CAROL ANN RICE RAFFERTY - FIBER ARTIST

All of my coffee filters were up cycled or re-purposed after serving their original purpose of filtering coffee first. As a wife / mother & homemaker I’ve always been interested in recycling, composting & keeping my input into landfills to a minimum. Fashions are our metaphorical armor we select each day to go out & face the world.

Carol Ann Rice Rafferty, born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1956, combines her love of art, history and sewing. As a young girl she enjoyed spending hours listening intently to her mother and grandmothers as they shared childhood memories, sang songs they learned as children, cooked favorite family recipes together, and learned to embroider and construct garments. Her mother had a career in fashion which strongly influenced Carol's interest in design and fashion. Carol sewed and knitted her entire wardrobe during her high school years. Her passion is creating trauqil environments, sewing, cooking, and gardening as an outlet for her artistic energy. She earned her degree in Design from Buffalo State College. She remained at Buffalo State teaching in the Fiber Program as an Adjunct Instructor continuing to build the program, assisting with workshops and introducing new techniques into the fiber program.    

Carol's art has recently been published in the book 500 Paper Objects. Her work has been accepted into Fiberarts International 2007, Craftforms 2006 as well as numerous juried shows in Buffalo and Pittsburgh. Carol left her teaching position after two years to study in the graduate Fibers Program at Savannah College of Art and Design. She offers college level classes in fiber reactive dyes, painting, papermaking, shibori, weaving and other fiber techniques at her home studio in Clarence, NY.

"My art is on the bridge between fine art and craft. Thinking of ways to improve designs, experimentation to repurpose materials are my passions. Creating beauty from ashes, designing functional, aesthetically pleasing environments is imperative to me. My art is an extension of myself.”