Uncommon Threads

from: www.sacbee.com

Ray Materson used his prison time to learn a craft - creating miniature masterpieces

Last Updated 9:06 am PDT
Wednesday, May 16, 2007

"The Noon Watch, " "Mark McGuire," and "Covenant and Betrayal" are included in "Stories Through Needle and Thread," an exhibit of Ray Materson's miniature needlework at the Design Museum at UC Davis.

Ray Materson embroiders tiny pieces of art using, oddly enough, the unraveled threads of ordinary socks. It was all he had to work with in prison, and socks remain his medium of choice.

Nineteen of the New York artist's exquisitely detailed miniatures are featured in "Stories Through Needle and Thread" at the University of California, Davis, Design Museum. He will talk about the artwork at 1 p.m. Sunday at the museum.

"He can tell such a powerful and monumental story in such a small format," says associate professor of design Ann Savageau, who curated the show. "There is honesty and complexity to his work. He doesn't spare the viewer or try to whitewash his own story or his own failings."

Materson's work is remarkable -- 1,000 stitches per square inch in pieces measuring just 3 inches by 4 inches -- and it often is raw and graphic, depicting prison life and drug use. Many of his subjects are nude.

The story of how a recovering addict and convicted felon came to embroider miniature masterpieces that impressed his fellow inmates and now command as much as $4,000 from private collectors is a long one.

It begins, more or less, when Materson was 14 and took up drinking and pot-smoking to be "cool." He struggled with his addictions well into his 20s, despite attempts at recovery, and then got hooked on cocaine.

One day, desperate for drug money, he stole a toy pistol from a Kmart and started robbing people in parking lots. After the third holdup, he was caught, convicted and sentenced to 15 years in a Connecticut prison. He was 33.

"I was scared out of my mind, because I'm this middle-class college boy with a degree in philosophy," says Materson, now 53 and a single dad raising his two young children. "I spent the first year trying to lay low because I didn't fit in too well. I was trying to be a tough guy, which I was not very good at, and people saw through me."

He also spent that first year feeling angry -- at the justice system, the world and life in general. One day, he fell to his knees in his cell and prayed, something he hadn't done in a long time. He asked God to get him out of there, pleading that he didn't belong in prison.

"But the warden didn't come along with a 'get out of jail free' card, and choirs of angels didn't show up, either," Materson says, laughing. "I was given instead really vivid memories of things that had been special to me as a kid, in my glory years, as I like to think of them."

He remembered the plays he wrote and performed in school, his term as sixth-grade class president and his beloved New York Yankees. He thought about his grandmother's serenity as she sat on the porch and embroidered pillowcases, even as his drunk, angry father raged nearby.

"She could sit and rock and be oblivious to it all," Materson says.

He also thought about the University of Michigan football games he attended with friends. In a bit of well-timed serendipity, the Wolverines were about to play the University of Southern California in the Rose Bowl.

Brightened, and feeling better about himself than he had in a long time, Materson decided to embroider a patch in Michigan maize and blue, which he would wear on game day and pretend he was in the stands in Pasadena.

"It just so happened that the man in the next cell was hanging out some underwear and socks he'd washed in the sink, and among those belongings was a pair of tube socks with maize and blue stripes," Materson says. "So I struck a deal for the socks and gave him a pack of cigarettes."

Materson cut an embroidery hoop from a Rubbermaid container he had in his cell and borrowed a sewing needle.

"The block officer always had a little cache of sewing supplies in case a prison uniform needed repair," Materson says. "I would 'check' the needle out each day until finally one of the guards said, 'Just keep the damn thing, Mattie!' They knew what I was doing and didn't perceive me as a threat."

He never had the luxury of scissors but ploddingly cut the toes off socks with fingernail clippers he bought at the prison store so he could unravel the threads.