Fiber art and encaustic 1 -- Terry Jarrard-Dimond

Late this summer I got to see the Bluegrass Biennial, a juried all-mediums show of Kentucky artists, which had a handsome complement of fiber art and also some striking encaustic work.  One encaustic piece was made by an artist whom I know through fiber art circles, and I realized that I know at least a half dozen people who work in both those mediums.  That got me thinking about whether there's a special affinity between encaustic and fiber art, so I asked three of my friends to tell a bit about their experiences in the two  mediums.

I'll start with Terry Jarrard-Diamond, who is probably best known in fiber art circles for her large pieced quilts (she won best in show at Form, Not Function a few years ago and served as a juror for Quilts=Art=Quilts this year).  In recent years she has been doing a lot of work in painting and encaustic.

Terry Jarrard-Dimond, Smoked Ring, encaustic

 Q.  How long have you been doing fiber art / how long have you been doing encaustic?

I have been working with fiber for perhaps 16 years and began exploring encaustic about 5 years ago.  I had been aware of the medium for years but more in connection with sculpture than painting but when I began blogging I became aware of the work being done in this medium.

Q.  Did you feel that encaustic was a natural progression from your fiber work, or a totally new thing?

The step into encaustic painting was not a progression but rather a lateral move.  I had wanted to paint for several years and as I read about this medium the desire to try it developed.  Much like fabric and sewing, there is a significant technical learning curve with encaustic.  Easy to apply encaustic paint.  Not easy to make the work look professional and resolved.

Q.  Do you think encaustic has an affinity with fiber?  and if so, why/how?

The only connection I can see is perhaps the versatility of both of these mediums.  I do think encaustic painting has been and still is an "It" medium meaning that it has come into the awareness of the art-making community and has attracted many new users.

There is often a direct relationship to the final look of some of my painting to pieced fabric work done several years ago.  This is due to how I see space and organize shapes in relation to a space and each other. 

Terry Jarrard-Dimond, Quietly Red, fiber

More fiber/encaustic artists next week...

Quilter in transition

I recently had the pleasure of attending the opening reception and gallery talk for a new show of work by Terry Jarrard-Dimond, at the Arts Center in Greenwood SC.  The seven quilts on display show her transition from one striking, highly individualistic style to another; it's neat to be able to trace this evolution in style.

Her "old style" quilts are distinguished by precision piecing of her hand-dyed fabrics.  They depict shapes that Terry has always described as "entities" in some kind of relationships that we can only guess at.  The quilts are somewhere between large and very large.

Barn Dance: Spring Swing, 2008

I've seen this quilt in the past and have always been intrigued by the stark white panel at the left, balancing and giving gravitas to the saturated colors and strong shapes in the rest of the composition.

Plus Blue, 2009





















The star of the show, visible before you even walk in the front door of the gallery, is Plus Blue, the largest piece on display.  Terry made this at the same time she was working on three quilts for the Color Improvisations exhibit, now touring in Europe, and I would describe these four pieces as the culmination of her "old style" of pieced quilts.  Like those three pieces, this one is huge, bright and commanding with its strong shapes and repeating motifs.  My photo doesn't do justice to the brilliant hand-dyed fabrics.

After this tremendously productive year, Terry decided it was time for a change and started experimenting with more assertive surface design.  She had always dyed her own fabrics, but in solid-ish colors with only a bit of mottling.  Now she started applying the dye or more deliberately, with paintbrushes or monoprints, and also used discharge.

She said in her gallery talk that in her older quilts, color came first.  By contrast, in her newer work, "the color is rich, the color is beautiful, but the color is secondary to texture and composition."

Nude in the Dark, 2010

Richter Inspirations 1, 2010

There's a lot going on in this small piece, reminiscent of the work of German painter Gerhard Richter.  Some pieces have been appliqued with zigzag stitch.  The panel on the left has particularly heavy threadwork in different colors.

Richter Inspirations, detail

Here's her most recent piece:

Personal Space, 2012

Interestingly, the bold, mysterious shapes from Terry's older quilts have returned in this piece, appliqued over the top of the painted and printed stripes.

Long-time readers of Terry's blog saw a lot of her surface design experiments as she started to break away from her old style.  Now the fabrics, executed in much larger scale, have started to appear in her quilts. 

I wish we could have seen more of these new pieces in the show, but Terry had to share the space with the equally striking work of two other artists, Tom Dimond and Syd Cross.  The show continues through February 25.

A new direction

While I was in South Carolina last week I had the opportunity to see a show of work by Terry Jarrard-Dimond and her husband Tom Dimond, at the University of South Carolina Upstate in Spartanburg.  I have been familiar with Terry's work for some time and knew that she made a big change in direction about a year ago, so I was looking forward to seeing this new body of work.

And I was not disappointed.  Her new quilts make a cohesive and impressive show, all based on dots and stripes and executed in dye-painting.  While her earlier works were hard-edged and tightly composed, these are looser, more ambivalent and totally gorgeous. 

