Sara Goodman is a textile artist with a studio/school in Lyme, New Hampshire. She has had a lifelong interest in the resist dyeing techniques of ikat and shibori which she has traveled to Indonesia, Japan, Guatemala, India, and Nepal to experience first hand. This connection to historic textile techniques and the work of artisans from around the world is reflected in her work with a contemporary flair.
Sara is a former member of the board of directors of GoodWeave, an organization dedicated to eliminating exploitive child labor in the handmade carpet industry in South Asia. In this last year, she has designed a collection of handwoven pile carpets, manufactured in Nepal by InnerAsia/Khawachen. The patterns are derived from Sara’s original shibori textiles. These luxurious carpets are made from 100% Tibetan highland wool and dyed only with natural dyes. The carpets carry the GoodWeave label, which is the customer’s best guarantee that the carpets are woven only by trained adult artisans.
This newest project reflects Sara’s deepening commitment to using only natural dyes in all of her work. Since 2008, when she stopped using any chemical dyes, she has devoted herself to developing a full, rich color palette, using only mordants and dyes that are derived from natural materials. Collected from around the world, some of these sources of color are the flowers of the weld plant and the heartwood from the osage tree for yellow, the roots of the madder plant for brick red, the carmine insects of cochineal and lac for deep red and magenta, and the leaves of the ancient alchemical indigo plant for brilliant shades of blue.
Sara would like to share the inspiring article about her fabric art, Community in the Weave, printed in a local magazine. Her work has also been featured in Handwoven and Shuttle, Spindle and Dyepot magazines and at the Handweavers Guild of America fashion show at Convergence, has won awards from Complex Weavers and The New England Weavers Seminar and has been shown at Julie’s Artisans Gallery in New York, Cambridge Artist’s Collective in Massachusetts and The League of New Hampshire Craftsmen retail galleries.