating one-of-a-kind fabric art, Serlin worked for 12 years as an architect in the Bay Area. The relentlessly stressful work of juggling schedules, budgets and egos prepared her well for the tedious, but gratifying, work of fabric art.
Ultimately, the solitude of making art using fabric and the sometimes-repetitive sometimes-exhilarating process is far more consistently pleasurable, she says, than the demands of architecture.
After leaving the architectural path, Serlin’s initial steps into the art world were painful. In the mid- and late-1990s, she was regularly shunned by traditional art gallery owners who didn’t consider fabric art to be anything more than fancy quilts. They didn’t want her work hanging in their spaces.
In response, Serlin sought diverse public places at which to show her art. She found open arms – and checkbooks – at hospitals, retail outlets and municipal utilities.
The turning point came in 1999 when, in a fiercely competitive process, she was selected to create art for elevator lobbies on eight floors of the 25-story EPA building in Sacramento.
“I was dumbstruck,” she recalls. “That afternoon my life changed.”
Until that point, Serlin had made only one small landscape quilt representing an aerial view of the Sacramento Delta. The idea came after years of flying and looking out the window as the aircraft approached Sacramento. Tickled by how her hometown looked like a quilt when viewed from several hundred feet in the air, Serlin pulled out her camera and clicked away, determined to replicate nature’s quilt in her studio.
Other Serlin pieces hang in private homes and healthcare facilities. Five eye-catching pieces are permanently on display at Sacramento City Hall as well. Each one – stationed at the elevator banks on five floors – is part of a tree, starting with the roots on the first floor and ending with the canopy of leaves on the fifth floor.
Serlin is now in the middle of creating four pieces for an exhibition called “12 Voices,” organized by the nonprofit Studio Art Quilt Associates. She was one of just 12 artists chosen in the international competition. The show – meant to highlight the best fabric artists working today – is scheduled to launch at the Dennos Art Museum in Traverse City, Michigan, this fall. It will travel across the United States for one year.
Serlin’s next creative endeavor is designing collages using not only the right visual fabric, but fabric that is unique, meaning time-sensitive fabric or cloth with a story.
“I’m looking to use fabric from the same people living in a community who will ultimately view my work, or fabric from a certain period or with a special story. That’s where I’m aiming now,” she says. “The challenge is letting people know what I want.”
For more information, please visit www.axelradart.com.
