How the Eno River Served as a Muse for Artist Silvia Heyden’s Weaving Practice

Silvia Heyden: Weaving Notes & Nature | The Nasher Museum of Art, Durham  |  Through June 7

The most important object in Silvia Heyden’s home was her loom. 

A wooden behemoth, the loom soaked in light from two large windows, occupying a sizable portion of Heyden’s living-dining area the way a baby grand might. Here, overlooking a tangle of backyard bamboo and a sprawling paper bush, she spent hours absorbed in weaving. 

Heyden was born in Switzerland in 1927 and moved to Durham in 1966 when her husband was hired as a professor of medicine at Duke University Medical Center. Across her lifetime, she completed hundreds of tapestries, many of which now hang on the walls of collectors around the world—as well as in familiar local spots, like Durham City Hall. 

“Nature was big in everything she did,” said her daughter, Françoise Heyden, standing in the room her mother used to weave in. “She had the light that she needed [here], which was very important, and the nature. Nothing else mattered.” 

Françoise moved into the tucked-away Duke Forest house when her mother died in 2015. Sometimes, she said, she feels she can still hear the phantom tap-tap of her mother’s foot against the loom pedal. 

Silvia Heyden: Weaving Notes and Nature is on view at the Nasher Museum of Art through June 7. Small in size but not in scope, the exhibition celebrates Heyden and the lasting influence that the landscapes of the Southeast had on her work. The show was conceived through a Duke University course taught by Curator Julia McHugh in tandem with the Nasher’s Theory and Practice concentration, which marks a decade this year. Student curators developed all elements of the exhibit. 

In her youth, Heyden attended the School of the Arts in Zurich, where she studied color theory and principles of design in the Bauhaus tradition. Weaving wasn’t part of the school’s curriculum; in fact, said Françoise Heyden, her mother’s interest in it was actively discouraged at the time. Tapestries were considered an outmoded decorative art that had, across centuries and technological advancements, come to be a practice that served only to reproduce images from other mediums. 

But Heyden had visited the pre-Renaissance tapestries in her hometown of Basel and fallen in love. She was determined to make the tradition new again. To this, one instructor is said to have responded: “That will take you a lifetime.” 

In North Carolina, Heyden found solid footing for her new lifetime’s work. The Nasher exhibit homes in on two of her sources of inspiration while living here: nature and music. Heyden was an accomplished violinist (as a child, she aspired to be a violin maker) and, upon moving to Durham, began to play in the Duke Symphony Orchestra.

Heyden had synesthesia: She saw sounds in color and committed to transmitting melody and movement in her work through a dynamic personal style that incorporated triangles, half rounds, and feathers, among other motifs. 

“She didn’t start off with a drawing of what she wanted the tapestry to look like,” explained McHugh, curator of Arts of the Americas at the Nasher. “She allowed herself, in the process, to experiment and feel it like she was playing the violin. She always talked about sort of the threads of weaving to be similar to playing her violin.” 

Over a couple of different visits to Weaving Notes and Nature, I felt moved by the singular force of Heyden’s vision, how deftly her pieces communicate art as not just a finished product but as something that is the sum of its parts: the labor, substance, and story behind it. The works made me think about the limits of mass reproduction—simulating an image or style for the sake of simulation, as artificial technologies do now—and how that falls short, not only because the results lack imagination but also because they lack effort. 

Heyden didn’t seem to feel fidelity to two-dimensionality—rather, she wrote, surfaces were meant to be “transcended.” Tapestries offered textural possibilities that, say, a painting or photograph couldn’t. As a result, there is much to notice within a Heyden tapestry. None is a static block of fabric: Each has intentional gaps, overlaps, and stray loops of fiber that externalize the weaving process, evoking a sense of happening. Evidence of labor is integral. 

When Tropical Storm Chantal whipped through the Triangle last July, it did considerable damage along the Eno River. Historic water levels wore down infrastructure, strewed debris across the woods, and remade entire sections of the trails. 

Silvia Heyden: Weaving Notes and Nature, which wraps up just before the one-year anniversary of Chantal, has a timely run. The exhibit offers a generous prism of what one person saw when she looked at the Eno and opens up generative possibilities for visitors about how they, too, might better see and appreciate the immediate environment. 

“We went to the Eno when it had just partially reopened and walked some of the trails,” said McHugh, describing a trip to the river to retrace Heyden’s favorite spots. “The experience of being at the Eno after studying her works for weeks and weeks—the [tapestries] absolutely came alive.” 

Walking the trails, McHugh said, students recognized patterns of disorder like those in “Hurricane,” a tapestry Heyden completed in 1969 after witnessing one of her first big North Carolina seasonal storms.

“Hurricane,” which McHugh describes as the show’s “showstopper,” is comprised of a frenzied grid of colors that buckle and bow. “Playing Pattern” (1999), also on view at the exhibit, features triangles of rich blues and greens that closely evoke the ripples and current of a river. Other pieces explore the fractal quality of light on water or the abstraction of clouds from a plane window. 

In her later years, Heyden took walks at the Eno nearly every day. The scale must’ve been nothing compared to the river of her childhood, the Rhine; nevertheless, she found plenty to be fascinated by. An exhibit card put together by student curators, available for visitors to take home, maps out Heyden’s favorite Eno spots—a cliff face with mountain laurel, a good heron-sighting spot, several swimming holes. 

“While the river flows infinitely down with a life of its own, I must work within the confined space of a tapestry on the wall, which is a composition with its own laws and rules,” Silvia Heyden explained, once, of her process. “I never go down to the river and draw something which would give me a tapestry; instead, I teach myself how to weave the fluid forms and patterns in the water.”

Heyden was an original, but she did have imitators: One artist, according to her daughter, even received commissions by directly mirroring her mother’s work. Unfazed, Heyden seemed to trust her imagination and the transportative next new thing—maybe a snatch of music, maybe a shallow pool of eddies. Being available to the process was most important. 

“She didn’t care if somebody copied her,” Françoise Heyden said. “She said, ‘Well, that’s what I’m doing now, but next week, I’ll be doing something else.’” 

Heyden made at least 800 tapestries—a lifetime’s work, and a practice she called a “dialogue between means and meaning.” Her daughter believes many more pieces exist that haven’t been inventoried. As a result of the exhibit, McHugh said, several people have told her they own a tapestry and didn’t realize who had made it. 

“She had shows, a lot of exhibits on both sides of the Atlantic, and she didn’t care,” Françoise Heyden said. “That’s not why she was weaving. She was always pushing, pushing, pushing, to discover the next thing, the next thing.”

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