“I love the naturalness and rawness of undyed wool. Mary incorporates this ethos into her weaving by focusing on using natural materials as much as possible. “ I love the fact that there’s a community of people here at Fibershed doing this kind of thing, inspiring and challenging our ideas of what’s possible.”
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She’s a master spinner, which I am mostly still too impatient to learn, but I do love the little cotton tahkli spindle she gave me.” She showed her how to skirt a fleece and take it one step at a time, seeing the whole process through from raw wool to a woven garment. “She forcibly made me relearn to knit ‘continental’ style (‘picking,’ not ‘throwing’), which I am forever grateful for. Inspired by primitive skills, i t was her mother-in-law in Wisconsin who inspired her love of wool and taught her basket making and spinning. My loom allows for that manner of expression.” Evidence of the human hand, the mark-making, the imperfections… for me, this is where beauty occurs. I’m not a perfectionist, and I’m not a technician… the Japanese aesthetic of wabi-sabi is what lights me up. “What I love about the Saori loom is the freedom and expression it evokes. Mary experimented with many different kinds of lap looms and eventually found the Saori floor loom that resonated with her the most. It felt like poetry, like dance, like concept and expression, building lines and layers and creating wholeness out of disparate perspectives.” “As soon as I sat at the loom, I felt that familiar surge of creative possibility and a sort of poetic resonance with the repeated action of bringing opposing forces (warp and weft) together. It was very straightforward, which felt good.” When she moved back to Northern California from China, she finally had space to take on weaving, which had always spoken deeply to both her heart and hands.
I started knitting baby hats and learning about wool’s absorption properties from diaper cover patterns. “Turning to fiber was a natural impulse toward tangible, practical exploration. Her life in fiber arts began ten years ago, “ I taught myself to knit instinctually before I realized I was pregnant with my daughter.” She has a background in fine arts, experimental performance, and poetics and love for conceptual philosophy and critique, all of which felt abstract and heavy in light of impending motherhood. She lives in Graton and works out of her weaving studio housed in the Atelier One building. Originally born in San Francisco, Mary grew up in Minneapolis, spent a chapter of life in Hong Kong, and eventually returned to Northern California to raise her two children. Fittingly, she calls her ongoing weaving project “ Gather the Universe. “These are values I hold deeply,” she says, as the shuttle shoots back and forth between the shed. “To me, the spider humbly embodies the beauty in the action of weaving.” To Mary, weaving is bringing in different pieces, combining opposites, including variety, uplifting diversity, and joining them all together to make a stronger, more beautiful whole. “Weaving is a great metaphor for my life, “Mary says. As Mary Diaz works at her loom, it’s not clear if she’s the one weaving or if it’s the large ornate spider on her arm that is weaving her.
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