Weaving Her Own Way - Suzanne Tick

From TTE 18: American Textile Design, Fall 2023

As Suzanne Tick announces her retirement from Luum Textiles, stepping down as Creative Director at the end of 2024, The Textile Eye honors a career that has profoundly shaped the contract design industry. Renowned for her visionary approach to sustainability and her seamless blend of nature, technology, and craft, Suzanne has set new standards in textile design. The creative team from Suzanne Tick Inc. has transitioned into the Teknion/Luum NYC Showroom, ensuring her legacy of innovation and excellence will continue to guide Luum into the future. Suzanne herself will focus on her incredible weaving projects and her passion for teaching Vedic meditation.

I had the immense pleasure of speaking with Suzanne last fall, and I’m delighted to share the resulting interview in full as a tribute to her extraordinary career.

Weaver and designer Suzanne Tick

A pinboard at Tick Studio shows fragments of works in progress.

From loom to Luum, weaver and textile designer Suzanne Tick has always started from scratch, first considering the raw materials that thread into her creations. Growing up in the rural midwest, she spent summers sorting metals at her father’s scrap recycling yard and exploring ways to use the cast-offs. It was a fitting start to her long career innovating ways to work sustainably with fibers, including developing the contract industry’s first biodegradable, post-consumer recycled polyester for Luum Textiles, where she is Creative Director.

Tick is also a design partner with Skyline Design and owns Tick Studio in the East Village where she leads meditation classes and weaving workshops. Her hand-woven art pieces made with repurposed materials have been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, Cooper Hewitt, and Art Basel, among other places. But as an art student at the University of Iowa, her career wasn’t always clear cut: Tick initially was given a “no thanks” from a string of New York design houses, but she didn’t let that deter her from forging her own path, using her passion for weaving and the environment to land top roles at the very places that once turned her away.

Tick weaving with pieces of nature in her New York City studio. In addition to her industry work, Tick creates woven art sculptures from repurposed materials.   

Acid yellows and electric blues are part of Luum’s luxury performance groupings.

In Luum’s New York City showroom, a sampling of fabrics shows how Luum palettes harmonize man-made and the organic, balancing warm and cool textures.

You started out studying printmaking in college. How did that lead to weaving?

During my freshman year, I started etching fabric onto copper plates as part of my printmaking classes. And, you know, every experience we have informs other experiences in our lifetime, so I thought I should take a weaving class so I could weave the textures that I wanted to embed into the copper. Then I was in a conundrum because both printmaking and weaving are so time- consuming. By my sophomore year, I had a loom and I would shut down the building every night: The janitor would come in and say, “It’s 1:30 a.m., you gotta go.” But I would unlock the window and crawl back in; I was totally obsessed with weaving. My parents would tell me, “This is lovely, but what are you going to do with it?” I was not fashion-oriented, but my mom did have Interiors magazine, and I saw all these textile companies in there, and I was like, “I’m going to do that. I’ll work for one of them.”

So you went to New York?

During my junior year, I contacted all those companies I had seen in the magazine—Knoll, Boris Kroll, and Jack Larsen, but it was really hard to get an interview as a weaver in Iowa. They said, “We don’t interview weavers from Iowa. We don’t even hire weavers, and I thought, What does that mean? Can’t I just show you my work? I finally got into Boris Kroll and Larsen and Knoll for like 10 minutes and they told me I needed to have a pattern design portfolio—I didn’t even know what jacquard design was. We were weaving on dobby looms. They told me I should go study pattern design at an East Coast school. So I went to FIT and got an applied science degree. Then I called the same companies, and Boris Kroll hired me.

Tell us about when you started at Boris Kroll.

For the first six months, I worked on patterns and we were on graph paper, and then the patterns would disappear, and it just drove me crazy. Finally, Mr. Kroll asked me what was wrong, and I said that I’d like to follow my pattern through the system and go to the mill. He said no one had ever asked for that before, and he invited me to be his assistant and I went to the mill with him every week to learn all the mechanics of making and costing yard, and the dye baths and all of that. I ended up overseeing the design department.

After Boris Kroll, you worked at Brickel and Unika Vaev before going out on your own.

I had a baby and I didn’t want to not experience being a mom, so I didn’t want to work full-time. I started creating textiles with the mills I had worked with. [I noticed] the collection I was working on looked like Knoll, which wasn’t intentional. So I took it to Knoll, but at first the creative director didn’t want to look at it, saying they weren’t looking for outside work. I waited a few more weeks and said, “I really think you should look at this.” And finally the creative director said, “You know,  you’re right. We should have this in our collection.” And that started the foundation of my working in collection format where everything has to be launched at the same time. The collection has a narrative, and it all works together, from panel to upholstery to wall fabric. Knoll asked me at one point to focus on sustainability, so I came out with their first sustainable material in about 1997.

What was the recycled material like then?

