Meg might begin the design process by gazing at her garden or the work of one of her favorite painters.  From the ideas she gathers, she will make an uncolored scale drawing and choose colors, using the studio floor for her palette.  With her keen sense of blending, Meg selects her yarns, gathering and mixing four strands to produce one color.  A rug which seems to be made up of five colors might include 100 subtlety related shades.  With help from Meg’s assistants, order emerges from the heap on the floor, in the form of neatly wound balls of mixed yard.  After drawing the design, she can begin to hand-tuft the rug.  This is done with a manual electric tool that punches the yarn through the stretched cloth, where it is eventually held in place with latex and covered with a lining of cotton and twill tape.  With their looped pile, these rugs have the look of antique hooked rugs, but the laborious process of hand-hooking has been replaced by a faster, more versatile technique.

Just as there is nothing old fashioned about the rugs’ construction, there is nothing old fashioned about their design.  With an undergraduate degree in textiles from the Tyler School of Art in Pennsylvania, and a masters’ degree from the Rhode Island School of Design, Meg approaches even traditional patterns and motifs with a thoroughly modern eye.  After college, Meg worked as an artist and teacher in her field, and it was while teaching at Plymouth College of Art and Design in England that she learned the rug-making technique which allows her to freely use color and yarn in a painterly fashion.  Since returning to the United States in 1990, Meg has made her living by making and selling these unique rugs.

Her work has been exhibited in many shows, including the ACC Baltimore Craft Show, American Craft Exposition, Crafts at the Castle, Philadelphia Museum of Art Craft Show and the Smithsonian Craft Show.  Meg’s designs have also appeared in various magazines and newspapers, including Better Homes & Gardens, House Beautiful, Country Living, Victoria, In Style, Elle, Metropolitan Home, Boston Globe, Baltimore Sun, Washington Post and books, including Art League of Rhode Island, Objects for Use: Handmade by Design and Contemporary Art in Rhode Island.  Her work hangs in the Ambassador’s Office, United States Department of State, Nairobi, Kenya.  

Meg sums it up like this, “In a way, all art is a jazz riff.  You’ve got a theme you want to explore, you make a couple of first steps, then the work takes on a life of its own and you go where it leads.  For thousands of years now, we’ve been using the same symbols—spirals, squares, dots, rings—to communicate powerfully below consciousness.  They address a home sickness which can’t be satisfied by the earth beneath our feet.”

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Promendade

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Plum Mojo