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Fiber artist Susanne McCoy displays her first fabric collage series in the gallery at Karon’s Frame Center, 625 East Front street in Port Angeles from 5:30-7:30 p.m. on Friday, Feb. 11.

The show continues through the month of February during business hours.

A third generation artist on both sides of her family, McCoy comes from a lineage of portraitists and landscape painters in both watercolor and oils. 
Before raising her family, she made her portraits with black and white film, later “painting” her landscapes through garden design and plant placement.  During the last few years, she plunged into the world of fibers and fabrics: dying cloth, painting silk, making art quilts, and finding her happiest creative expressions.

Having also inherited the travel bug, McCoy says that  Mexico had become her muse.  She launched an “anthropological” investigation as to why this devotion was so deep and widespread: “Why was the Virgin of Guadalupe (not her real name) the Patron Saint of the Americas? The Queen of Heaven? Why on earth?,” asked McCoy, originally an atheist.

McCoy says she has been in service to the Virgin of Guadalupe since first visiting Mexico in the late 1970s. A number of personal miracles and an unexpected visitation caused spiritual change, such that she now attends church and lives a simpler, more contemplative life.

The making of the collages is a meditation, a practice of gratitude for her and the Virgin of Guadalupe informs these stitched and beaded prayers, McCoy says.