Fabric flower garden to bloom at Hawai‘i Handweavers’ Hui show

They started with scarves and shawls. A couple of years ago, Wendy Kamai organized her Honolulu Museum of Art School class — composed of a half-dozen people with various mental and physical challenges, a group dubbed We Be Weave — around the idea that it should share its work with a broader audience. So they focused their efforts on participating in the biennial Hawai’i Handweavers’ Hui exhibition and labored over process-oriented pieces, demonstrating various weaving techniques.

That transformative experience — of creating artwork not just for the class, but also for the public — has fueled We Be Weave ever since. The group presented its own show in the art school’s Mezzanine Gallery last year and returns to the Hawai’i Handweavers’ Hui exhibition this time around with an elaborate 3-D installation piece representing a flower garden, a symbol of how much they have grown as weavers during the past two years.

The We Be Weave garden will be displayed with more than 50 juried woven pieces from throughout the state. The show runs through Sept. 13 on Oahu before moving to the Big Island for a second exhibition, Sept. 18 to Oct. 18.

Some of the participants think of weaving as a functional craft, producing usable objects, such as towels, clothes and table runners. Other participants consider their products fabric art, making tapestries, jewelry and 3-D objects like the garden.

"We have been able to mesh everyone together into one group," said Joyce Ingram-Chinn, president of the 100-member hui. "It creates interesting entries. We all work together and appreciate each other’s weavings, no matter what people do."

Hawai’i Handweavers’ Hui was founded in 1953 and usually creates a theme for its show that embraces abstraction, such as "Joy of Weaving" in 2013, "Sublime, Sensible, Serendipitous" in 2011 and "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle" in 2009. This year, though, the show coincided with the Chinese year of the sheep/ram, and organizers thought it might be fun to link the activities under the title of "Shear Delight."

Many of the highlighted pieces are made of wool. Hand-spun wool is available for sale at the show, and the group also has created an educational slide presentation about sheep, including how wool is removed from the animals and prepared for weaving.

"We talked about having a real-life sheep there, too," Ingram-Chinn said. "But we could not figure out who was going to pick up after it."

The special exhibition of the We Be Weave flower garden only adds to the pervasive earthiness of the exhibition. Instructor Kamai said the show served as a grounded goal for the group, demonstrating at first that they could learn how to weave and create something artistic.

For this round Kamai gave the We Be Weave group — Marvin Anderson, Alice Webb, Cassilly Woll, Gabe Ramento, Katie O’Brien and Amy Noborikawa — some wire hangers for them to bend into interesting shapes, such as butterflies, to use as weaving frames. She said, "I thought if I could get them creating more, they might think about what else they could do."

That strategy worked as the butterflies morphed into other garden creatures, such as geckos, ladybugs, spiders, ants and bees, and the group decided all of those needed some kind of home, which led to the construction of large flowers on which they could perch, in a garden setting.

"They were really excited about weaving on these different shapes — so excited that they started thinking about what they could create out of it," Kamai said. "When they started putting the flowers together, they were like, ‘Wow! I did that.’ It was so much fun. It was magical.

"When we started they had a lot of ‘I don’t know if I can do this’ attitudes," she added. "Now they are a lot more confident, they are a lot more competent. Now they just say, ‘Show me and I can do it.’"