Mary Salome Vandergraft, Fiber Artist
Mary Salome Vandergraft, Fiber Artist in Durham, North Carolina, creates hand-painted silk scarves, garments from vintage Japanese kimonos, wall hangings and screens. Inspired by the vibrant sunsets and sunrises of Southern Idaho, where she grew up, Mary’s designs are added to 100% white Chinese silk using the highest quality color-fast fabric dyes.
Mary Salome Vandergraft
Mary has been a textile artist since she was four-years-old and started making doll clothes. The vibrant sunsets and sunrises of Southern Idaho, where she grew up, provide inspiration for her color pallet. Fabric stimulates almost all of her senses, but especially her visual and tactile ones.
Mary began weaving fabric in the early 1970’s and later, while living in Saudi Arabia, she learned to batik. Upon returning to the US she ended up in Chapel Hill, North Carolina and in September of 1986 attended a workshop to learn silk painting. The sensuous iridescence of the silk and the way it took the dyes had her hooked!
She began making and marketing silk scarves and clothing, selling them at fine craft shows and one-of-a-kind boutiques throughout the US. She eventually began making interior pieces such as wall hangings, screen, banners and kites and recently installed two large box kites at the Albert Eye Research Center at Duke University Medical Center, Durham, NC.
She has taken classes and workshops at many premier craft schools including Penland School for Crafts in North Carolina, Arrowmont in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, Haystack Mtn. School of Crafts in Deer Isle, Maine and the Design School at NC State University, Raleigh, North Carolina.
In addition to her textile art, Mary is the director of the After School program at St. Thomas More School in Chapel Hill, NC.
