Vicki Conley, “Algae,” 30×38 in.

4 Common Corners is a fiber arts collective whose members come together to celebrate the beauty of the Southwest. Over time, their exhibitions have celebrated such signature local elements as Rocks, Cottonwoods, and Things Abandoned. Their current showing, now in the Edna Runswick Taylor Foyer, at the East Entrance to the South Campus Center for Arts and Media of Salt Lake Community College, is titled Hidden Life. A dozen artists, using a wide variety of fiber-arts techniques, set out to explore parts of the natural world that typically escape our view.

In “Made of Stardust,” Bev Haring establishes the compound significance of the theme. Her layered composition uses a technique less familiar than the sewn-together blocks of a quilt—less familiar to textile art, that is, but quite familiar in paper, in the art of collage—to create something that looks in its photograph like a watercolor, say, with transparent passages overlain on textures and an opaque background. On seeing the result, a viewer who recognizes the subject as the double helix molecule of a DNA strand will know that these essential life structures are far too tiny to be seen without a microscope. But Haring’s thought penetrates deeper, as her title reveals. The line “We are Stardust” has found a home in poetry and song, but before that it was spoken by scientists. We now understand that an entire generation of stars that formed after the Big Bang had created space as we know it had to burn out, explode, and scatter their dust across the universe to make the elements heavier than the few light ones stars are made of. So the real “hidden life” that Haring reveals is the lost billions of years of celestial lives that it took to create the periodic table full of elements that we depend on entirely.

Betty Hahn, “Birth of a Storm”

It may already have occurred to interested parties that recent events, from the warming climate to the narrowing of politics and beyond, have made the subject matter of Hidden Life more important than ever. For example, Betty Hahn’s “Birth of a Storm” makes creative use of the so-called “false colors” of a weather diagram to bring into the gallery an optical version of the violence of a cyclonic storm. It could be argued that hurricanes, called among other things “typhoons,” have always been a fact of life in many parts of the world. However, without changing their fundamental patterns, these literal cataclysms have grown larger, more destructive, and yet more numerous a few years into the long-predicted era of climate change, or global warming. Hahn offers us the chance to think of a child, say, sleeping soundly under a comforting quilt that ironically depicts a less than ideal future for her and her generation, and this artist does so while there is still a possibility that we can change our fate.

Rosanna Lynne Welter introduces a metaphorical, textile secret into her “Nesting,” in which she presents a kind of X-ray of a tree, the branches of which are filled with hidden birds’ nests, each of which inhabits a pocket sewn into a spot near where such an avian domicile would ideally be situated. Anyone who’s walked beneath trees in different seasons may well have marveled at the way such nests disappear while in use as brooding stations, then come alive when the chicks hatch out and begin to insist on being fed. Welter has also used her stitches to suggest the fine branches that support her pink and blue foliage. It comes to mind that the colors may be symbolic, since those same colors are used by humans as signals that are part of the bedding of their own offspring.

“Cylindrospermum” is a genus of filamentous cyanobacteria—believed to be the earliest life forms on Earth—found both in soils and in water. Shannon Conley shows us a network of living things just under our feet and very possibly as complex as any larger living organism, like trees in a forest or the mixed populations in a body of water (an example of which Lynn Welsch depicts in her enormously complex “Under the Sea Creatures.”) Conley and another artist who may be her relation, Vicki Conley, who made a comparable image of “Algae,” may bring to mind the gigantic, yet almost unseen Desert Crust that is finally getting the attention it deserves.

Rosanna Lynne Welter, “Nesting”

Lynn Welsch, “Under the Sea Creatures,” 25×39 in.

No two of these twelve artists has turned her textile skills to representing hidden life in quite the same way, but each has employed color and fabric detailing in ways that highlight living things, either by their environments, their effects on the world around them, or by looking directly at them. No one who comes to see their work needs to be told that the four corners of the United States—Utah, New Mexico, Colorado, and Arizona—constitute a unique part of the American scene: our own locus of Hidden Life.

4 Common Corners: Hidden Life, Salt Lake Community College, Salt Lake City, through Apr. 3

Geoff Wichert

Geoff Wichert objects to the term critic. He would rather be thought of as a advocate on behalf of those he writes about.