Work by Lily Lee, an assistant professor of sculpture in the Department of Art, will be part of a traveling exhibition, Hand in Hand: Craft and New Technologies, which will be on display from Jan. 20-March 24 at the Crooked Tree Arts Center in Petoskey, Michigan and from April 14-June 6 at the Crooked Tree Arts Center in Traverse City, Michigan.
The exhibition focuses on contemporary craft and design objects that explore the “nexus of traditional handcraft techniques or forms with new and innovative concepts, materials, methods, tools, processes, or approaches.”
Lee’s works in the exhibition are from her series The Great Basin Murders in which she commemorates victims by creating hand-woven burial shrouds. Lee uses Fiberworks, a weaving software program, to develop original patterns using data from each case — including victims’ heights, weights and age estimates, as well as information about where and when their bodies were found.
The density of the weaving communicates the postmortem interval. While this work is Lee’s attempt to broach the anonymity of unidentified human remains through devotional craft, the woven panels she creates remain visually austere, illustrating the absence of information that characterizes many cold cases.
