Christmas ornaments -- the reveal

For decades I've been making Christmas ornaments for family and friends, and it's an integral part of my art calendar.  After so many years it's always a challenge to come up with an idea that's a bit different from what I've done in the past, and then actually making the ornaments occupies a fair chunk of time in the fall.  (Read about some of my past adventures here.)  The rules are simple: each ornament has the initial or full name of the recipient, plus the year.

This year I was inspired by a piece of fabric covered with text that my sister gave me a long time ago.  She used it for a while as a curtain, but after she moved it decided to come live with me.  I used it for a quilt (now traveling in the SAQA Text Messages show) and then I used some of the leftover bits for another quilt.

the first quilt:  Crazed 20: Print on the Dotted Line (detail)

the second quilt: Postage 7: Tower of Babble (detail)

In making that second quilt I enjoyed incorporating tiny, tiny bits of fabric -- sometimes only one letter -- into my compositions, working with a tweezer to place the bits under the needle as I sewed.  Although my objective in that piece was to fragment the text into illegibility, I realized that I could go the other way and piece the fragments into words, in fact, into the names I needed for my ornaments.

So I went back to my bits of text fabric, now getting quite small and obviously used, in search of individual letters.  I tried to change fonts in mid-name for that ransom-note look, although a couple of people got their whole name in the same type.  I ran out of some capital letters before I ran out of people, but otherwise had no trouble.

I constructed the ornaments exactly as I had constructed the second quilt, striped fabrics, raggedy thread ends and all.  The backs came from some fabric I found online with big numbers for the year.

I hope all the ornaments are happy on their respective trees today, and that all the recipients are even happier.  Same goes for all my readers.  Merry Christmas!

Text Messages -- results in 2

I wrote yesterday about one of the quilts that was rejected from SAQA's Text Messages show.  Here's another one that shared the same fate.

I had a big piece of fabric with words all over it; my sister had used it as a curtain for some years and when it was time to redecorate she sent it to me.  I loved the typography but hated the words (really stupid) so I wanted to cut the fabric into really small, unreadable bits.  I got the idea to make a piece in the style I call "postage stamp" quilts -- a bunch of miniature quilts stitched together into an open grid.  In this piece, the "postage stamps" were about 1 1/4" tall by 1 3/4" wide.

I've made six quilts in this style before, so I have the process pretty well under control.  This one is the smallest ever, so it wasn't that hard to do (in fact, now that it's been rejected for this show, I may be tempted to go back and make it a lot wider than 24", SAQA's requirement).

I realized as I was submitting my entry that the contest rules required each piece to have a 4" sleeve at the top.  This piece doesn't, because it doesn't have a solid area to attach a sleeve to the back of.  Instead it hangs from a rod.

Postage 7: Tower of Babble































Maybe that's why it got rejected from the show, and if so, I certainly deserved it for missing this point in the call for entries.  (But I have to wonder why SAQA, willing to expand the definition of "art quilt" last year to include many types of work that aren't exactly like traditional quilts, wants to be so rigid in its rules for how work is hung.  I wonder if the efficiency of having a whole show full of quilts that can be installed with identical hardware is worth the potential loss of creativity in barring work that is different from the traditional norm.)

Well, no hard feelings -- this quilt, too, will have its day, just not in this show.

The challenge of challenges 7

This series of posts on challenges has finally made its way full circle back to where it started: my response to a new SAQA show that will be called "Text Messages."

SAQA has been particularly energetic in the last year or so in organizing theme shows that will travel around the country and be documented in catalogs.  I think this is an excellent idea and at least in my book, the most valuable service the organization provides to its members.  I have read many calls for entries for these shows and decided not to participate.

For instance, the "Beyond Comfort" exhibit had to do with "new technologies, techniques and materials."  Not my thing.  "Layers of Memory" had to do with memory, a subject I had worked with in 2001 and 2002 (my company had offices in the World Trade Center and I spent a lot of time in that building, so my response to its destruction had a lot to do with my own memories) but which I was no longer actively exploring.  "Art Meets Science" and "A Sense of Humor" didn't strike any chords.  And several other shows just didn't relate to what I was interested in.

