Impulses from Charlotte Selver’s Sensory Awareness in the Work of Lenore Tawney

1 Lenore Tawney, “Autobiography of a Cloud,” p. 16, transcript, Lenore G. Tawney Foundation (hereafter cited as LGTF). 2 The author’s interview with Ann Wilson, who likewise lived at Coenties Slip, in Taos, 24.3.2012. 3 In an unpublished German-English interview in which Selver is looking through her diaries with her co-worker Stefan Laeng, she notes: “I was there for Lenore Tawney, [who was afraid of going blind. She did go blind when she was older but ... she could still see the tiniest of threads.]” The German passage in the original text is translated in [...]), Selver-Archiv Stefan Laeng (hereafter cited as SASL). “I learned to feel the ground below my feet, and to pay attention to each breath, and to every sensation,”1 noted the American fiber artist Lenore Tawney about the changes in her perception of herself and her body brought about by the Sensory Awareness work of Charlotte Selver. Around 1959, a development from figurative to abstract motifs made itself ever more evident in Tawney’s artistic production as the result of an experimental application of her employed weaving techniques that increasingly integrated space in an installative manner. This culminated around 1961/62 with her use of the gauze technique in the “Woven Forms” she would show at her eponymous 1963 exhibition (Fig. 1) where the three-dimensionality of the textiles as well as distinct contrasts between invisible and transparent sections in the fabrics were exposed. The weavings were made at Coenties Slip on the tip of Lower Manhattan where Tawney’s studio neighbors were Jack Youngerman, Robert Indiana, Agnes Martin and Ellsworth Kelly. The latter characterized Tawney’s large-format textile pieces that hung freely in the space as pioneering works for the evolution of installation art and the dealings with space and material in the art of the nineteen sixties.2 Afraid of going blind, Tawney began attending workshops and individual sessions with Selver in the late nineteen fifties.3 After 1959, and even more so around 1962, it is increasingly apparent that Tawney’s experiences with Sensory Awareness flowed into her weavings, especially as she allowed a moment of letting something happen within the otherwise highly systematized specifications of the weaving process. In a letter to Selver, she wrote: “This is what I meant last spring when Mona Schieren