Louise Pappageorge

FINDING BREATH

2022

Louise Pappageorge is a native of Chicago and a graduate of the School of the Art Institute, Chicago. Her work is included in many national and international private and corporate collections, including the City of Chicago Merlo Library. Publications include American Craft, Fiber Arts, and Home Magazines. She currently divides her time between Chicago and Michigan. Early on through the women in her life, Louise was exposed to all types of “domestic” crafts, sewing, crochet, knitting, embroidery and macramé. Although her artworks have little to do with the utility of these crafts, she retained a profound interest in the mediums and sensibilities of those domestic crafts and their implications to feminism and women’s work. Her current work incorporates found and newly created crochet and laces to construct sculptural bodies of work that are metal leafed and patinaed creating sculptural forms from a feminized craft. In addition, Louise casts these laces in bronze to further explore the contextual relationship of lace to the surface. These newly defined artworks are a defiance of gravity, defiance of invisibility, and the gravity that has kept them in the background. She views these dimensional artworks as a dialogue about the initial feminized craft used as a background, metamorphosed into sculptural forms that take on the characteristics of the “masculine” fine art sculpture, thereby enhancing their intrinsic value.