Martha Donovan Opdahl's photostream  

MFA Indiana University--Bloomington IN 1985
I studied in Budd Stalnaker's woven & constructed textiles program. Since receiving my MFA degree, I have been actively producing artwork, most recently in my Santa Fe studio...hand-dyeing wool yarn and tufting large scale abstract wall pieces. The work is in private, corporate and public collections. I am represented by several galleries in the US and have shown my work internationally and throughout the US.

In 2003 I began working on a more intimate scale using a different process...cutting, folding, layering and piecing together white cotton organdy shapes. These constructions I sew onto black plexiglass. My love of line comes through in the folded seams which form architectural scaffolding. They are revealed by the contrasting opaque translucency of the adjacent shapes. The layering of shapes provides more opacity and more rhythmic contrasts. This work has evolved from the earlier buttons + machine top-stitched compositions to pieced and layered formal constructs to the more recent exploding silhouttes.

Last year (2011) I started to build a body of non-objective 3-D work in rubber, a radical departure from my previous (yet on-going) work. I use waxed linen thread to bind shapes cut out of rubber using a basic textile technique--hand-sewn running stitch