Artist Bio

Libby Raab is an architect and artist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Along with her custom residential projects, she works with photo and paper weaving as an exploration of colors, textures, and pattern. Libby believes that like architecture, weaving is a form of spatial expression and material experimentation. Her work explores the intersection of geometry, digital technology, and nature.  By hand weaving original photos that have been digitally altered, Libby aims to create a dialogue between tradition and innovation, organic and synthetic textures, reality and illusion.

Libby holds a BA in Psychology from DePauw University and a BArch from Boston Architectural College.  She has been practicing architecture for over 25 years and established Libby Raab Architecture (LRA) in 2015.  Just as Libby believes that good residential architecture is connected, personal and intimate, she also strives to find the personal connections in her artwork.  In our increasingly digital world, it is often the analog, handmade work that draws a viewer in and helps them conceptually connect with a piece of art.  

Artist Statement

Weaving is an act of integration.  My paper weaves are about disintegration. The warp and weft represent the past and present.  Together they make something new feel intentionally worn and faded - a simultaneous making and unmaking. Using custom patterns inspired by ancient weaves and informed by my contemporary aesthetic, my paper weaves are an effort to compress time through the creation of their future selves into present existence.

The building blocks of my weaves are original photographs of patterns found in nature.  Some images are “degraded” with the addition of color gradients to mimic sun fading.  Others are exaggerated through successive screenshotting and computer “aliasing” to create new digital textures and give the impression of a previously woven fabric. To further accelerate the “visual decay” and the passage of time, I intentionally erode portions of the weave.  In other areas, the addition of paper raffia represents a scarring over of past wounds that have self-healed. 

I am fascinated by the way colors continually shift in relation to each other and find that while color can indeed feel unstable, that changeability can also be informative and surprising.  When cutting images into strips and isolating colors from their original context, the colors shift immediately.  Once the strips are woven with new color adjacencies, the values shift again often in surprising and delightful ways.

Through the integration of textures, patterns and perceived passage of time, my hope is that viewers will feel the dynamic tension between the natural and digital worlds as well as experience the stories each weave has to tell.