Finding Her Form: Joyce Melander-Dayton

It’s been a long road, but Joyce Melander-Dayton has arrived where she wants to be as an artist.

The journey has not been a surprise. “I knew when I was younger that it would take me a while to get to where I felt I’d found my role,” the 53-year-old said recently over lunch in Minneapolis, where her latest exhibition is taking place.

Melander-Dayton, whose mixed-media, textile-based work recalls constructivism, loved needlework and other traditionally female crafts as a youngster. But once she began her study of art in college, she decided that to be taken seriously, she would need to master painting. And so began her early career as a realistic painter.

As she matured, though, she began to accept that she had “always liked the backsides of canvases more than the front.” The turning point came one day when she opened Vanity Fair and saw a story on Robert Rauschenberg, who incorporated three-dimensional objects onto two-dimensional surfaces. “I thought, he can do whatever he wants to a canvas. Why can’t I?” Her paintbrush was getting in the way of her art, she realized; she wanted to touch her work more directly. The tactile pleasures of her youth could not be denied.

With that insight, she began poking holes in her canvases with an ice pick and weaving through them. That was 15 years ago, and the variations keep coming. That suits her fine. “I don’t get when people do the same thing over and over,” she says.

One thing that hasn’t changed for the Santa Fe-based artist: her meticulousness. It’s unmistakable in her work, which combines embroidery, beading, weaving, applique, and felting, among other techniques. “I’m very tidy,” she says. “People told me to loosen up as a painter,” she recalls. “But I’d say, somebody needs to embrace their OCD side.”

Melander-Dayton can’t identify her favorite works. “I have very little attachment to the work itself,” she says. What she likes, she says, is making it. “I just have a good time all the time,” she says. “My studio is a happy place.”

The hand-mind connection brings her great joy, she says, and she thinks others could benefit by it too. “Our society does not make things. That makes us anxious and neurotic,” she says. “People would be better off working with their hands.”

“Constructions in Concert: Art by Joyce Melander-Dayton” is showing at the Textile Center in Minneapolis through April 14. Monica Moses is American Craft magazine’s editor in chief.