Documenting the package project

Longtime readers of this blog may remember that in 2011 I did a regular art project in which I made bundles or packages of stuff that I found lying around in the studio or on the street.  Although I had set up a blog specifically to record my daily art projects, for some reason I never posted my packages.  I had rationalizations: it wasn't technically DAILY art because I only required at least one package per week, and I hadn't gotten around to doing a good job of photography.

Years passed, and at the end of August I had an impetus to clean up my act -- I am getting ready for a solo show about my regular art projects of the past.  I wanted to have my daily art blog up to date with everything I've done since 2010, and also wanted to publish a magazine about the package project.  That meant I needed to haul the packages out of storage and photograph them, which meant I needed a photography station with a better background than the green cutting mat that I had perched packages on at the time.

Fortunately I have in my possession a whole pack of foam core boards (yes, the corners are all bashed in, but that wasn't a problem with this particular use) and many yards of black cotton.  So I made a photo booth:

Here I'm shooting my sketchbooks from 2016, in which my daily art was drawing, but the same setup worked great for the packages.  And you will be happy to hear that the picturesque drapes and droops of the fabric became invisible in the photo, leaving just a nice lush black.

So now all my packages -- 99 in all -- are properly photographed and identified and posted to my daily art blog.  If you want to check them out, go HERE.

And here are all the packages that were made out of packaging -- all the stuff that wraps, protects, swathes and bulks up the stuff we buy.  It has always seemed criminal to me to throw all that away.  I feel much better when I can wrap it up in a bundle, stash it away in a box and call it art.

Daily art -- whatever happened to the bundles?

When I wrote last week about my various daily art endeavors, Sandy asked how I ever decided to display my bundles, my weekly art project in 2011.  I wish I had an answer.

As I made my bundles or packages, I simply deposited them into a big shopping bag in the closet under the stairs with the luggage.  My thought was that someday perhaps I could find an opportunity to display them all together.  I still think that would be a nifty idea, but so far I haven't found such an opportunity.  At the end of the year I did photograph all of the bundles (except from my week at the beach; those bundles were MIA for a year and a half and have only recently resurfaced) but not well enough to make the photos into a little book or anything. an obvious first step would be to reshoot them on a better background than my green cutting mat.

I also have no good answer for my collages, this year's daily art project.  They are display-friendly because I chose to use the same size support throughout the year (old library card catalog cards) but I haven't figured out what to do with them.  An easy solution would be to mount them in an album but that seems a bit unimaginative.  If I ever have the opportunity to show them in public I'd probably go low-tech and simply pin them to the wall.

Here they are now.

Wouldn't it be nice to be in the High Art Club and be able to just call up your gallery and schedule a show whenever you had a bunch of stuff ready for public viewing?  I am still jealous of an artist, Nancy Chunn, who decided to do a daily art project in 1996 (every day she took the front page of the New York Times and annotated/embellished/drew all over it).  She had to really rush at the end of the year because her gallery had scheduled a show of the entire year's work to begin on January 11.  By the way, her book about the project is magnificent and you can get one on Amazon for 99 cents.

Lost and found -- good news

One of my daily art projects for 2011 wasn't really daily, more like weekly.  I was making bundles or packages of stuff that I found lying around, either indoors or out, at least one every week.  Some weeks I'd make several if opportunity presented itself.

One week in particular I made a bunch of bundles, since we were at the beach and not doing much except walking in the sand and picking up shells anyway.  There were six, and I carefully put them into plastic bags and cushioned them so they wouldn't get broken or unbundled on the way home.  In a masterpiece of bad vacation planning, we had only one day between getting home from the beach and setting out for a cruise, so between unpacking the suitcases, doing laundry and repacking, some things never did get properly put away.

You guessed it immediately, but I didn't figure it out until eight months later when I was trying to document all the bundles I'd made during the year.  I realized with a terrible sinking sensation that the ones from the beach had never been unpacked and put in the big bag with all the other ones.  I searched around in what I thought were obvious places but never could find them.

At least I had the photos, I told myself, trying to get used to the concept of having lost some of my work for the year.  Heck, what's the point of a daily or weekly art project if you can't assemble the whole thing when it's over?

Time passed.

The other night I was looking for some crocheting to do while we watched TV.  It has just recently gotten cool enough that I want to have an afghan over my lap in the evening.  So I found a bag with a project already begun and worked on it during the movie.  As I was packing up afterwards I noticed the bag was kind of heavy and rooted around to see what was in the bottom besides three more skeins of yarn.

Of course it was the bundles from the beach; apparently I had taken that afghan along on the trip and not looked at it since.  I am so happy, having almost but not quite resigned myself to them being lost forever (or should I say misplaced forever, if there's a difference).

