Rebecca Messier’s In Stillness invites viewers into her deeply personal and meditative practice reflecting her poignant precision, repetition, and material curiosity. Drawing from a childhood rich in craft and an enduring love of paper, Messier’s thread work speaks to the patient accumulation of form over time. Her father’s architectural drawings and her own early experiments with origami and folded paper seeded a reverence for structure and symmetry that now anchors her textile-based compositions.
Though she began her creative journey exploring paint, wax, ink, and clay, it was thread on paper that offered her an unending sense of possibility. In Messier’s hands, rigid paper transforms into something tactile, pliable, and woven—its surface pierced and wrapped until it resembles fabric, not substrate. Using rayon, silk, and polyester, she navigates the material limits of saturation and density, approaching color and texture like a builder layering meaning into every stitch. The resulting works—intensely ordered yet soft in palette—are quiet studies in balance and control.
Her process is both architectural and intuitive: planned meticulously on a drafting table, then carried out in quiet, repeated gestures that she likens to a form of regulation—a way to ground herself in the present moment. It is a practice of making that is physical, rhythmic, and ritualized.
All works in this exhibition are presented in series, never as single, stand-alone pieces. This intentional format emerged from Messier’s natural impulse to reimagine each finished piece in a new form—to expand, contract, and reinterpret—echoing the continuous cycles of breath, impermanence, and transformation. Inspired by artists like Anni Albers, Max Cole, and Agnes Martin, her thread works exist in the same lineage of quiet abstraction and spiritual precision.
Though rooted in our own mountainous community of Telluride, Messier's palette leans toward the muted tones of the desert—sands, charcoals, and sun-washed earth. These tones evoke a kind of internal landscape: still, expansive, and elemental. It is from this terrain, both within and beyond her, that the work breathes.
