Category Archives: Inspiration

A Great Time for Fiber Art

Soundsuit performers waiting to go on

I’m playing a bit of catch up here on the blog. Who would think that some of my busiest time would be after I’ve finished and delivered the art? I’ve been working on a tuneup of the website, taught an intensive this last weekend at Pratt with Larry Calkins, sending out notices for Thursday’s opening, and working on my presentation for Saturday’s Artist Talk at the gallery.

I did take a day off last Wednesday and saw some art. This is an amazing time for fiber art in Seattle. Local galleries are showing more fiber in the last few months: Rachel Brumer’s show last month at Grover/Thurston, a show of surface design by Amy Johnson at Fetherston, Catherine Person has been showing fiber sculpture and will be showing embroidery by Maura Donegan in April, and then there’s my show at Foster/White opening this week. And two of the major museums currently have big fiber exhibits. I went to both the Seattle Art Museum to see the Nick Cave exhibit and to the Frye Art Museum to see the Degenerate Art Ensemble show. Wow! Both shows were really great.

Click the links here to find out more about the exhibits.

Nick Cave, Meet Me at the Center of the Earth at the Seattle Art Museum through June 5, 2011

Degenerate Art Ensemble at the Frye Art Museum through June 19, 2011

Pam McClusky, curator of African Art and Textiles at SAM, has done a great job curating and displaying Nick Cave’s show, Meet Me at the Center of the Earth. I’m a big fan of Cave’s work, Nick Cave the artist not the Australian pop-star. I have a copy of the catalog, Meet Me at the Center of the Earth, from when the show was originally mounted at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. I also got to meet the artist last year when he was here in advance of the show to talk about ways to engage the community during the SAM show. A lot of what we all brainstormed didn’t happen, budget woes is my guess, but the Museum has been working with Cornish College and Spectrum Dance Company to stage “Invasions” of dancers performing in some of the suits. I got a chance to see one of the Invasions at the Museum performing along with Orkestar Zirconium the week the show opened. Even after seeing a lot of video footage of the suits it was amazing to see them moving in real life/real time/three feet away. It was incredibly exciting. My cheeks hurt from smiling and my chest felt full from joy. When I talked about it later the word that came to me was “ecstatic”. I took some video with my trusty little Canon PowerShot but so far, I haven’t been able to figure out how to upload it here. So in the meantime, here are a couple links to some professional Nick Cave footage.

Nick Cave-Art in Motion

Nick Cave-Perspective

I like the exhibit quite a bit and I have been hearing from people not familiar with his work that it has blown quite a few minds. It is a large exhibit and very inpressive in both the large scale of the figures and the amount of detail in each one. My only complaint is that the figures are so static. They are made to move and although it’s more alive than seeing them on the pages of a book, it feels as though you’re only seeing half of the picture. There is a room with very nice video projections that gives a sense of their dynamic possibilities but in the time I was there I didn’t see any video I hadn’t seen before on the web. I wanted to see video of every suit so that you could look at it still then press a button and see a small video screen of that suit moving. That would have been amazing. Still, half the picture is much better than nothing and the suits have a presence that fills the room, five rooms actually. So get down there if you have the chance. There’s nothing like seeing it in person.

The other exhibit I saw that day was the Degenerate Art Ensemble. Wow again! This show rocked my socks even more than the Cave exhibit, mostly because I was unfamiliar with their work. They are a collaborative performing group combining dance, theater, innovative costumes/sculpture, and music. The exhibit is sparse but impressive, showing set pieces and costumes in combination with video projection and audio. I found it beautiful and eerie and the DAE will be mounting a performance of the Red Shoes in conjunction with the exhibit. A nice thing about the Frye is that admission is free!

Spring!

Spring is in the air, I can tell through my watery, itchy eyes, and I just couldn’t stand sitting at my sewing machine another minute today. I went for a long, lovely walk and of course I was drawn to the trees. I loved the contrast of this small bud emerging right from the gnarly bark. I loved the texture and depth of the bark on the trees in the picture below, too. They are like layers of documents pasted one on top of each other, each marking the passing of another year.

Finding My Faith

Cotyledon 5 in progress

I’m not a religious person so when I’m talking about faith, it’s faith in my creativity and ability. Sometimes faith requires taking big steps at the edge of a cliff and sometimes it’s only baby steps along a stitched line. Sometimes taking even those baby steps can require a giant amount of bravery. I have to trust my intuition, have faith in that undefinable place where the ideas come from when I’m making all those big and small decisions that lead up to a finished piece of art.

These last few weeks have required more than the usual amount of bravery. My daughter has been my studio companion lately as she has been recovering from a really difficult period of persistent headaches. She is finally feeling better and at school for the first time in two weeks. It’s been difficult to watch my little one deal with chronic pain and not be able to fix it.

I guess that’s where we have to lean on faith. And sometimes I wish I was a religious person because it seems it would give a focus to that feeling of giving up one’s trust to something or someone that is invisible and undefinable. It would be reassuring that while I’m doing my part here, there is a higher power looking out; to have faith be Faith.

If you haven’t seen Elizabeth Gilbert’s TED talk, Nurturing Creativity, it’s really worth watching. She posits that there is a creative energy, a “genius” that comes from outside of ourselves when we are in the act of creating. That our job as artists, is to show up and consistently do our work, so that we are available to funnel this genius when it comes through us.

This idea of the “genius” is the closest thing I can think of to describing the way it feels when I work. That if I keep doing my part, the showing up and putting in the hours, I can trust that all of those decisions are leading somewhere. Somewhere in my head there is a vision of the finished piece and all I have to do is find the path to its completion.