You might wonder how a bag of half-finished crocheting could sit around for two and a half years without being investigated.  But believe me, that's easy.  I own lots of tote bags, and many, many of them contain half-finished crocheting.  Guess I need to watch more TV and work on those afghans!

Package project update 8

My very first bundle of 2011 was kind of an omen: it was a handful or two of fabric bits wrapped up in some tulle.  I love fabric bits; my motto is "if it's big enough to see, it's big enough to save."

It always hurt me to throw away bits, and for many years I have saved any scrap more than an inch wide, pressing and sorting them and often sewing them into quilts that I named "Shards."  Four years ago I had an exciting artistic breakthrough when I started making my postage stamp quilts, using even tinier bits of fabric to make little compositions on the small pieces.

From that point on, of course, I had to save even tinier bits.  I put large plastic bags at my cutting table and at my sewing machine, and started depositing scraps and thread ends into the bags instead of throwing them out.  Since the bits are so tiny it takes a LONG time to fill up a bag, but I do have a good collection of bits in case I want to make little postage stamps --- or incorporate the bits into a bundle.

So to make bundle 1-1 I just dug into my bag and got enough bits to fill up the tulle.

As the year went by I used this concept several times. 

Here's a videotape cassette stripped of its tape and filled with fabric bits.  The tape got braided and used to tie up the bundle.

Here's a pile of polaroid film cassettes filled with fabric bits.

Here's a plastic tube.

Here's a piece of translucent fabric.

Here's a bundle of threads without any container at all.

Still lots of fabric bits left in the bags and the package project is over.    What will I do with them now?  Guess I need to make a new postage stamp quilt.

Package project update 7

As I contemplated my 2011 package project, I started to think about what went into the packages.

Many of my packages were bundles of like objects -- a lot of broken pencils, a lot of strange metal objects, a lot of styrofoam packing forms, a lot of selvages.  These were the easiest bundles to make, because you wander about and notice a bunch of the same thing lying around, and what comes to mind but to put them together.

And to take a lofty critical look, repetition is one of the hallmarks of modern art.  It resonates with our modern mindset of mass production and abundance, and with the modernist sensibility that rejects hierarchy in favor of equality, or perhaps we should say interchangeability.

Often I made rather than found my identical things, cutting up a big piece of plastic or cardboard to make a set of bits that could be bundled together.  This was fun; I like to sit and make fussy little constructions out of a bazillion little pieces, as witness most of my quilts.  I enjoyed the decisions of how to cut and arrange the pieces as well as the actual binding or tying. 

But I didn't always limit my packages to identicals.  Often there would be two sets of objects put together: some metal surrounding some cardboard, or some plastic surrounded by cocktail picks.  The two sets would usually seem to go together because of size: just enough cardboard to fill up the space between the metal brackets, the plastic folded to be the same length as the picks.  I found that matchmaking was a lot of the fun of making these bundles.

Toward the end of the year I put a shoebox on my worktable called "bits for bundles."  When I came upon a little something I would toss it into the box, and eventually the box started to yield collections.  It was like a freshman mixer: guys who arrived forlorn and alone would find friends as time went by.  As a result, I occasionally made a bundle of totally disparate objects that seemed to want to be together.

Maybe this was my favorite bundle of the year:  the beautiful green top of a silicon spatula that divorced from its handle, a piece of a venetian blind slat, some strange screws and bolts, including one in blue.  It's tiny but everything seems to work together.  Hey, just like art!

Package project update 6

When you do a long, multi-part project with a couple of constant elements you realize that the way you handle these constants takes on a life of its own.  In my 2011 package project each package or bundle had a label to tell when it was made.  Because the project rules called for at least one package a week, I decided to number the weeks as the primary identifier.  For instance, this package was the third one made in week 23.

This label is what I came to think of as the kissoff style, where I just found a piece of paper and wrote the ID number on it.  I'm not particularly proud of this kind of label.  The ones I like more are those where I used a little imagination.

This one was marginally above kissoff level.

Sometimes I sewed the ID number onto the label.

Sometimes I put the label "under cover."

Here's one I was proud of -- the fabric bolt was printed in white ink with the 2 you see at the right.  I drew the 24 on the left in white pencil, then outlined all the numbers in red. 

Sometimes I turned to found objects for the ID number.

But late in the year I realized the best possible source for found numbers -- the yellow pages, which is a riot of color and every font known to mankind.  And the phone numbers are usually the largest type in the ad!

It's easy to find separate numbers to make up whatever ID you need.

But if you're feeling obsessive compulsive, you can search out phone numbers, complete with hyphen, for the entire ID.

Just when I was really hitting my stride with the labels, the year was over. 

Package project update 5

A year ago I embarked on a project to make bundles or packages every week.  I had been intrigued by reading about bundles as a popular format for early fiber artists in the 1950s and 60s, and thought it would be interesting to explore this method of working.

