Silk Compositions

Megan Barra creates works of art from fabric she sews by hand

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Megan Barra was seven when her father moved the family from Baton Rouge to Lafayette. She has soaked up the culture ever since. “I thank him every day,” said Barra, whose immersion is reflected in her love of Cajun and Zydeco music and the fast-disappearing local dance halls as well as in the art and graphic design she creates.

Today her studio/office is furnished with antiques. A drop-leaf table from an antiques mall serves as her desk. She stores art supplies in a 150-year-old Acadian lap desk, made of cypress, with a hinged top. Her father’s old drafting board sits in a corner with a Sonny Landreth LP, Bound By The Blues, resting on it. “I designed that as well as Sonny’s other recording packages over the years,” she said. “My favorite design projects are music packaging.” In 2002, her package design for Landreth’s CD Levee Town was nominated for a Grammy.

On the wall above her cypress file cabinets hang three of her “Silk Compositions.” More are stacked upright on the floor. “These are from 2016 and ‘17 and are on a bigger scale than my older pieces,” she said. Barra’s earlier works ranged from 4x6 inches to 12x12, with a few ventures into larger-scale pieces. “I wanted to explore the opportunities that come with a larger canvas, which allows more complex detail in material, color, and content,” she said of her newer compositions.

“The images Megan’s creating are pretty amazing,” said Barry Ancelet, professor emeritus at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette (ULL), who owns several pieces by Barra. “She has a poetic notion of imagery. She’s zeroing in on quintessential elements, like a woman playing a guitar. She’s very musically oriented.”

Barra was excited to have one of her pieces, “Les Blues d’Amédé Ardoin,” exhibited at Art Melt (the largest multi-media juried art exhibit in the state) in Baton Rouge last summer. The piece is filled with references to the Creole musician (1898–1942) who lived and played in Eunice but also traveled to New York City to record. Ardoin spent the last six weeks of his life in a mental hospital in Pineville. The most commonly told but unconfirmed story attributes his decline to an attack by two white men, who objected to a young woman’s lending Ardoin her handkerchief to wipe his brow when he played at a house party. “I love his music,” said Barra. “I printed several images on silk fabric, including the only known photo of him. He was thirteen or fourteen, dressed in a suit for his confirmation, holding a candle and a rosary.

“When Ann Savoy was putting her book [Cajun Music: A Reflection of a People, 1984] together, she brought the photo to the graphic-design shop where I worked, and I made a photocopy of it.

“After setting up the image digitally, I transferred it to silk with an inkjet printer. I ironed the silk fabric onto freezer paper before printing on it.”

The piece includes symbols of Ardoin’s life and work, including a lemon, which he carried to refresh his throat when he sang, and an image of a flour sack Barra found online to represent the sack in which the musician carried his accordion. She printed on silk a map of St. Landry and Evangeline parishes, where Ardoin performed. “I’m a collector,” she said. “My mother’s parents traveled in the 1970s to every state, to Canada, and to South America. My grandmother gave me all her maps. I’m an amateur archivist, and she understood that. I’ve used some of them in paper collages.”

The work is labor-intensive. Each piece is cut from silk and painstakingly hand sewn. “I may do the straight edges with a machine.” 

Barra works on her silk compositions at her Lafayette home, doing hand sewing at her kitchen table and machine sewing in her bedroom on a 1910 Singer treadle machine once owned by her great-aunt Camille Paris. “It’s a beautiful machine,” said Barra. “The drawers are filled with her rick-rack and patterns and notions. I like having them; it’s like her spirit is still there. She was 104 years old when she died.”

Barra prefers quilts made of scraps to those made of new, color-coordinated fabrics. “With scraps, each piece tells a story. I have quite a collection of fabric now. People give me old clothes or something they brought back from Thailand. I have a roomful of see-through plastic bins organized by color. 

“Other boxes contain special things. I went to an auction at Albania Plantation in Jeanerette and bought a whole [auction] lot of vintage handkerchiefs, some embroidered. One had a vintage map of Louisiana printed on it. I find some things at antique shops or garage sales.”

Her work has been exhibited as far afield as France and Canada; Le Musée acadien du Québec has “Laissez les bons temps rouler” in its permanent collection. Barra is not currently represented by a gallery, but her work sells itself when people fall in love with it. “I took some pieces to Gallery 912 to be framed by Jeromy Young,” she said. “He sold one before I could pick them up.”

Ancelet, who co-founded Festivals Acadiens et Créoles (then called A Tribute to Cajun Music) in 1974, has long been a fan. He and his wife Caroline own four of her works. “I was in her office and noticed the framed pieces. I asked her, ‘What’s the story?’ She told me she had just got them back from a show in Baton Rouge [Art Melt]. I said, ‘Are they for sale?’ and she said, ‘Sure!’ I pulled out my checkbook and bought a piece called ‘Songbird’ for Caroline for our anniversary. It depicts a white bird with red wings and back sitting on a couple of Louisiana irises. I asked Megan to save it until it was time for me to give it to Caroline. 

“When I went to pick it up I saw more from the same series in a larger format. I said, ‘Omigod, what is this?’ I was looking at one that is a bit of a departure from her normal style of subdued colors and soft tones. It’s more abstract.

“She said, ‘That’s a piece I did inspired by your Sunday morning concert after the pig roast.’” (The Ancelets host an annual cochon de lait, and musician friends perform in the kitchen while the gumbo cooks.) Ancelet bought “Kitchen Band” on the spot.

“This more abstract work is a new direction for me,” said Barra. “I wanted a lively musical feel, like improvised phrasing in jazz and blues. I used small pieces of silk with randomly placed bright colors against a morning light background. The geometric stylized musicians are based on guitarist Sam Broussard and bass player Gary Newman.”

Both works are included in Barra’s 2017 catalog, which itself is a tiny work of art. The 4.75x6.75” cover is dark blue with tiny repeated images of birds in white: “That’s a pattern I made of the egrets flying at Bird City at Avery Island,” said Barra. Each of its ten slick pages contains an image of a silk composition. One piece, “Black Snake Blues,” bleeds off the page, its vivid colors drawing in the viewer. Four pieces have poems in French on the facing pages. 

Barra intends to keep expanding in both her graphic design and her art. “I want to get to the point where I draw on the fabric,” she said. “I have to experiment. That’s going to be another exploration.” 

View more of Megan Barra’s work at meganbarra.com. Ruth Laney can be reached at ruthlaney@cox.net.