Focus on commission: Patricia Malarcher

An even exchange: art for space

by Patricia Malarcher

In the mid-1980s I found my dream studio— a classroom in a vacated Catholic school with about 800 square feet of floor space, a wall of windows facing north, a large closet, a long wall for pinning up work, and a blackboard for sketching. The size of the room allowed the scale of my work to expand and easily accommodated several projects at once. But then I received a Renwick Fellowship, a research grant that would require me to spend most of a year in Washington, D.C. How could I keep my studio when I couldn’t afford monthly rent for space I wouldn’t be using?

The school was part of a complex of granite buildings, including a church, on the property of St. C ecilia’s Parish in Englewood, New Jersey. The church, an early 20th-century version of French Romanesque architecture that had received recognition from the local historical society, had been newly painted in a subtle range of warm grayish greens. Along a side aisle, a niche with a sage-colored wall housed a marble and bronze tabernacle (a container of Eucharistic bread), its pedestal constructed of off-white marble. It struck me that this setting could be enhanced with a textile hanging designed to complement the interior architecture. I had been creating art quilts in geometric patterns with metallized Mylar as a dominant material, and felt this approach was adaptable to such a project. Father Joseph O’Brien, the pastor, was receptive to the idea and agreed on a barter: I would create an art piece to cover my rent.

Months later, upon my return to a studio that had grown “cold” from not being used, it was time to honor my half of the barter. I welcomed a project that was challenging enough to renew my creative energy in the space. To suit the proportions of the niche and to frame the tabernacle, I designed a hanging ten feet high and seven feet wide with a three-foot-wide center opening to suggest a doorway. This format would require 49 twelve-inch-square linen modules appliquéd with patches of silver Mylar, its surfaces both shiny and brushed. Varying combinations of squares, triangles, and parallelograms would form a subtle but lively geometric rhythm.

While design was in progress, Father Joseph came to the studio offering a bag of outdated vestments for the project. These added exciting visual possibilities and context to the work. In a range of greens, reds, purples, golds, and whites that signified different liturgical seasons, the garments could be cut into patches that, intermingled with Mylar geometric shapes, would incorporate the parish’s material history into the work. I sequenced the colors as a “liturgical rainbow” to represent the flow of worship from Advent to Christmas to Ordinary Time to Lent to Easter to more Ordinary Time. With purples at the bottom of either side of the hanging, the colors segued upward through greens and golds on the left side and through reds and golds on the right; at the top each spectrum diffused into light yellows and whites.

The fabric trove from Father Joseph also included narrative murals depicting saints on unstretched canvas that had been removed from the sanctuary walls. The paint was cracked and faded but had the patina of age; even used sparingly, samples of these would add depth and meaning as part of the community’s legacy. The imagery included architectural structures with rows of triangles that, placed on the diagonal, echoed a large triangular shape implying a tympanum above the open “door.” Centered above this, a frontal image of an eye from a painted saint symbolized the “Eye of God,” a biblical reference.

To lighten the labor involved in assembling the piece, Patricia Wrixon, a member of the parish and an excellent seamstress, volunteered to help machine appliqué the Mylar and fabric to the linen modules. The squares were sewn to a cotton canvas backing and the piece was installed on a Velcro-covered rod.

Some years later, the hanging was removed from the niche for the next repainting of the church. I held my breath in fear that it might be discarded. Eventually, however, it was reinstalled and remains in place today. The bartered artwork has outlived my tenure in the classroom, which ended when I graduated into a studio added to my home.