...began as a commission for a new corporate headquarters building in Norwalk, Connecticut. The structure in question had a two-storey atrium area bookended by the firm’s main office and production areas. The interior designer responsible for outfitting those spaces had already purchased some of my work for a previous client, and was eager now to commission a site-specific piece. After preliminary correspondence and explanatory back-and-forths, I detailed a proposal that was ultimately accepted.

Although I'd not previously worked to a square foot price, the designer insisted on it, feeling that the client would relate better to that language than to an artist's "feel" for what the price should be. I didn't like how transactional that felt, but realized I'd reached the point at which functioning as a business person and professional, a small business owner, was going to have to be one of my strengths, not one of my weaknesses. I would always try to keep the creative side separate from the business side, though that would never be 100%. This wasn't a hobby, after all. It was my calling, and it was also my paycheck.

The interior designer provided a generous number of snapshots of the intended wall and atrium area, some of them pastiched along the lines of a David Hockney photo collage from that same moment. Along with those came a large, rolled sample of the textured vinyl wall covering whose siena hue I would need to consider.

Above, the two maquettes I produced for the commission, the one on the left consistent with the Interweave quilts I’d done in 1982, and the second following from the Barstow School commission and subsequent pieces. At the time I felt far more enthused about the latter design, and was pleased it was the client’s choice. The Interweave variation with its curved delineations was never realized in fabric. Below, a detail view of the maquette, gouache on paper, collaged.

As I’ve said, music – listening to music – has been central to my studio routines and practice and was especially so in the 1980s, when many of the works I created, including Metamorphosis, reached to express some form of “visual music,” to interpret to the extent possible, specific musical works or passages and the effects they had on me. Across a range of categories, from mainstream classical to opera to jazz and Broadway musicals, and to some extent traditional folk idioms and their modern-day manifestations, I listened, absorbed and attempted to give material form to melodies or themes that “stuck,” that in my mind played and re-played in a kind of insistent loop. While I can tie no one specific musical work to Metamorphosis, my family and I were attending Boston Symphony concerts at Tanglewood each summer from the late 1970s, and to this day the deep impressions I took from memorable performances of pieces like Berlioz’s Requiem, Mahler’s First Symphony, Beethoven’s Ninth, and an unforgettable Tosca with Shirley Verrett, reverberated in the compositional and color strategies I was employing. The geometric frameworks provided control and a non-narrative order that gave me license to risk a kind of riotous color mayhem, guaranteeing an active, choreographic dynamic. I wanted works like Metamorphosis to have presence, to dance and sing and rise to powerful finales. The spirit of the thing counted for a lot.

The challenge of how to hang diamond shapes like this was easily resolved. I attached fabric sleeves along the two “top” sides of the piece, with openings midway that would accommodate a cross-brace bolted to the perpendicular wood arms. A simple “A” frame in warp-resistant hardwood (I usually used oak), fixed to the wall surface via screw eyes at the three outer points, did the job efficiently.

What happens to a textile artwork like this, made for one specific space, when the corporate entity that commissioned it is sold, reorganized, relocated and/or absorbed by a larger multi-national? That’s part two of this work’s biography, to be continued...

Metamorphosis (above) in its original installation in a two-level corporate headquarters atrium in Norwalk, Connecticut, in late 1983, and below, in the original 1983 studio photograph by David Caras.