With this quote by Dorothea Tanning regarding one of a series of fabric sculptures that resulted in the installation Hotel de Pivot, I realized that working with fabric for anyone creates a tremendous risk or challenge. For Tanning the five year period of making work that culminated in Hotel de Pivot was a time as an outsider. She was working with materials that she “wasn’t supposed to” as an established painter, and she was working on pieces that were not “marketable” at all. But she was establishing a world with wools and tweeds, and a formal language that had not been previously worked out by anyone on a canvas. Thus, the three dimensional world of Hotel du Pivot becomes more than an image; it’s a pinnacle point in Tanning’s artistic development.