“Echoes in Thread” Exhibition at Gravers Lane Gallery

Gravers Lane Gallery continues to assert its place as a vital institution in the world of contemporary craft. Since 2011, Gravers Lane has curated exhibitions that bridge past and future, offering a platform for artists who elevate traditional craft into the realm of fine art. The Echoes in Thread exhibition serves as a prime example of how fiber-based practices—too often marginalized—can engage with conceptual depth, historical weight, and visual beauty. The exhibition is on display through July 11, 2025. It successfully unites the works of three distinct artists—Lucy Arai, Polly Barton, and Agathe Bouton—whose practices are rooted in heritage, craftsmanship, and spiritual reflection thus unifying harmony through the language of fiber.

The foundation of Echoes in Thread is the reverence for age-old textile traditions—Japanese sashiko stitching, ikat weaving, and the rich tapestries of Burma—reimagined with a contemporary sensibility. The thread here serves as both medium and metaphor, anchoring narratives that span cultures, decades, and disciplines.

Echoes in Thread: Artists as Storytellers and Custodians of Culture

Lucy Arai’s compositions blend sumi ink, indigo, and delicate sashiko embroidery on handmade paper. Her approach, both intuitive and technically masterful, is grounded in a deeply personal bi-cultural identity. Drawing from her Japanese-American heritage and early exposure to traditional techniques, Arai’s work pulses with poetic tension and quiet resolve. Each stitch feels like a whisper across time, connecting generations through cloth and gesture.

^{Lucy Arai}

Arai’s work pulses with poetic tension and quiet resolve. Each stitch feels like a whisper across time, connecting generations through cloth and gesture. Arai’s participation in the U.S. State Department’s Arts in Embassies program and her nomination for the Louis Comfort Tiffany Biennial signal a career dedicated to using art as a form of global dialogue.

Polly Barton brings the shimmer and structure of ikat weaving into conversation with pigment, metal leaf, and papyrus. Her metallic monofilament threads, sourced from Japan, lend a luminous quality to her work, exploring the liminal space between woven structure and painted surface. Barton’s roots as a student of Helen Frankenthaler and her studies in Japan with master weaver Tomohiko Inoue inform her dynamic balance between expressive spontaneity and formal rigor.

^{Polly Barton}

Her work resides in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago and the MFA Boston, which mines the threshold between structure and improvisation. Her use of silver leaf and pastel imbues her pieces with a lyrical fragility, while her woven paper compositions display a resilience that mirrors the medium itself.

Parisian Agathe Bouton presents her “Burmese Days” series: a moving tribute to the textiles of Myanmar. Through monoprints, woodcuts, and hand-stitching on Burmese and Japanese paper, Bouton captures the wear and repair of garments lived in by generations of women. Her prints embody the histories, labor, and resilience embedded in textiles.

^{Agathe Bouton}

Bouton, a decorated printmaker with international exhibitions from Paris to Dakar, uses her craft to tell intimate, tactile stories. The pleated skirts that inspire her series become maps of time, memory, and endurance—each fold holding a chapter of lives lived and labors endured.

Echoes in Thread, the Exhibition that Offers a Moment

Gravers Lane Gallery’s focus on disciplines like fiber, ceramics, wood, and metal speaks to a growing cultural hunger for authenticity and material engagement. Echoes in Thread resonates within that framework, offering viewers a moment of stillness and reflection in an increasingly digital world.