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Why fabric? (by Margaret Cooter)

Published August 10, 2014 Art Technique , textile art 7 Comments

Why quilts – rather than paintings … do you sometimes wonder? Whenever SAQA’s Art Quilt News pops into my inbox (you can subscribe here, it’s free) I ponder this question – the quilts shown in it are each part of an exhibition somewhere. Of course, seeing the work on screen is nothing like seeing it for real, whether its a quilt or painting or other medium … so the quality of the photography for what we see on screen is going to make a difference, especially for quilts, with the texture of the quilting often so very important in the design concept.

This week, thumbs up for fabric in this quilt, Yellow Pod, by Colleen Ansbaugh –

The fabric is monoprinted, which at first made me think – “why not on paper” – but here the quilting adds that necessary something to complement and enhance the lines and colours of the print.

K Velis Turan’s “Please Stand By” is screenprinted, and the reverse applique will make some elements pop, which again seems to enhance the design … and wouldn’t work as well in paint or print on paper. The visible quilting is a graphic element in itself (closeup is here) –

Nancy Crow‘s “Double Mexican Wedding Rings IV” (1988-90) could be a zingy print on paper, but this piece is “so quilty” because it comes right out of the quilt tradition – the blocks need to be pieced, not painted … fabrics, not hues, need to be used.

Would you say much the same about this next quilt? Does it need fabric and stitch to bring the design to life, or would it work equally well in paint, print, or collage?

Alicia Merrett, Blue Harbour

Quilted sea … that makes sense to me – the sea itself has a visible texture … but when it comes to quilted skies, what do you think – does the quilting evoke the feel of the wind or enhance the look of the clouds? Or are skies best left “just” painted?

Photorealism on fabric is another stumbling block for me – it makes me ask “why?” Perhaps “because I thought it would be interesting” is good enough an answer?

It seems to me that sometimes the use of fabric is either an indulgence, or else a power struggle: the materials need to be vanquished, they need to be bent to the will of the maker.

There’s a further consideration, and I rather hesitate to mention it, but here goes…. What do you think – could it be that some people using fabric because they haven’t developed skills in other media?

Kantha stitching with Dorothy Caldwell (by Kathleen Loomis)

Published August 3, 2014 Art Technique , textile art 3 Comments

I wrote in June about Dorothy Caldwell, the internationally renowned fiber artist, who conducted workshops for my local fiber and textile art group. This time I’d like to focus on her use of the kantha stitch, aka running stitch, the most basic possible of hand stitches, the one we all learned when we first took up a needle in our hand. Dorothy joked that the reason she uses kantha so much in her own work is that she has never learned any more complicated stitches, but I’m not sure I believe her. Nevertheless, it’s a powerful mark-making tool.

She brought several kantha embroideries that had been made by a cooperative of women in northern India with whom Dorothy has worked for several years. They make large pieces to sell in an effort to improve their village, and among other things have been able to build a meeting house in which to work and to clean up a lake that can now be used for fishing.

One of the recurring motifs in the embroideries is a woman’s headdress that seems almost to be blowing away, billowing behind the figure. In fact, it shows a sari that is no longer draped over the woman’s face — as the women in this village used to dress when they were dependent and downtrodden — but is pushed back in freedom.

One or two of the women are in charge of drawing the cartoon onto the blank fabric, after which many women might work on the same piece. Popular compositions might be repeated many times but in different color schemes. Here’s a large scene that was executed twice, once in white on black and the other in black on white.

We didn’t have time in the two-day workshop to make any such elaborate embroideries, but we did spend enough time with the kantha stitch to see how it can be deployed in many different patterns and rhythms.

Here are my two kantha samplers, still in progress. I’ll definitely keep working with this stitch and learn more about how it works.

Some Time Later (by Clairan Ferrono)

Published July 27, 2014 Art Ideas , Artist , contemporary art , paintings , textile art 8 Comments

E Hesse

http://collection.mam.org/search.php?search=Hesse%2C%20Eva

Some time ago I posted about an art filled trip I’d taken to Wisconsin. This post was meant to follow shortly thereafter, but life intervened. Finally, we move on to the Milwaukee museum of art. I had limited time, so I quickly determined to see only the modern art (which is what I am most interested in). One room was closed, which was a disappointment, but that allowed me to spend more time with each piece that intrigued me.

