Mansfield, Patricia

Patricia Mansfield working on a batik

During her thirty-one year career in the Department of Related Art and then Environment, Textiles and Design, Patricia Mansfield succeeded in bringing together art and technology by creating innovative uses of image processing in the textile arts.

Mansfield earned both of her Related Art degrees from the UW--a BS in 1964 and then an MS in 1966. She immediately joined the faculty as an instructor, later moving up the ranks to a full professorship. She retired in 1997 with Emeritus status.

Throughout her time at the UW her interests included surface design, computer-aided design and image processing. In addition to participating in juried exhibitions across the country, she collaborated with colleagues and students to create many textile events, including the design of costumes for the Alwin Nikolais and Hannah Kahn Dance Companies during their campus residencies in 1978 and 1980. She designed many banner works for the University. Among them were the 1980 a fabric sculpture "Firebird," which was suspended in the courtyard, and coordinating interior banners that were designed for the School of Music's Stravinsky Celebration, and the 1989 Banners on Bascom project that she created together with a former graduate student.

But she is perhaps best remembered for her advocacy of the Helen Louise Allen Textile Collection and the work she accomplished in designing ARTSearch, a nationally recognized interactive videodisc based retrieval system. Out of a desire to make the Collection more accessible to researchers both on and off campus, Mansfield produced a laser videodisc of the Collection and designed a computer database that provided simultaneous retrieval of both visual and text databases. Later, image processing was added to enable textile design students to use the historic textiles as inspiration for contemporary designs. She also brought computers and art together in her work on using computers as a design tool. Her computer-aided design imagery first appeared in 1976 at the juried show Fabric Design International in Lawrence, Kansas. In 1989 Professor Mansfield received an appointment as a Vilas Associate. The resulting new work utilized video to capture real world images and superimpose an array of design solutions over the virtual reality universe that surrounds us. This approach was applied in the design of large-scale outdoor banners including Water Reflections for the Wisconsin State Capitol Building. Professor Mansfield continues to use this approach in her current design work.