"Porthole Cabinet"

Anne Bossert

"Working in both textiles and wood satisfies different parts of my personality. I love the spontaneity of painting dye onto threads and the comforting act of weaving. But I also enjoy the excitement of buzzing saw blades and the problem solving that comes with woodworking."

Anne Bossert comes from a long line of farmers. Taking inspiration from this self-sufficient lifestyle, she creates functional works of art. The seeds were planted long ago, in the days when Bossert would admire her grandmother's quilts and learn to sew her own clothes. After learning to weave and dye cloth, she experimented with metalworking and woodworking. Eventually, her belief in the preciousness of cloth led her to build functional display cases and tables for her hand-woven pieces. Today, her furniture is an evolution of her desire to combine cloth and wood.

Bossert enjoys bright colors and believes we all could use more color in our lives. So important is color to her, that she names most of her pieces based on their color inspirations. Being surrounded by row upon row of corn and soybeans throughout her childhood also made an impression on Bossert's aesthetic. She loves stripes. She uses Baltic birch plywood in the construction of her furniture, specifically for the striping effects that can be achieved with its thin laminations. Stripes are also echoed in the way she dyes and weaves the cloth. To continue the relationship between cloth and wood, Bossert uses the same dyes to achieve a continuity of color. She does all of the woodworking, weaving, and dyeing herself, while channeling the self-reliance of her agrarian forebears.