CAMERON ANNE MASON

I’ve been working on a new project for my installation at the Oregon County Fair. Each year we take our hippie selves out of the closet and go down to Veneta, Oregon to take part in the Fair. This will be the fourth year that we’ve created a “Living Room” called Yew Are Here. It’s a non-commercial open space where people can rest and regroup before hitting the next show, getting some food, or checking out the next craft booth. For me, it’s a chance to show my art in an environment I really love.

The Tower Lanterns I’ve been using as the centerpiece of the space have been getting a bit worn and frayed, especially after the big rainstorm of 2009. I either needed to spend some time rehabbing them or make something new of this year. So, of course, I decided to make something new! The old lanterns were pictoral and showed the Sun/Earth, the Moon/Mountains, and the Sea. I decided to keep these basic themes but work in a more graphic style using overall patterning, color and texture which is more closely related to the fine art work I do.

The patterns and colorways are as follows:

Largest/Sun: spiral patterns with colorway of yellow and orange with overdye of reds

Medium/Water: waves patterns with colorway of greens and light blue with overdye of darker blues

Smallest/Earth: vines and leaf pattern with colorway of greens with overdye of darker greens and brown

First things first, though. I made a bunch of test swatches (top) to test out layering colors and then determined which combos worked well. Of course, since I can’t seem to help myself I ended up using thirteen different base colors, thirteen different overdyes, and doing it on both silk and cotton. I didn’t do all the combinations (it was tempting but that would have been 338 samples) but I still did one hundred fourteen.

At the bottom are the silks with the first layer of dye and dyed cotton muslins for linings. They need linings because otherwise the lights shine right through the silk.Next step, wax.

Here are some photos from Party at the Park–Set the Table for SAM, the fundraiser for Seattle Art Museum at the Sculpture Park I participated in last week. I was very happy with the way my table turned out. It was very nice to be included with some big names in the art scene along with a bunch of emerging artists. Here’s the way the program read: Tamara Codor, Claire Cowie, Chris Engman and Chauney Peck, Troy Gua, Alfred Harris, Victoria Haven, Luke Hayes, Joy and Reffry, Cameron Anne Mason, Joe McDonnell, Nicholas Nyland, Joe Park, George Rodriguez, Ginny Ruffner, Carolina Silva, Maki Tamura, Trimpin, Joey Veltkamp, and Claude Zervas and Leo Berk.

the table set and ready for dinner

The museum handled all the details very well and certainly made me, as an artist, feel appreciated. As participants we got to go to the event with delicious food, a full bar, music and a lovely view, not to mention valet parking. Our dinner was cooked by Renee Erickson of Boat Street Cafe and the Walrus and Carpenter (which we love and which just got a fabulous review in the NY Times). We had dinner with some uber rich folks who were also very nice. It was great to meet a lot of these artists and to reconnect with the ones I already knew. Alan and I really enjoyed hanging out with Trimpin. He is just as quirky and charming as you’d imagine and we hung out with him and his wife Cheryl for a while. He had this very amusing tribute to Liberace as his theme which included a “baby grand piano” and musical champagne glasses which he controlled using an app on his itouch.

Trimpin's Liberace table

It’s not the kind of party we usually attend, much more hoi polloi than our usual bbq crowd but it was really fun and not stuffy at all. It was a chance to both rub elbows with the rich and famous and hang out with a bunch of artists with access to an open bar. I would definitely do it again next year if they ask me.

I think Alan had a good time, too.

I’m participating in a fundraiser for Seattle Art Museum tomorrow night, Set the Table for SAM. It’s a dinner party preceding their Party in the Park event. Eighteen artists were asked to “set the tables” for a dinner party. We then get to attend the event, have cocktails and dinner, and sit at the tables that we decorated. I’m really excited about my table concept, Rare Earth. I dyed some velvet and I’m using some of the Earth Forms. I’m going to fill in with stones, sedums, beach pebbles, pods, moss, and candles. It’s been a perfect project to focus on since I got back from Rio, short and not too much work. I’m really looking forward to it.

votive holders I covered with dyed silk

rocks, velvet and vessels, oh my!

Zeca and me with my work at the show in Rio.

Phew! What an amazing trip that was. I’m still getting back on my feet and back in my time zone, but I had a wonderful time. Zeca Medeiros and the other folks at the show did wonderful job putting together the show and making Barb Fox and I feel welcome. The show was beautiful and the audience was very engaged, taking photos and looking very closely at the stitching, composition, and surface design. Our talks went very well. It was a hoot to have an interpreter and people listening through headphones. I felt like a speaker at the United Nations! I’ll get some more pictures up soon of my trip, but here are ones of the show for now.

crowds looking very closely at the artwork

snapping photos

Barb Fox with her work

our wonderful hosts, Zeca, Alvaro, and Henrique!