Terry Jarrard-Dimond, What Isn't Seen

Terry Jarrard-Dimond, Shelter (detail below)

Raw-edge pieces were occasionally sewed on top of larger expanses of fabric to interrupt or echo the underlying patterns.

Terry Jarrard-Dimond, Hold That Thought (detail below)

Some of the pieces were accented with hand-stitching.

Terry said in a gallery talk that after she spent a year making several huge pieces for the Color Improvisations show, curated by Nancy Crow and currently touring in Europe, she was ready for something different.  Readers of her blog have followed her weekly experiments in surface design throughout 2010, which led to the works in this show. 

I'm sorry to say that the show will close on Friday, but keep your eye out for Terry's new work to appear in other venues.

I'll write tomorrow about Tom Dimond's work in the same show.

Collaboration project 2

My theme for 2011 is collaboration, and I have just finished the second project of a planned eleven.  This one is embroidery, and my collborator is Terry Jarrard-Dimond.  A couple of years ago Terry did a workshop with fiber artist Dorothy Caldwell, and liked an exercise called blind embroidery, in which you don't look at your work till it's done.  Last fall we were together and Terry remarked that she was thinking of doing 24 hours of blind embroidery, but it seemed like a lot of time to commit.  I suggested that we collaborate and each do 12 hours.

I found white and black fabric, cut a piece of each, and we chose at random.  Terry got the white, I got the black.  The rules were simple: mark off a rectangle and stitch.  We sewed a heavy cord to outline our workspace so we could feel the boundary.  We planned to have our respective husbands take photos after every hour of stitching to document progress, but that didn't work out exactly; I missed hour 2 and gave up entirely after hour 7. 

I decided to work in cross stitch, and managed to actually get the stitches to cross for the first couple of rows where I could feel my vertical axis.  (That got more difficult as I worked in the center of the piece and lost track of my orientation.) 

Here I am at work wearing a souvenir sleep mask from my last transoceanic flight.  The biggest problem was maintaining the proper tension.  Because I wasn't working in a hoop, the fabric wanted to buckle underneath the stitches, as you can see in the photo.  I spent way more of my 12 hours trying to keep the fabric flat and the thread pulled properly than I did actually poking the needle through the cloth.

Here's hour 4 -- oops, he shot the back of the work, not the front. 

By hour 5 I started to panic -- would I ever cover the whole area in my 12 allotted hours?  I started venturing away from the neat rows and wandering out into the wilderness.

Here's hour 6, more wandering in the wilderness.  And hour 7 below.

The second half of the project is undocumented, mainly because my husband took a trip as I finished my embroidery.  At the end, I removed the cord that outlined my stitching area, pressed it as well as I could and stretched it.

Here are the two pieces together; detail below.  We call them "Equinox: Day" and "Equinox: Night" and you can probably figure out why without an artist statement.  Go over to Terry's blog to read her side of the story!

Passing it on!

I had a treat earlier this week when I learned that Janet Bottomley, a quilter and teacher from the UK, has nominated me for the Liebster Award, a kind of moveable feast in the low end of the blog world.  The idea is to give a little appreciation to smaller blogs (those with fewer than 300 followers) that you particularly enjoy.  (I believe that it started in Germany, hence the name, which means "favorite.")

So first, my thanks to Janet, who blogs about her quilts and her studies for the City and Guilds continuing education program.  I think it's marvelous that the internet makes it possible to have friends on other continents, and that we so often realize how much we have in common with people so far away geographically but so close in terms of everything important.

But now the hard part -- who will I pass this honor along to?  I have many blogs that I read religiously, often to the detriment of actually going into my studio to make art.  It was hard to choose just three.

First on my list has to be Thru Linda's Eyes, in which Linda McLaughlin posts a photograph every day.  First, because that's the blog I read first every morning when I sit down at the computer.  I've written about how Linda has been a role model for my own similar project and how I suspect we are twins separated at birth. 

Second is Margaret Cooter, another Brit, whose blog I have become addicted to in the last six months or so.  Margaret has been particularly prolific and productive since she enrolled in a course on book arts.  As a typophile myself I have loved watching the nifty projects she's making when she's not doing fiber art or photography.

Third is Terry Jarrard-Dimond, whom I have the pleasure of knowing because like me, she is a repeat offender at Nancy Crow's classes.  Terry has written extensively about her experiments with surface design, complete with tutorials that have inspired lots of readers to try flour resist and other exotic techniques.  But I really love her thoughts on art in general, and her insights gleaned from many decades in the art world (I'm always jealous of people who went to art school the first time around and have been doing it for their whole careers, in contrast to latecomers like myself).

I could suggest many more blogs worthy of honor but I'll stick with the rules for now.  Thanks, Janet, and my thanks also to Linda, Margaret and Terry who have given me so many hours of good reading and thinking.

