Weaving the NH Landscape Winter Exhibit Hours
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Nancy_Chase_Lyon exhibitWINTER HOURS

Winter exhibit at Discover Portsmouth features weaving by Nancy Lyon (1947-20211) with limited viewing times. Attend the opening reception on Friday January 4, 2013 (5-8 pm). Then visit during ART AROUND TOWN on Friday January 4, 2013 and Friday, February 1 and March 1 (from 5-8 pm). Or call to see the exhibit by appointment at (603) 436-8433. Exhibit runs through March 17, 2013. (Read about the artist below)

 

Artist Nancy Chase Lyon (1947 - 2011) grew up on the NH seacoast, graduating in 1964 from the University of New Hampshire at Durham. After a year of graduate school and 1968 marriage to Douglas Lyon, a fellow philosophy major, she apprenticed to a silversmith and worked as a jewelry maker. Weaving, however, allowed her creativity to blossom.

After the couple moved to Goffstown in 1972 she established “Nancy Lyon Hand Weaving.” The business eventually employed eleven workers to supply a national audience for hand-woven wall hangings as well as a production line of Nancy Lyon clothing. Selected examples of her landscape wall hangings in three different types of yarn are exhibited with selected design materials for her individual landscapes and commissioned works, often multiple panels designed for specific walls.

As a textile artist Nancy Lyon used weaving techniques to create brightly colored impressionistic landscapes in fiber. “My hangings,” she wrote, ”are influenced by the weight and texture of yarns, by the layers of clouds, hills and valleys surrounding me in New Hampshire, and by the landscapes of Japanese printmakers. I am trying to expose textile structures and color grading within pattern units to describe the many ways in which color, form, and atmosphere interlace.”

Beyond the mechanics —the skills of warping, thread count, interlacing and pattern -- the art of weaving ”lets you create something that feels and looks beautiful.” For her, weaving was “a pleasure that feels something like laughter—the process of melding texture, color and pattern makes me feel good. There is warmth, a sense of wholeness, and a newly created moment of beauty. When it goes right, working with fiber, yarn or textiles makes me feel like I have just heard good news.”

A leader of the New Hampshire Weavers Guild in the early 1970s Nancy Lyon was also active in the League of New Hampshire Craftsmen becoming president (1976-78) and chair of its 50th Jubilee committee (1982-85).  She entered her weavings in more than 45 juried and invitational exhibitions and gave classes on spinning, weaving and dyeing. An expert on crackle weaving, a black weave pattern that she reinvented, she taught her techniques all over the country.

After the moving to New London, NH in 1989 Nancy closed her weaving studio, while still doing fabric painting and crocheting. She turned her intense energies toward canine search and rescue as president of the New England K9 Search and Rescue. For twenty years this all-volunteer group and their trained dogs literally sniffed out and tracked hundreds of lost people in 360 searches including at ground zero after 9/11.  In 1996 she also joined the Ausbon Sargent Land Preservation Trust in New London, served on its board of trustees for nine years and as chairman for one.

For more information about the exhibit contact: 
Discover Portsmouth operated by the Portsmouth Historical Society 
10 Middle St, Portsmouth, NH 03801/ (603) 436-8433
PortsmouthHistory.org

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