L Carroll Grey Sleeping Painting 2010-12

details

I was taken by this rough mixed media piece by Lawrence Carroll, an artist I’d never seen before: https://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Carroll Of course, the stitching drew me in! This piece is made of wax and canvas on wood.

G. O’Keeffe

There was a room of O’Keeffes, but I found none very interesting except for this small still life. The vegetables seem to me to have her particular sensuality, and I like how they are clearly situated in the white bowl? on the white cloth? which is narrowly delineated at the top of the painting.

S. LeWitt Wall Drawing #88

This piece by Sol LeWitt was drawn on an entire wall of the museum in pencil.

The work was conceived by de Witt specifically for the Milwaukee Museum of Art, but not executed by him. He gave instructions (above) that 6″ grids should be drawn to cover the wall and that freehand lines (looking very much like quilting!) should be drawn inside each square. He further instructed that the inside of the wall have blue and yellow lines, but this was not done. He clearly believed that “the hand of the artist” was not essential, only the idea. However, I wonder what the work would have looked like if he himself had drawn all the lines.

J. Mitchell Untitled 1969

I spent most of my time with the abstract expressionists (no surprise here!). I like the movement around the dark clotted enter of this piece by Joan Mitchell. I also like the texture of the thick paint.

detail

Rothko Green Red Blue 1955

This is not one of the best Rothkos, but his work is always worth looking at to my mind.

H Hoffman Dew and Dusk 1957

Hans Hoffman was the teacher of the early abstract expressionists and a master of color. His work is so exuberant I couldn’t help smiling the entire time I was looking at it. The multiple colors are so saturated that there is no hint of the “rainbow” effect.

detail

R Diebenkorn OCEAN PARK #88 1974

The Diebenkorn was too large for me to get a full shot of, and again, it’s not his best work, but still quite lovely melting soft soothing sea colors kept from being too sweet by some dark and sharp lines of color containing them. I love the blurred edges as well.

As it turned out, I had 15 minutes extra which I spent just sitting in a big comfy chair, looking out a window at a gorgeous view of Lake Michigan. In addition, it is worth a trip to this museum for the building itself designed by Saarinen. It has wings which are opened and closed at specific times of day. www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFQQJIUTv9M

https://mam.org/info/details/quadracci.phpwww.mam.org

You can get an app for your phone showing different views of the wings opening and closing.

Dorothy Caldwell — making art of place (by Kathleen Loomis)

Published June 22, 2014 Artist , textile art , Women in art 6 Comments
Tags: Dorothy Caldwell

My local fiber and textile art group was privileged to have the internationally known fiber artist Dorothy Caldwell spend a week with us earlier this month teaching workshops. She also gave a lecture on her activities in the “outback” of two countries, Australia and Canada. These activities have culminated in a show that has just closed in Peterborough, Ontario, and will soon travel to two other venues in Canada.

She points out that Australia and Canada are similar nations in many ways: They’re both huge countries with the great majority of the population clustered on the edges, with vast expanses of sparsely settled, ecologically fragile territory that few people ever get to see. They were both British colonies, with substantial numbers of people who were transported there as punishment. Both are rich in resources.

Dorothy has been traveling to Australia for 20 years on a variety of travel, teaching, study and artist residence programs. Recently she received a grant from the Canadian government to conduct two parallel art projects on the two continents; in both places she would go to a remote location for several weeks, getting to know it, collecting both natural and manmade artifacts, and dyeing paper and fabric with indigenous plant and earth materials. Then she made a new set of works reflecting her experiences.

In Australia, she visited a sheep station in the Flinders Ranges of South Australia, north of Adelaide. In Canada, she went to Pangnirtung on Baffin Island, 1600 miles north of Toronto, close to Greenland.

“My work is about being in a particular place and using what’s there,” she said. “I want to get out into the landscape, experience the land, get to know a place by handling the materials.” For instance, she hiked barefoot on the delicate tundra to get a feel for the tiny, stunted vegetation.