It was hemp-like and very coarse. It was really crude and I had to figure out how to extrude it. That was the beginning of solution-dyed polyester, and now we can do recycled polyester. We sold over a million yards in the first collection, and that was a huge phenomenon then. After that, I just kept focusing on how the industry needs more recycled material, and I’ve been doing that ever since.

Tick and her team assembled a color wall of 1,000 Luum upholstery fabrics.

Luum’s Super Natural Rubric (on the sofa cushions) is made with North American wool in the weft with a recycled cotton blend in the warp. Everyday Bouclé (on the frame) combines recycled warp and weft yarns with a hyper-textural wool blend bouclé.

Luum’s indoor outdoor fabrics: combinations of Geoglyph and Pebble Melange.

Earthly Artifacts collection by Luum.

A New Beginning at Luum

After working as an outside creative director at Knoll for some 13 years, Tick resisted the company’s urging to work in-house, full time. She made the move to Teknion shortly thereafter.

What was the transition like becoming the creative director at Luum?

I just called David Feldberg [CEO at Teknion] and asked if he wanted me to build them a textile brand. He flew in the next week. He wanted to name it Teknion Textiles, and I didn’t think that was the right thing. So we worked for about three years, but we wanted to sell outside beyond the Teknion family so we needed our own brand to grow, and we rebranded to Luum 10 years ago.

As creative director, you define the direction and the sort of research is going to be important?

I have my own team who are employed by me that take care of all the design and oversee the marketing. We feed the marketing direction and come up with all the creative. All of us are weavers except for my marketing person. We work with the internal Luum team so they know exactly what we’re doing. Four times a year, we bring in our concepts and ideas from around the world—we look at data mining, all the museum shows, arts and science topics, what’s happening in fashion.   

Could you highlight a bit of the most recent Luum collections and touch on the biodegradable aspects?

The Super Natural collection has been a dream collection for me because it’s the first time I’ve really launched all-natural materials. There’s been this tipping point now—about 76 percent of the textile industry is polyester. That’s a lot of polyester going into the waste system, and it’s just not right. So I wanted to go back to the cottons and wools recycled from garment waste. We found a mill out of Europe that has worked for 200 years on recycling garment waste, which is amazing. Super Natural was our fourth collection from that mill, so we’re very much at home with that manufacturer now. We included another new product that was primarily cotton, so a lot of the new stuff is really about how the hand of the material is because people are coming back to the workplace and it’s about: Do you want to be sitting on a warm hand, which is a textured, wooly feeling? Or do you want to sit on a cool hand, which has the viscose cotton feeling—smooth, but very dense? It’s all about creating on looms and machines that we don’t usually get to play with. We did our third biodegradable material in the Super Natural collection, so that was the one plastic that went in, but it was biodegradable and it has a beautiful wool quality to it.

Tick weaves and conducts hands-on weaving workshops in her East Village studio.

Sailor’s Delight, 2019, is made with discarded mylar balloons and mixed media on a wooden frame. “I collected over 1,000 mylar balloons while roaming the beach of Fire Island,” she says.

Paper Fringe, 2010, part of Tick’s Divorce Papers series, shredded documents.

Among Tick’s inspirations include designer Sheila Hicks, “as she has worked as an industry textile designer and an artist,” Tick says. “I met Sheila in 1997 right after having some success with Knoll Textiles.” Tick also counts Anni Albers (“for her structural and technical works”) and Magdalena Abakanowicz, who she studied about during college, among her other influences.

Creativity and Meditation

Tick Studio’s townhouse operates as a design lab, weaving workshop, and space for Tick, a Vedic meditation teacher, to lead classes.

How would you say your meditation practice dovetails with your creativity?

I could sense my agitation in the way I was expressing myself with all of the work I do and have been doing with my clients, and I also have always known that there’s something kind of beyond what we’re just seeing in the world, like things that would just coincidentally happen. I tried meditation, and it felt good, but I never stuck to it, and then I tried this [Vedic] meditation practice that is a mantra-based practice, and I  thought, I can do this, and I want to do this, and it’s so easy. One day I woke up not worried, and I thought, I think this is what happiness is. Now my whole team have their own mantras and we meditate, and I will tell you, it changed the entire perspective in the office. We’re all in sync. We get so much more done because you clear away all of the neurosis out of your system.

Can you tell us about your weaving practice and some of the latest commissions you have?

I’m up for three possible new large commissions, which is nice. Sustainability is definitely a topic; the relationship within all of these possibilities has to do with the ethos of the businesses and if they have materials that I can weave with and they can allow me to shred or to make it into materials. Everything informs everything, so it’s really about getting the materials that they want to have interpreted, and then working with their folks on recycling it and bringing that material into focus. It’s really about coming up with different ways of exploring the materials and then creating beautiful pieces of art out of it that people won’t even know unless they ask, What the heck is that?

So the way you work is all about  investigating the materials?

Yes, we definitely are constructionists. It’s all about the construction,  the fibers, the experimentation.