My rules were simple: find some stuff lying around, bundle it up, and label the package.  I had to do at least one bundle a week, but more would be OK.  The stuff could be lying around in my own home and studio, or someplace else, such as outdoors.  The only times I incorporated new material were occasionally to cut a length of thread, cord or wire to tie the bundles, although many times I could find preexisting cord lying around to do the job, such as this big wad of tangled fishline (given to me by a frustrated fisherman).

As with any daily or weekly art project, it took a little while to find my rhythm.  Some of the early packages were a bit awkward and self-conscious, but I gave myself permission to move on, knowing that they'd fade away in the large collection of better work. 

There were 53 weeks in 2011, and in 33 of them I made only one package.  In 11 weeks I made two packages.  I did three packages twice, four packages twice, five packages twice, six packages twice, and an impressive eight packages once.  Total for the year was 99 packages.

Of course, themes developed.  Many of my packages were made from packaging materials, testament to our insatiable consumer appetite for stuff, inside of other stuff.  Many packages were made from leftovers from quilts and other fiber art projects -- all those strips of batting and quilting sliced off the quilts in the final square-up, all those selvages sliced away at the start. 

Although my rules allowed stuff lying around outside, I was choosy in what I used for the project.  I didn't want my art to bring bugs and critters into the house, so I rarely used plant materials (once some acorns and maybe a nice bare stick). 

But I found ample supplies in the pencils, plastics and metal bits that litter the streets.

Travel always yields debris that makes neat little bundles.

Now that the project is over I realize I want to think about it more analytically.  I'm taking photos of every bundle, and plan to also photograph theme groupings, and hope to have everything documented and posted soon.

Package project update 4

I noticed much earlier in the year that many of my packages are made of packaging -- all the cardboard, plastic, styrofoam, paper and other materials that protect, support and swathe the things we buy.  That trend continues.

Fabric bolts. 

Miscellaneous packaging -- you can open the parasol if you want.

More miscellaneous.

I always feel guilty about throwing away huge amounts of cardboard and plastic. Somehow turning it into art -- even if that only means tying it up in string and putting it into my project bag -- feels better than tossing it into the landfill.

Package project update 3

Perhaps the most interesting packages are those made from strange miscellaneous things that you or others have kept for a long time, but objectively have no real purpose any more.

A friend from my fiber art group brought me these bits of wood, from which somebody had cut little dolls.  She thought I might find them useful.  And I did -- ten minutes after I came home from the meeting, I made them into a bundle.

Years ago I had a cheap plastic frame for a poster but after a while the plastic warped, cracked and wouldn't hold together.  Why had I kept it all this time underneath the shelves in the workroom?

And my favorite: a dozen sturdy metal brackets to hold up the heavy blinds in my studio.  The blinds came down the week we moved into the house, but the hardware stayed. 

Package project update 2

Sometimes I make packages out of things that I find on my walks.  I shouldn't be surprised that people are slobs, willing to throw away anything on the street.  So when I pick up some interesting junk, I feel that I'm doing my bit for society.

Landscape guys apparently don't bother to pick up the ends of weed-whacker cord when they run out and need a new cord. 

Lots of pencils are thrown away on the street, especially near schools.  Most of the dowels were part of an art project that somebody had pitched near a school.  And the red sticks were firecrackers, found on the park road on the Fifth of July.

Package project update 1

We've just finished week 34 of the year, which means I'm two-thirds of the way through my package project: each week I make at least one package or bundle of things that I find lying around.  Finding stuff lying around is generally not a problem, since I'm a pack rat, but making up the package requires a bit of imagination.

In a few weeks I've made only one package, the minimum required by the rules.  In other weeks, when I'm puttering around the studio trying to clean up or find something, I'll make a half-dozen or more.  Here's a peek at some of my better packages.

No surprise that much of my stuff lying around has to do with fabric.  I quilted eight pieces in June and July and had lots of pieces of batting left over, generally in strips that were trimmed off after quilting.  There's not a lot you can do to make one bundle of batting look different from the next, but I tried.  The one in the front, for instance, is embellished with some little tiles that my friend saved out for me when she remodeled her bathroom.

When I finish my quilts, I use bleach to write my name, the quilt title and the year on the sleeve.  Then they have to be laundered to wash out the bleach, which gives me lots of raveled clots of threads.  Here's a little bundle of the leftovers, which have always seemed quite beautiful.

Bits of fringe from an upholstery sample book.

An old videotape case, minus the innards and stuffed with bits of fabric.

Finally, here's a bundle of yards and yards of cord made on a pin knitting device.  I started this cord when I was in high school and have been shlepping it around for many decades, occasionally adding a foot or two from leftover yarn.  I once planned to coil it into a cushion or mat, but the colors didn't really go together so I never did.  I realized that it will never look as good as it does right now, tied into a bundle.

Tomorrow I'll show you some more of my packages.