On both these visits she brought Japanese handmade paper, tough enough to hold up in a dye pot, and colored them with natural pigments from plants and earth. She also collected things like rusty nails and broken tools from the sheep shearers, which came home to become part of the “museum” section of her show.

“Collecting has always been an important part of what I do, since I was a little kid,” Dorothy said. “My way of journaling is collecting.”

After she came home from her trips, she made some of her characteristically huge fiber pieces to reflect her travels and learnings. Here’s one inspired by the Arctic summer, with 24-hour daylight that often leads people to stay up all night in euphoria. Dorothy asked one of the locals how they dealt with not being able to distinguish between “day” and “night” and was both chagrined and charmed at the response: “When we’re tired we go to sleep.”

Dorothy Caldwell, How Do We Know It’s Night, 120 x 114″

Here’s a piece about the fjord on which Pangnirtung is built.

Dorothy Caldwell, Fjord, 120 x 114″

I was delighted to observe how she continues her practice of collection and documentation even if she’s not in an exotic place, but somewhere as unspecial as Louisville.

On a day off between workshops we walked over the new pedestrian bridge that spans the Ohio River. When we got to the Indiana side, Dorothy pulled a plastic bag out of her purse and proceeded to collect stuff to memorialize this place. She found some mud to daub on a card, writing the date and place on the back, and then dunked some silk into muddy water to dye it. She repeated the process on the Kentucky side (even though to my eye mud on one side of the river is fairly indistinguishable from mud on the other).

On the Kentucky side we found some deep footprints in the sand at the edge of the river, partially filled with water that had seeped in. Dorothy looked around, found a root, and used it to stir up the water into an opaque dye-like solution to color her cards and silk.

Here’s the root, the silk, and the card, out to dry in the sun (and the footprint/dye pot). She took the root home too as a souvenir.

By the end of the week she had assembled a “museum” in her room of her trip to Ohio, Kentucky and Indiana. There’s the root on the right and the cards in the middle; the silk has been partially twisted into string, and she also collected some bits of rusty metal to round out the display.

Deep sea crochet (by Olga Norris)

Published February 18, 2014 Art Ideas , art intepretation , Art Technique , textile art , Women in art 5 Comments

In the current issue of Sculpture magazine I encountered an extraordinary story of mass participation crochet coral. The images would normally have put me off, because I am not a fan of the crowded and what I would call visually messy; but Sculpture is a serious publication, and I have rarely been disappointed with its articles. You can perhaps read the article through this link.

KONICA MINOLTA DIGITAL CAMERA Image from Institute for Figuring

There have been several collaborations between science and the arts now, which can be read about here, and here, and here, and seen/listened to here. It is an area which seems to be growing, to my delight, because I do very much believe in the benefits of cross pollination. I thought that the Coral Crochet Reef would perhaps make an interesting post for Ragged Cloth Café.

Twins from Australia, Margaret and Christine Wertheim, the former the scientist (physics and maths) and the latter the artist (painting, literature, and logic), but both interested in mathematics were intrigued by a Latvian mathematician who worked out how to model hyperbolic geometry with crochet. They worked on examples of hyperbolic geometry for a couple of years until bored with perfect shapes – and found that imperfections in the pattern looked organic, and that the results looked like corals. They decided that they could crochet a whole reef – and from there the larger project grew. There is an excellent You-tube film here which explains the project much better than I ever could.

crochetcoralreef_1 Image from here

Should you wish to create your own versions of crocheted or knitted corals there are patterns here and here. This whole project, or the wide totality of projects goes to show just how much folks enjoy being part of creative communities, indeed, of a greater creative community. I’m not sure how many would think more about mathematics beyond hyperbolic geometry – but perhaps even if just one or two do that is success. I do hope that an increasing number of projects like this, and others combining ideas of science and the arts will permeate everyday culture so that we will grow up thinking more widely and in less pigeon-holed a manner.

To my personal visual taste the crochet reefs might be unattractive compared with the real growing marvels, but if our humanity can be enhanced as well as the existence of those who share our planet, then crochet on!

coral for real The real thing – image from here