Biography
Darlyn Susan Yee is a Los Angeles-based artist whose practice weaves together traditional and unexpected materials into complex designs that engage a dialogue between art, design and craft. Her meticulous, labor-intensive processes result in fiber-based sculptures and installations. She engages a dialogue that crosses cultural understandings of identity, gender and place. Complex, but with a sense of whimsy, Darlyn's explorations of presence and containment encompass large installations to small handheld vessels.
To contrast the perceptions of architecture as high art and craft as low art, Darlyn collaborated with Yarn Bombing Los Angeles on CAFAM: Granny Squared. The project to cover the façade of the Craft And Folk Art Museum with crocheted granny squares brought together over 500 contributors from 27 countries and 50 states. On the closing weekend of Art In The Streets at Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, Darlyn and other artists yarnbombed their cars in Have Yarn Will Travel to showcase another form of graffiti intervention.
Darlyn's artwork has been shown internationally in museums and galleries, and has garnered numerous awards. She was included in 100 Artists of the West Coast II by Schiffer Books, the publisher of her book Macramé Today: Contemporary Knotting Projects. Her work is featured in numerous private and public collections.
Statement
I create fiber-based socially engaging figurative sculptures and installations to engage the viewer to explore the relationship between materials and form. I recontextualize the more feminized traditions and practices of fiber art inverted through the use of industrial materials to explore issues of gender identity, sense of place and purpose, and cultural identity and commonality. My recent focus is on repurposing and up-cycling materials using traditional fiber techniques to create installations of exaggerated clothing, and temporary public art displays.
I manipulate texture and form through style combinations including hand knotting, knitting and manually altered machine knitting techniques with crochet. The more compliant fiber materials I use include cotton, wool, mohair, linen, lurex, acrylic, nylon yarns and cotton string and rope. Mastering traditional techniques with more cumbersome materials such as flagging and barricade tapes challenged me to create a new set of tools. I choose to work with all of these materials because of their tactility.