Sometimes that faith is harder to find than others and I have to remember, baby steps.

Cotyledon 5 detail

Working with a Heavy Heart

The news is bad. Images from the Japanese earthquake and tsunami are everywhere. I have to look and then look away, like a traffic accident on the side of the road. So much loss, so much tragedy, so much devastation, and so much fear of what is to come.

Things have been difficult here on the home front, too. My twelve-year-old daughter has had a persistent headache now for over two weeks. We’ve been to her family doctor, a neurologist, a chiropractor, she’s taken a boatload of big drugs and still no relief. My husband and I have been playing tag team. He works one day, I work the next. The good news is that the MRI she had on Saturday was normal. Phew. The bad news is that her head still hurts.

So how does one keep making art?

Well, I’m very thankful that I’m at the part of my process that doesn’t require much creative thought. I’m just ironing fabric on to my panels before I stitch them. I don’t think I could be creative right now.

But images and thoughts still bubble up. I was just looking at some of the photos of debris of homes, cars, people’s belongings. There was a mixture of bright colors, plastics I assume, and it looked like an inpenetrable tangle of multi-colored thread, strewn across the landscape. Someday soon I might be able to talk about these disasters using my visual vocabulary.

In the meantime, I keep working. I have a deadline, after all. And my heavy heart keeps time.

A Change of Scenery

an eroded piling at Golden Gardens

At the end of last week I had a blank canvas experience. I’m starting the next set of Blades and ready to start choosing fabrics. But when I went through my fabrics for this series I realized that I didn’t have enough fabric to choose from. All of a sudden I felt like a deer in the headlights and I couldn’t think of what to do next. It didn’t help that I was getting over a cold. So what to do when the well runs dry?

Answer: Go outside! Saturday the sun came out, a rare occurrence in Seattle in January. I dragged my husband and oldest daughter along with me for a walk on the beach. Just getting out next to the Sound jogged some inspiration loose. Lines and patterns in nature, what I like best!

After the beach, I went to the studio and used flour paste to make patterns on the cloth. Next step, dye.

Beauty in the Kitchen

The other night I made red cabbage with pork chops for dinner. Wow! What a gorgeous vegetable. The color, the lines, that perfect little triangle of the cut out core blew my mind. So I had to get out my camera and document it. Then I chopped it up and cooked it. Beautiful, a little suggestive in these photos, and delicious, too.

Rainy Morning

It’s been stormy this morning, hailing, thunder, and pouring rain all before the sun came up. Now it’s getting lighter and the rain is easing off. It’s turning into one of those muted Seattle December days of grey. I remembered some photos I took a few weeks ago during the rain when my Purple Smokebush, cotinus coggygria, still had its leaves. This is a great plant in the garden. Ours is in the planting strip between the sidewalk and the street and has the most beautiful, vivid purple leaves and sprays of foamy, pink flowers in the Summer. These flowers are what gives it its common name. You can imagine them as clouds of purple smoke. In the Fall, the leaves turn from purple, to yellow-green, to brilliant orange and red with a pattern of brown spots. Gorgeous, and even more so when intensified by the rain drops. And, great inspiration for the studio on a grey, rainy day.

Gifts!

Our family celebrates Hannukah which started December 1st this year, incredibly early. It’s been a little bit of a struggle to get into the holiday spirit, especially since I’m so busy with my work. But I did get some fabulous gifts on the first night. My husband gave me the book Bark, by Cedric Pollet. It is so beautiful and inspiring. The author is French and traveled around the world taking pictures of trees. Every page is a work of art and a source of inspiration.

When I got to the studio the next day I found that Pam had left me a couple of gifts, too. A pomegranate and a persimmon from the Farmer’s Market in Davis, California where she had been visiting her mother. They were so beautiful with the book I just had to photograph them together before I ate them. Mmm, beautiful and delicious!

NorthWest Designer Craftsman

Yesterday my husband and I hosted a social for the Northwest Designer Craftsman organization. I’ve been a member for a couple of years but haven’t been able to give much to it. I was happy to contribute my house for the gathering and it gave me a boost to get some long overdue cleaning done, too.

It was a loud, convivial, and crowded event with many of the local luminaries of craft. They are a graying group, but very welcoming to those of us new members whose hair hasn’t completely changed color. It was an honor to host people who I admire for their depth of work in craft.

I would love to see some kind of mentoring program within the organization, or even just an informal way to share information with those who have so much more experience. I had great, but short, conversations with some women whose work I really admire in basketry, Jan Hopkins, Danielle Bodine, and Jill Nordfors-Clark, and Dona Anderson. I still feel a little nervous around people who have shown more and have had more success than I have. And yet, each of them were so friendly and approachable, and many said how much they admired my work. What do you know? Part of the reason I joined NWDC was to get these conversations across media, especially since I’m still trying to figure out where I fit, or even if it really matters.

The organization is coming to a turning point. Many of the members are elders, and there is a need for new energy to reinvigorate it. There are a few people who have taken on leadership roles with the idea of change. After yesterday’s event, I feel there is something there, something worth investing time and energy into to help it survive. I’d like to help, but I have to take baby steps otherwise it’s so easy to over commit. To be continued . . .

Persimmons!

Last weekend my husband and I had a quick getaway to San Francisco. We had a great time, we ate, we drank, we walked, and walked some more. And what did I take pictures of? Fruit at the Farmer’s Market, of course! There were six kinds of persimmons and these gorgeous pomegranates at one of the booths. I wanted to buy one of everything but getting it back on the airplane posed a problem. We did have a big, beautiful, delicious, ripe persimmon with breakfast, though. Not something readily available in Seattle.