1 3 cally the mysterious flows that arise . I am always filled with expectationwhen I start these pieces because the end-result is as undefinable as the movement of water or air yet as recognizable as a river or a cloud . Weaving inherently deals with front and back, between the visible and the concealed surfaces, between outside and inside . From early on a great quantity of my work has been concerned with this fact. In the Umbras the reverse is always the hidden layer. The back of each strand supports the color that the face reflects, and the entire back is the skeleton of the visible surface. A variation of this concern is found in the series Lost Images in whch the strands are placed on edge (so it becomes the primary face) and, as a result, both front and back are obliquely visible to the viewer . In most of my work I used this unacknowledged side to experiment. I felt less pressure about concluding ideas or perfecting finishes; this hidden side is freer, more unknown, more open-ended.When I started the Stelae this preoccupation with the double-face of things came to the foreground . I had never been so conscious of the force contained in the back as when I did these pieces. For that reason the Stelae have one side of luminous gold and the other of dark silver. The reverse, though much more resolved than in earlier work, still has vestiges of the original experimental function of the back. The two sides are stitched together by a thin weightless edge that becomes a thread, that becomes the irregular contour of an accidental shape . The solid surfaces of the Stelae link the woven structure to the ruins of past civilizations. This series of irregularly shaped textiles retook some ideas of the free-standing, large-volume fiber structures I had made during the late seventies and early eighties . But now I had squeezed volume materially into a lithic surface. I think of them as stones full of space, each one a presence full of 28. Umbra 25, 2001; back face. 29. Umbra 30, 2003; back face. 30. Stelae v, 1996. 31. Stelae v, 1996; back face.