Quilt selection

Some quilts I came across recently that made me want to see more of the maker's work.

First, "Agave in Green and White" by Kathleen McCabe, seen in a SAQA news bulletin and exhibited in 2012. Apart from enjoying the way the fabrics make the plant look "real", it makes we want to look more carefully at plants and buds and light and shade -

From the same source, Sandra Sider's "On the Road: Slippery when Wet" captures the feeling of suddenly finding the car in a skid, or finding your mind dizzy from some unexpected thing -

And some small quilts (12"x12") from SAQA's 2012 benefit auction -

"Mood Indigo" by Judith Content

"Clearing My Mind" by Karen Rips

"Happy Wolf" by Nancy N Erikson

Poetry Thursday - The Trees by Philip Larkin

The Trees

The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too,
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.

Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

Philip Larkin 

http://www.poemhunter.com/

Art I like - Elena Herzog

Elana Herzog is a New York based installation artist who also makes handmade paper and books. Her installations are disintegrations - fabrics stapled to the wall and then ripped off, for instance. The staples are used as a way of drawing, and even the flat wall pieces, through the freeing of the fabric, letting it come off the wall, become almost alive...

Untitled 2003; mixed fibers, metal staples, drywall, paint, plywood
18 x 20 inches (from here)

Untitled 2, 2001; cotton chenille bedspread, metal staples, drywall, plywood 
91.5 x 84 inches (image from here)

Of her first book project, Romantic Subtractions, she says:  " It is part of Collective Generation, a project of French publisher, Gervais Jassaud, for which he combines the work of a poet and a visual artist in a book that he has designed. I have made the artwork for 12 books that contain the poetry of Jerome Rothenberg. Each one is different and made by hand."

"The form of the book is a site to which I respond – a long and meandering one, in which each surface has two sides. The process of stapling materials to the page creates a different but corresponding image on each side of it."

shown in 2010; image from here

aha - double-sidedness again ... turn the page and ... see what has come through ...

Ceramics week 8

Only two classes left now... I'm well into making the "clay books", but not entirely clear on which glazes to use. In any case, we experimented with on-glaze colours (red and grey in my case) - and I forgot to take photos of what was going into the kiln this week.

However, this is what came out:

They start out about the height of a credit card. The white clay (Draycott) seems to have shrunk rather more than the pink (St Thomas) or the crank. Some have black slip under a clear matte glaze, others have a black glaze ... and I didn't have the camera last week to record which was which. Both seem to work equally well.

Art I like - the porcelain "textiles" of Recheng Tsang

Ovals, 2012, 53" x 93"

Study for Ovals

Californian sculptor Recheng Tsang's porcelain wall pieces consist of many individual elements, their unified shapes and sparse colouring making them interesting yet still serene.

Found via kathrynclark.blogspot.co.uk; read an interview with the artist here. Tsang realised, after graduate studies in Chinese literature, that she missed working with her hands. Studying ceramics intensively in Tokyo, she realised there didn't have to be a line between art and craft. Her work is influenced by textiles, botanical pieces, and chinese literature. "I like the idea of taking things that are small and seeing how they can give presence to a particular space."

" I like working in natural. Why? There are lots of subtleties in white that requires a viewer’s attention. Color is distracting sometimes. Simplicity brings out the form better. But I also love the different surfaces of the glaze. How I reconcile that is that I work monochromatically. I work with one color scheme at a time. I think a lot of my work in terms of longevity. Each time I look at it, I discover something new."

Handstitch, week 3

In the final class of this short sequence, we were set several tasks, which nicely filled the day -

interspersed with a slide show taken from closeups of what we were working on last week, which Amarjeet manipulated (mirrored, repeated) in Photoshop to show some possible ways of developing designs. My stem-stitch tonal exercise reminds me of a stag beetle, joining the insect-like vandyke stitch ... is this perhaps something I should develop...

 ...developing cretan stitch into a honeycomb for bees, perhaps? -

First task: pattern darning. Finding a slubby yarn for the weft influenced my choice of colours for the warp -

 Next task: layering a stitch with primary colours, to create "optical" secondary colours -

 Layering stitch like this doesn't come naturally to me ... I shall try it some more ... but I preferred the back -

 Another task involved the bondaweb we'd painted, and some people were adding foil, but I struggled with making a warm and a cool sample, on the same background ... got a bit lost, really ...

Again, preferring the back...

 It's always good to be out of your comfort zone for a little while (isn't it) - and where better than a class with a congenial atmosphere, where you know that other people are going through the same thing. What have I gained - after all, when it comes to learning stitches, I can usually figure out from a book, and I have several books showing embroidery stitches, right back to Mary Thomas's, and including Constance Howard's...

I finally sussed out coral stitch, and found some potential for bullion knots. I'm starting to consider the effect of the background, even though I'm more interested in the effect of the stitches themselves, whether it's on the front or on the back of the fabric.

