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As a child, Susan Edmunds remembers weaving on a small hand loom. It wasn’t until 1996 that the retired test developer, picked up another small loom and needed to find out how to change the waft.
“I visited my friend’s shop in French Town and found myself in a room surrounded by spinning wheels and looms,” Edmunds said. “I felt so at home.”
Edmunds got the same feeling of being at home during the Arts Commission’s open studio this year when she visited artist Marsha Goldberg.

“It’s astounding how much a like our work is,” Edmunds said. “Marsha asked me to join her in her library exhibit, my first show with more than one piece.”
During the month of December the two artists are exhibiting together at the Highland Park Public Library. Recently, during the artist’s opening reception, with the smell of ginger and apples in the air, on the afternoon of the first snow fall of the year, it was hard to tell which was the work of the weaver and which was the painter’s.
“Susan came to see my work during the open studio and it was apparent how the similarities between us were striking,” Goldberg said. “In both of our pieces there are intersecting colors, horizontal and vertical lines, and how we replicate nature in our compositions.”
Edmunds’ Sketchbook Pages 2009 done with graphite and colored pencils, works as a separate series and as a journal of ideas for her weaving. The horizontal lines mirror Goldberg’s Crossing/Eliat #3, a woodblock monoprint with colored pencil and graphite.
“The pieces are like fossils, you can’t tells which is the grain of wood and which is the object,” Goldberg said. “It’s like looking down from an airplane, which is print, which is drawing?”
Marsha Goldberg, who has been a life long painter,  started her professional training in high school, went on to receive her BFA in Painting from Boston University, and her MFA from Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University.
Goldberg has had many solo exhibits in New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and New Jersey. She has been included in exhibits at many colleges and university museums as well as in private galleries. Her oil on canvas Turnout is on loan to the library and hangs over the fireplace.
“The works on paper were produced during the year I spent in Eilat, Israel,” Goldberg said. “The imagery incorporates ideas about the desert meeting the sea, as well as the borders-more and less visible- between countries.”
Edmunds has come along way from the small hand held loom she had as a child. Much like the shop she visited to learn how to remove a warp, she has filled the top floor of her house with looms.  
Some of the looms she has researched from antiquity and built herself. The back strap loom  was used by nomads, she has built an ancient Greek loom, tapestry loom warp-weighted loom and many others.
Edmunds has done so much research into weaving that she has helped to produce two films, Text and Textile: An Introduction to WoolWorking for Readers of Greek and Latin and Gods, Myths, and Mortals: Discover ancient Greece.
Her largest piece in the exhibit, Striped Rug #2 was created with a linen warp, wool weft, and plant derived dyes.
“I begin a weaving with a clear, uncomplicated plan and warp my loom accordingly,” Edmunds said “If I am dyeing yarn for a particular piece, I may allow controlled accidents to occur and in each moment of weaving I try to remain alert to possibilities.”