I can’t believe the day is finally here that I’m heading off to Rio. I leave in just a few hours to take the red eye to New York and then continue down to South America. I’m not looking forward to the flight, about 16 hours in the air over three flights, but I am excited to be going. I’ll be playing the part of the international artist and presenting my talk, Surface, Form and Stitch at the Rio Patchwork Design Show. I’m travelling with Barb Fox, also a winner and presenter and Bonnie Brewer, Barb’s sister and fellow art quilter. After a few extra days in Rio we’ll be heading off to Iguazu Falls on the border between Brazil and Argentina. I’m not traveling with a laptop so there will be a break in the action here on the blog until I get back.

Adventure here I come!

This last month I spent some time creating costumes for my daughter’s middle school production of Little Shop of Horrors. I worked with a high school girl who created the puppets while I made the costumes. I love making things for performance. It’s going back to my roots and its fun to work with such broad strokes on things that won’t be seen closer than 10 feet away. It’s always amazing to see the kids put their hearts into the production and see them grow, literally when it came to the plant! And I have to give major props to Glyde King, the teacher and director whose vision and high expectations of these kids pays off in so many ways. And thanks to Daniel Sheehan whose great photos you see here. His daughter, Claire, was our littlest plant and a scene stealer for sure.

our littlest plant, Claire, drinking Seymor's blood

the plant grows . . .

and sings and dances . . .

and grows . . .

and grows! puppet head by Robin Thomas

What a fabulous opening reception last night! The weather cooperated with a lovely, mild Spring evening and lots of people came out for First Thursday. Many friends came by, people ooh and aahed, and I even sold a piece to new collectors. It was a whirlwind and a very satisfactory evening.

Foster/White Gallery
April 7-30, 2011

Our lightest touch affects the land, and the land in turn inhabits us. Soil under our fingernails and rain in our hair, we reach our faces up to the sun when it breaks through the clouds. The cycles of sowing and reaping sustain us as we work in balance with the Earth.

My artwork interprets natural forms and textures through the lens of culture, a culture that is built on our agrarian past. In my new series, Blades and Cotyledons, I delve deeper into shape and surface, finding richness in a narrow groove.

The Blades series explores shape as a metaphor for human interaction with the natural world. Obsidian, fractured into faceted shards from solid stone, creates a sharp, cutting edge. Hoes till and reap. We can focus on a single blade of grass in the expanse of a field for just a moment before it is lost among the many.

The Cotyledons series examines the energy of growth as it bursts forth from the stasis of the contained seed. Shaken from a packet and pushed into damp soil by a child’s finger or planted by the million by an industrial agribusiness, the seed is an essential building block of culture. A fragile miracle of nature, the seed sprouts and feeds the hungry.

Three practices come together to form my work: Sculpting, surface design, and stitch. Drawings become maquettes become patterns. Fabric is dyed, over-dyed, discharged, resisted, printed. Panels are free-motion embroidered by machine and hand-stitched into their final shapes. I am invested in process: Exploring, teaching, documenting, writing, and making.

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!

Today was a big day. Today I took the last stitches in the last piece for Soft Earth, my April Foster/White show. It’s been five months of concentrated work: planning, forming, dyeing, stitching. I’ve been pretty hard on myself (and my family, too) but now I’ve got twenty-one new pieces, thirteen Blades and eight Cotyledons. That averages out to about a piece per week! A good bit of work I’d say.

The other big thing that happened today was a studio visit from Marci McDade, the editor of Fiberarts. We’ve been in touch recently because I’m going to write an article about the workshop I’m teaching next week with Larry Calkins. I was really excited about her coming because, well, she’s the editor of Fiberarts! And because I feel really good about my work and in a good place to share it.

Marci was like a curious honeybee visiting every flower in the studio. She was drawn to  my stash of fabrics, petting the velvets and full of questions about technique and concept. We talked about the magazine and staying relevant in the changing world of fiber. We talked about process and journaling and maybe putting together an article for the magazine on blogging. We talked about balancing parenting with work. We talked about good places to eat while she’s in Seattle. And all the while she was taking photos of everything, arranging them in still lifes, standing on a stool so she could get a better shot, and having me hold up drawings and fabric.

It’s really great when someone who holds a place of power in the art world is so accessible. Curators, gallery owners, magazine editors, they’re all people like you and me. They have knowledge, for sure, and they have influence but there’s no point in being afraid to talk to them. You might make a new friend.