BARBARA ROMAIN

Burlap, lace and paint, cut into panels and stitched back together.
Texture Collage stands apart from everything else in the Romain archive: it is a fabric work. Sacking, lace, printed cotton, mesh and painted canvas are cut into irregular panels, butted against one another and edged with hand-painted checkerboard, so the seams are declared rather than hidden. Painted lines run on across the joins, refusing to let the panels stay separate.
Everywhere else she used text as texture. Here she used texture itself, and the surface is meant to be read by hand as much as by eye.