Mountain Memories

The desire to work with colourful and tactile materials is in Ilse Anysas-Salkauskas' blood.  She learned to be creative as a small immigrant child playing with her mother’s knitting needles, crochet hooks, sewing needles and all of her scrap threads and fabrics.  Living with her mother’s and grandmother’s beautiful Lithuanian folk art needlework inspired her to a lifelong interest in creating artistic fibre art works, but in her own contemporary style.

Ilse has been interested in using a variety of artistic media and has created large and small tapestries from leather, corduroy, rayon, silk, nylon and cotton fabrics. She cuts, fuses and sews fabric and leather together to build her intricately layered art work. To finish her work she may embellish it with acrylic paint, wool or synthetic yarns, beads and other found objects as appropriate, to create complex, one-of-a-kind 2-D and 3-D fibre art collage constructions reflecting the theme of the work.

Her art work is strongly influenced by the Alberta prairie and foothills environment in which Ilse lives. The seasonally varying visually rich colours, textures, moods and changes made by nature and industrial development provide her with the inspirations for her fibre art work. She investigate and explore the medium’s boundaries to comment on issues of landscape, land use and environmental preservation. Ilse knots her leather from top to bottom so as to incorporate the colours onto the areas chosen. The colours in Mountain Memories conjure scenes of golden fields again a bright blue sky.