August quilt date report

Terry Jarrard-Dimond reports in:

"Here is my quilt I made for our quilt date.  This is what I would make but I'd make it 60" x 60"."

(The typographic observer observes: doesn't that sentence above look really weird with the two " symbols at the end?  But it's grammatically correct.  Go figure!)

So Terry -- if you hadn't done the quilting you could have just said it was 60" x 60" and I would have believed you!  And this gives me a really good idea for my next big quilt... won't take too long to piece...

Thanks for sending this beautiful baby quilt to me.

Quilt date for July

The quilt date for July is the artistic equivalent of beach reading -- kind of trashy but lots of fun. I use the term “bad-girl quilts” to describe those where I let the fabric do what fabric does – fray, wrinkle, droop, display its ragged thread ends – rather than where I use all my traditional quilting skills to make it behave. So you could think of this month’s quilt date as somebody that bad girls really go for, maybe a guy in a black motorcycle jacket with a cigarette and tattoos.

There are very few rules to this month’s date: you get some fabric, cut it into bits, and sew them down to a background. You can sew by hand or by machine. You can arrange the bits in an orderly pattern or at random. If the bits have frayed edges, that’s fine; if the edges flutter in the breeze, that’s fine; if you want to leave the thread ends hanging loose, that’s fine. Hey, it’s summer! School’s out! Do whatever you like!

I’ve used this approach in many different ways. Here’s a very tentative toe in the water of bad-girl-ness – yes, the raw edges are fraying, but they’re arranged in a formal grid in a careful pattern. The little fabric bits are just under a half-inch square.

River Map 1

River Map 1 -- detail

In the next piece, Rock Garden, the technique gets a little looser, with the fabric bits larger (maybe 1” x 2 1/2” for the bigger ones) and the rows of stitching roughly horizontal but with no particular spacing or order.

Rock Garden

Rock Garden -- detail

What Goes Up was made from one of my bags of somebody else’s leftovers, some hand-dyed fabric that had apparently been cut up for another purpose. I liked the shapes of what was left, and stitched them by hand to a ground.

What Goes Up

What Goes Up -- detail

I’ve also made many quilts where the fabric bits are actually strips of selvages, but sewed down exactly as I did the small squares, through a quilt sandwich of backing, batting and white ground fabric.

Black I

My friend Terry Jarrard-Dimond has experimented with this technique more than once in her monthly “textile constructions.” Here are photos of three of her projects; you can follow the links to read how she did them.

Terry Jarrard-Dimond -- Hand Cut Dots

Terry Jarrard-Dimond -- Dots and Prickly Pears

Terry Jarrard-Dimond -- Textile Construction #1

If you’re intrigued by this approach and would like to take a spin on the motorcycle with the July quilt date, here are some possibilities.

Start with a ground fabric onto which you will sew your fabric bits. If you choose a firm ground such as canvas or heavy wool you won’t need a backing; a lighter weight ground such as cotton will probably perform better with a backing and/or batting. You could also stack a sheer fabric on top of the base fabric and stitch through all layers.

For hand stitching you can stretch the fabric on an embroidery hoop or Q-Snap frame but it’s just fine to work with the fabric lying flat on a table. If you don’t use a frame, make sure you don’t pull your thread too tight to pucker the fabric.

Find scraps or cut small pieces of lightweight fabric, somewhere between postage-stamp size and business-card size. Arrange them on your fabric to make a pleasing design. Sketch or photograph the design if you think you won’t be able to remember it, then remove the pieces (maybe you want to put them on a tray or table in the same design). Put one piece back onto the fabric and sew it down in any way you like. Sew on the other pieces one by one. Use as much stitching as you like to attach the pieces and tie the design together.

If you’re hand stitching, the easiest way to start is with plain old running stitches, in rows or grids. You could also experiment with variations, such as:
• small stitches vs. long stitches
• closely spaced rows vs. widely spaced
• uniform stitch length vs. irregular length
• uniform spacing of the rows vs. irregular spacing
• straight rows of stitching vs. curves or zigzags
• knots on the back vs. knots and/or thread ends on the front
• make an occasional diagonal or perpendicular row of stitches that crosses your other rows.

If you’re machine stitching, you can use plain straight stitches or something fancier such as zigzags or wavy lines. Again, experiment with variations, such as:
• machine stitching in straight rows vs. curves or scribbles
• tightly packed vs. very sparse stitching
• zigzag or decorative machine stitches
• machine stitching on top of hand stitching, and vice versa
• different proportions of hand stitching and machine stitching.

Either by hand or by machine, feel free to experiment with your threads. Combine two or three lightweight threads of different colors or materials, putting them in the same needle. Try specialty threads such as metallics. Remember that embroidery floss comes with six strands; you can separate it into smaller bundles and/or combine colors. Use a larger or smaller needle if necessary as you change threads.

Let me know how it works out. If you want to send me a picture of what you made, I’ll post it.

Remember, even good girls might like a date with a bad boy every now and then.  Have fun!