Renowned American textile artist and sculptor Gyoengy Laky (b. 1944) was once described as a ‘wood whisperer’. Her highly individual, puzzle-like assemblages of timber and other materials helped to significantly propel the growth of the contemporary fiber-arts movement.

Laky’s art traverses an extraordinary personal story: Born amid the bombings of World War II, she escaped from post-war, Soviet-dominated Hungary; a sponsorship from a family in Ohio, grade school in Oklahoma, and a course of study at the University of California, Berkeley, followed, before founding Fiberworks Center for Textile Arts in the 1970s and fostering innovations as a professor at the University of California, Davis.

Gyoengy Laky traveled extensively, especially to Asia. There she worked in various workshops, learned new weaving and braiding techniques, experimented with different materials, and thus laid the foundation for an extremely independent oeuvre that ranges from smaller basket-like objects to area-spanning Land Art.

The publication Screwing with Order provides insight into her studio practice, activism, and teaching philosophy, which champions sustainable art and design, original thinking, and the value of the unexpected.