That's the back of the stem stitchery - I like the way the knots and ends contribute, and also the negative space. Here are some more sections of the flipside -

Refreshingly crude marks, you might say? They are pointing the way towards ... something ... "something almost being said" ...

Before sunset

Blue sky, fluffy clouds - glimpsed behind bare trees, between buildings, on the bus ride home (through the leafy private squares of Notting Hill). Can spring be on the way, at last?

Useful play

Over the years the offcut edges from quilts and journal quilts have accumulated - or rather, I haven't brought myself to throw them out - "they might be useful for something someday..."

That day has come. By gathering them into colour groups, cutting off the rough edges, laying them side by side, and joining the edges with an open zigzag, I've made strips of prequilted fabric - and then applied fabric scraps in a joyfully random manner -

The rough edges of the scraps can be covered with handstitch while watching tv of an evening. Indeed, the joins of the strips benefit from embellishment (sometimes the wadding peeks out of the cut edge) -

Those edges were from the "Hatching" quilt for the CQ Breakthrough exhibition. Each strip will make two bookwraps.

The edges from two or three journal quilts, together, make one bookwrap. These offcuts are from the 2012 JQs. Some of the joins have had narrow strips of fabric added, and there will be further handstitch to cover up some of the clumsier joining -

It will be trimmed (7" x 10" to accommodate an A6 notebook), given inside "pockets" at each end, bound, and a button and loop added. Takes about two hours, start to finish. 

whereas this is from part of the trimmings from the 2011 set -

The strips are more or less random, with a few substitutions to improve the look...

Knitting squares

Nikki Gabriel has a system of garment construction that uses knitted squares. (Found via world of textiles.) The yarn, called Wooli, is made of recycled factory fibre remnants, blended into yarn in New Zealand. The "natural" colour is called Greige, and there are several dyed colours -

A ball of yarn makes three squares - squares from another ball of yarn can be used for sleeves etc.

Watch the video here.

image from nikkigabriel.com

Quote for the day - Alechinsky

access his images here

"The deliberate expansion of means and methods does not automatically bring a new dimension of value." (Pierre
Alechinsky)

You don't see Alechinsky's work in the UK very often (though the Tate has eight of his works). I stumbled on his work at a show in the maritime museum in Paris about 20 years ago and immediately related to the way he breaks up the space into smaller spaces, using borders or "thumbnails". The shapes seem to be impetuous, immediate, impatient jottings; the colours can be wild. The output is prolific.

See some of his work, in chronological order, at poulwebb.blogspot.co.uk, from which these images are borrowed.

L'hiver, 1951

Borealite, 1971

Page d'atlas universell, 1984 (the series is derived from and printed on atlas pages)

La Mere noire, 1988-90

Les Aiguilles, 1996

La Quadrature, 2009

Art I like - Takashi Iwasaki

I didn't know which image of work by Takashi Iwasaki to choose, so here's what you see when you google his name. The various stitches in this closeup (from here) caught my eye -

It's a fantastical world, made cheerful by the colours - sort of Paul Klee and Gert and Uwe Tobias meet Tilleke Schwarz and Janet Bolton (or even Jim Flora)?

Iwasaki was born in Japan in 1982 and moved to Winnipeg, Canada, in 2002. He says of his work: "Most of my recent works (after 2009) are either visual recording of my daily life or visualization of my imaginary worlds or landscapes that no one would see unless otherwise depicted; whereas my earlier works have been mostly focused on their formal qualities." As well as embroideries, he makes painting, collages, sculpture and prints.

Midoriyaamehatzga, 2009, 51 cm square (from here)

"Related searches"

How long has this been going on? The words in blue, above the images -

click on images to enlarge

Google in its omniscience is now linking together our interests for us, by telling us about "related" things we've looked for, or at.

I clicked on a link for Jaune Quick-to-See Smith and got images of her work all right - and links to searches of "related" artists - Romare Bearden, Kathe Kollwitz, and Robert Rauschenberg. (Are those my searches, or those of the person who put the link in her blog post?) Hovering on one of the names resulted in a preview of the artistk's images -

Clicking on a name, you get further "related searches" - kathe kollwitz self portrait, kathe kollwitz war, etc -

Fascinating!

Book du jour - "Flood library"

The "flood flowers" morphed back into a "library" - three separate libraries in fact, using different types of paper.

I like the way that something so simple as water changes the paper and makes the structure of the book into a narrative of its own. These were done in a bit of a hurry for a submission, and there's probably more that can be done with this concept - enormously long "libraries", for example ... or different kinds of paper ... or adding text that seeps off the page ... or standing the pages in ink that wicks up ... adding thread to help the ink wicking up, that idea rather excites me ... but further development will have to wait a while.

Next in line is another of my "reading room" books, for the display of books at the Al-Mutanabbi Street poetry reading next week. After that, my next book event is the Turn The Page book fair in Norwich, 3-4 May. And then an open studio event in June. It's good to have a few things on the horizon - and it's good that the days are getting longer, spring is coming, energy is returning!

Found art Friday