Piper Shepard (Baltimore, MD) holds a BFA in Fiber from the Philadelphia College of Art and an MFA in Fiber from the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan. Her work has been shown in the Helen Drutt Gallery and the Snyderman-Works Gallery, Philadelphia, PA; the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City; the Baltimore Museum of Art; the Delaware Art Museum; the Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts, The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC ; The Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, The Textile Art Centre, Chicago, IL; the Museum of Art and Design in Helsinki, Finland; and The Taubman Museum of Art, Roanoke, VA. Publications include Fiber Arts Magazine, Surface Design Journal, and American Craft Magazine. Telos Press has published a monograph on her work entitled Portfolio Collection: Piper Shepard. She has received three Individual Artists Awards from The Maryland State Arts Council in Crafts. Her work is in the collections of the Baltimore Museum of Art and The Museum of Arts and Design, New York.

For over a decade I have been cutting cloth into lace-like filigree patterns. Sometimes the textiles are very regimented in their structure, other times, unstructured and cut like a free hand drawing.
I looked avidly at historic cloth because the methodology of cutting lent itself to a reacquaintance with textile objects such as Reticella lace or the repeat patterns in William Morris wallpaper due to their mastery and complexity. As well, writing such as Anni Albers, The Pliable Plane: Textiles in Architecture has been influential for its expansive approach to defining the function of cloth in space. Textile work whether authored or made by anonymous hands is my reference and serve as model and guide for me.
There are two interests I have been pursuing in my work. I am investigating the physical tolerance and qualities of cloth, considering cloth as a skin or membrane; understanding our knowledge of it as fugitive, with its abilities to sustain, absorb, hold history and memory. As well, I’ve been making large-scale textiles that reference architectural elements such as the screen, jali and curtain wall. I consider how cloth has functioned at an architectural capacity as division, protection, separation, and ornament.
My interest is to link cloth analogies (that of delicacy and fragility) with the patterning of historical sources and natural phenomena, which speak of such qualities. I believe a textile, which is an object of daily interaction, seems most appropriate to convey these ideas. By cutting whole cloth into lace-like, arterial structures, I hope to elicit qualities of a most ephemeral nature. The work is pushed toward its most fragile limits. A tenuous relationship with material and its physical qualities are amplified.

-Piper Shepherd