Fiberarts Magazine, Volume 29, Number 1, Summer 2002

A Mating of Nature and Technology

Jacquelyn Rice and Uosis Juodvalkis, a.k.a. Gild the Lily, create wearables with flowers that fly and butterflies that dance.

By Rhonda Sonnenberg

In Providence, Rhode Island, an 18th-century New England coastal city striving for yuppie resurgence but inescapably famous for mobsters and Portuguese chorizo, Jacquelyn Rice and Uosis (pronounced ”Wasis”) Juodvalkis are realizing the Bauhaus ideal of merging up-to-the-minute technology with handcrafted art. The collaborators, who are wife and husband, are using a camera, scanner, Macintosh computer, and ink-jet printer to imprint on silk, boiled wool, and wool crepe what seems like the entire miraculous pageant of nature’s pigment and pattern bounty.

This is no accident, since Rice’s designs are predicated upon actual living organisms. Butterflies and flowers – such as orchids, tulips, and hellebores, a white, winter-through-spring bloomer, perhaps Rice’s favorite – form the basis of many creations. A diaphanous gold silk scarf titled Golden Butterfly flutters about the body as though the creature had awakened and taken flight.

If dazzling volleys of mint green, fuchsia, salmon, and burgundy-tinted brown don’t leave one speechless, the reverse side of opaque fabrics will. Tunics and jackets are completely reversible, and given that the two sides of the fabric are printed differently, in designs related in feeling and yet starkly dissimilar, to turn a garment inside out is to be surprised and astounded.

One sleeveless tunic, in particular, is printed in a lava-lamp, seemingly viscous pattern. It bursts in yellow and a slate hue, the color of blue salvia just past its prime. The reverse side has a 3-D, silk-screened Warhol quality in that patterns are laid down in blocks creating abrupt geometric fields of orange, green, and yellow. (The couple’s adept seamstress, Valentina Platukiene, who speaks the Lithuanian tongue of her birth country, recently displayed some garments she had finished assembling, repeatedly using the word marginimas. Her daughter, acting as translator, explained that the word means “print and color at the same time,” adding that there is no comparable word in English.)

This is how anyone can do what Rice and Juodvalkis do:

Take one immensely talented, noted artist: the head of ceramics at the Rhode Island School of Design and former dean of fine arts there, a three-time National Endowment of the Arts grant recipient, international lecturer, and tableware designer whose ceramics are exhibited in museums such as New York’s American Craft Museum. Add to this resume a lifelong passion for fashion design, domestic and ethnic textiles, and handcrafts such as sewing, knitting, and crocheting.

Divorced and at mid-life, she is introduced by a friend to an expert in digital photography who owns and operates a 35-employee photography/signage company and color lab. The University of Chicago graduate not only has business smarts, but his color sense draws artists and designers as customers, glass artist Dale Chihuly among them. Yet the motive for bringing the pair together is not to unite two artistic spirits. More plainly, they have the same laugh and same acerbic sense of humor.

The friend’s hunch proves correct. The two, who marry in 1995, work off each other’s strengths and deficiencies like Liverpool’s own John and Paul. For hours on end, he teaches her the wonders of digital photography and computer design manipulation. Her nearly religious conversion to computer advocate, coupled with

her talent and vision, lead him to sell his business in 1999 and launch a joint venture, Gild the Lily, making one-of-a-kind art-to-wear garments through technological means.

“A lot of artists don’t know how to use a computer, or what they do know isn’t much,” says Juodvalkis, explaining the couple’s rare combination of artistry and computer skill. “The technology for knowing about computer color management and dyes is very rarified, so to have the aesthetic and the technical very well covered doesn’t usually occur in one person. We feel the confluence of the two of us is really in the miracle category.”

Rice, to this day, expresses amazement that an artist like herself, used to building with her hands and proclaiming the value of handmade objects over the computer-aided, immediately became, as she says, “hooked” when her husband showed her the Blend Tool of Adobe Illustrator software, which allows the transformation of shapes into new forms.

Rice bought her first sewing machine at age eight with summer wages she earned picking cherries on her grandfather’s farm in Wenatchee, Washington, three hours east of Seattle over the Snoqualmie Pass into the Cascade Mountains. “I still ask hand-building ceramics students if any know how to sew, if they know how to take the plane of Fabric, cut it into a shape, and make a dimensional object,” she says. “A slab of clay and fabric are very similar. They’re both flexible and fluid, and you may have to do certain things to make them stand up in space.” In fact, Rice is known for her three-foot-tall vases made out of one- by two- inch bricks of clay stacked upon each other on the diagonal, lending a weaving effect. “My clay things are tactile in a basketry way,” she says.

Though Rice found that her early computer forms looked mechanical, completely devoid of the sensuality she has achieved in her hand-built designs, the process presented an inescapable allure.

“I was shocked,” she says. “I craved more. I was addicted. I felt like a machine had a plug in my forehead. It was as though it (the computer) was thinking the way I was thinking. It was magical One no longer had to struggle to physically make something do what you wanted.”

Soon she graduated to programs such as Adobe’s Photoshop. “Uosis would teach me six, seven hours a day,” she says. “We would stay up till 2 a.m.”

Early printing attempts were fraught with problems, although a strong desire to experiment and learn kept the couple from becoming discouraged. Juodvalkis estimates it took them a year of experimentation before they had salable products. (They have to date invested about $60,000 in equipment.) Fortunately, the two agree most of the time and proceed with designs they both like. Says Juodvalkis, “The differences come not as we’re working, but after, when one of us might say, ‘Look how ugly that is.’”

The process begins with Juodvalkis taking photographs in the form of slides or digital images (the latter using a Nikon 990 digital camera). Slides are scanned into the computer using a Nikon LS-2000 film scanner; digital images are loaded directly into the computer. Sometimes even an object, such as a butterfly wing or a twig (“I bring them in like a cat bringing home a dead mouse,” says Juodvalkis), is scanned on an 11- by 17-inch flatbed into the computer, a process allowing clarity of microscopic details. Rice, who says finding new images he has put on her computer is “like receiving a present,” then begins manipulating the design and color. At the end of the design process, Juodvalkis will often make color adjustments to help the printer bring out what shows on screen or to add his own interpretation to the design.

The printer is 60 inches wide and houses four cartridges holding cyan, magenta, yellow, and black acid dyes for silk and wool. On silk, 20,000 dots of color per second are shot out, and at only .003 inch in diameter, the dots produce nearly continuous tones of color. Most silk and wool crepe is premounted in 15- to 20-yard rolls. (Boiled wool is too thick for bulk rolls, so one to five yards of it is mounted on paper as needed.) About two yards of fabric are printed per hour. A reversible fabric is flipped on the paper and run through the printer again. Until recently, Rice and Juodvalkis ordinarily printed one large piece of fabric and then positioned the pattern pieces to best effect. As they have become more attuned to the specifics of the final garment, they are designing some pattern pieces up front to fit together with others. This is how the butterfly series was done; the layout of wings was designed directly on the pattern shapes.

The final fabric process of steam heating and washing offers yet another chance for adjustments. Rice never knows what the fabric will look like until it is removed after three hours in the steamer, a seven-foot-tall, missile-like machine that sets the dye.

“Sometimes it comes out differently than I expected, but I like it,” says Rice. “Other times I may change the design a little, refine it, experiment with dye that gives me a better color. An important strength of our team is that we’re both willing to polish something until it’s right.”

Rhonda Sonnenberg is an author and journalist living in St. Petersburg, Florida.