Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Weaving, Textiles
Website: ruthlaskey.com
Ruth Laskey was born in 1975 in San Luis Obispo, California. She studied Art History at the University of California, Santa Cruz, earning a BA in 1997, then pursued studio training at the California College of Arts and Crafts, where she received a BFA in 1999, and the California College of the Arts, where she completed an MFA in 2005. She lives and works in San Francisco.
Laskey began her career as a painter, initially exploring organic forms on canvas, before abandoning painting altogether to work directly with the loom. Seeking complete control over the production of her images — from the dyeing of thread through to the final woven structure — she made the loom her primary tool. She is represented by Altman Siegel in San Francisco and has exhibited internationally, including at the Huxley-Parlour Gallery in London and Galerie Cinzia Friedlaender in Berlin. Her work is held in the collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. In 2010 she received the SFMOMA SECA Art Award and the San Francisco Bay Guardian GOLDIE Award in Visual Arts; in 2016 she received the Artadia Award.
Laskey works almost exclusively with hand-dyed linen on a traditional floor loom, producing painstakingly realized weavings in which geometric forms — trapezoids, triangles, diamonds, and, more recently, circles — emerge from the structural logic of the weave itself. Rather than applying imagery to a pre-existing ground, she builds figure and ground simultaneously: color gradients are achieved by pre-planning and dyeing individual threads to varying intensities before a single pass of the shuttle is made. Compositions are worked out in advance through mathematical calculations and graph-paper drawings. The resulting pieces can take months to complete.
Her practice is often discussed in relation to the Bauhaus tradition — particularly the textile and color experiments of Josef and Anni Albers — yet Laskey’s engagement with modernist principles is neither nostalgic nor ironic. The twill weave introduces a fine diagonal rib that gives her geometric forms a subtle dimensionality, causing shapes to oscillate between flatness and depth. By collapsing the distinction between support and image into a single woven structure, her work questions fundamental assumptions about painting, materiality, and how pictures are made.
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