Marshall University professors Ian Hagarty and Daniel Kaufmann combined painting and photography in a woven tapestry created for the 2022 Personal Structures exhibition in Venice.
The project developed over two years and used West Virginia’s New River Gorge as its central subject.
Two media literally woven together
Hagarty worked primarily through painting, while Kaufmann approached the landscape through photography. Rather than hanging separate works beside one another, they searched for a form in which both practices could become structurally inseparable.
A faculty exhibition at the Huntington Museum of Art served as an experimental stage. After testing several possibilities, the artists selected tapestry as the final medium.
The resulting work incorporated thousands of photographs, painted elements and digital manipulations. Those materials were not merely placed together as a collage but translated into one woven surface.
West Virginia presented internationally
The artists wanted to mark the designation of the New River Gorge as a national park and bring attention to the state within a major international exhibition.
They avoided presenting only a personal view of the landscape. Instead, research into the park and its history was filtered through their respective artistic methods.
Personal Structures, organised by the European Cultural Centre, coincided with the Venice Biennale and gave the work a broad international audience.
The collaboration also influenced the professors’ thinking about art education at Marshall University. Combining painting, photography and textile production suggested possibilities for a curriculum less strictly divided by medium.
The tapestry demonstrated that collaboration could produce more than a compromise between two established practices. It created a form that neither artist would have developed alone.