With technical brilliance, Lilian Tyrrell's large-scale tapestries---like fiber paintings--confront the viewer with some of society's pressing and provocative issues. In Poisonous Legacy , the message is about pollution. Her images are from the realms of urban issues and social values. Her abstract forms are beautiful, her weaving images powerful, her colors strong. The messages are unforgettable, but ones we would rather forget. In the Poisonous Legacy a oversized figure covered with cloth, using a breathing tube and with eyes masked looks at us full front view in a devastated landscape. The figure comes at the viewer as if escaping from an enclosure that looks like a picture frame. The thick weaving of the dominant frame pushes in on the space. We are reminded of all of our environmental issues in one that has been translated to fiber art. What is there only suggests what is not—a blend of the thoughts we have as we face the world we live in. Traditionally, tapestry weaves social, religious and philosophic issues into the tableaux; Tyrrell expresses contemporary problems and conditions. Tyrrell's work has been exhibited in Alaska and Portland Me. and Toronto , Canada as well as many other places. She was included in the C1eveland Museum of Art's 1994 Invitational and her installation for Urban Evidence: Contemporary Artists Reveal Cleveland, 1996 was at SPACES.