But "Text Messages" is a subject that calls out to me in 144-point boldface all caps.  I could probably write a book about my affinity with text as a visual artist -- and now that I mention it, maybe I will write about it for you in the coming weeks.  For now, let me say that text, in the form of letterforms and alphabets, has been a huge element in my work for at least a decade.

So the thought of making quilts with "actual or implied writing" struck so close to my heart that I had to do something to enter this show.  I wrote last month about quilt #1, which I began several years ago and hope to finish in the next couple of weeks.  Now I've almost finished quilt #2.

I came to be the owner of a large piece of fabric covered with black printing on white background.  I think it had been a curtain in its first career, because of the hems and the permanently embedded creases, and I have no recollection of how it came to me.  The printing was attractive but apparently the writing was commissioned from terminally stupid Valley Girls.  So if I were to ever use the fabric, I'd have to cut it into small enough pieces that the words wouldn't be embarrassing.

Well, not to worry -- my current "Crazed" series of quilts, now up to #20, uses fabric cut into small pieces, generally no larger than postage stamps.  I have been wanting to do more with pieced fine lines cut from striped fabric.  I have used striped lines -- actually they look more like dotted lines when they're less than an eighth-inch wide -- in five quilts so far, and don't think I've even scratched the surface yet.

So it was totally comfortable to make a quilt using the printed text as background and striped fabrics as pieced-in lines.  The fact that it met the criteria for the SAQA show was almost incidental.  Here's a detail shot:

Crazed 20: Print on the Dotted Line

Back from hiatus

Several years ago, when the terrorism witch hunts were more heated than now, I started to make a quilt prompted by the huge program of warrantless wiretapping of everything and everybody in sight.  I called the quilt "Intercepts" and it consisted of a bazillion bits of speech, in different languages, most of them so fragmentary that you could have no clue as to what you were overhearing.

My plan was to cover a very large piece of fabric with these intercepted messages, then sew and sew and sew and sew over the top of it to hold everything in place and evoke the complex web of connections between people in a global communication system.  I delved into my boxes of selvages for a lot of the messages, and found many others in fabric that I have bought over the years with type and alphabets.  I also lettered a lot of them myself.

I had a lot of fun composing the little bits into an overall array, and worked systematically to keep the pieces perpendicular.  I sewed for a long time. The quilt was going to be about 55 inches square, because that's how big my base fabric was.

I was pleased with the piece and thought it would be successful, but after a while I stopped.  I can't remember what distracted me, but one day I packed everything up neatly, put it in a box and stowed the box in my closet.

Years passed.

Last week I was reading about the new SAQA show called "Text Messages."  Each quilt has to include "at least one visible letter or word."  All quilts must be 24 inches wide, but can vary in height from 24 to 60 inches.  This call for entries seemed to have my name on it, because I love art with text, and have made many pieces with letters and alphabets.  But I have a bunch of other projects looming in the next couple of months and didn't have time to embark on anything major.

It occurred to me in the middle of the night that the quilt I had started long ago might be dusted off, completed and work for this exhibit.  I couldn't remember exactly how far I had gotten before stowing the project away; maybe I was halfway there.

To my delight, I found the box, right where I expected it to be.  When I unpacked it, it looked just as classy as I had remembered it, which isn't always true in work you put away a long time ago.  And guess what: it measured somewhere between 24 and 24 1/2 inches across!

So turn it 90 degrees, cut off the extra base fabric, and it's almost done.  I guess the gods of artistic creation want me to finish this piece and enter it in the SAQA show.  Now I'm just sewing and sewing and sewing to fasten the intercepts into a global web.

Fantastic Fibers 1

I was pleased to be juried into Fantastic Fibers, the annual show at the Yeiser Art Center in Paducah KY and went to the opening a week ago.  FF is a longstanding show that took a hiatus for a few years and has miraculously regained its reputation, with close to 400 entries this year.  The Yeiser is a lovely little gallery and they intelligently time the annual fiber show so that visitors to the big AQS quilt show can see it.  It's only a block from the National Quilt Museum and five blocks from the AQS show, so if you're in Paducah for the big show you can easily see FF.

Fiber artist Luanne Rimel was the juror for FF this year and she saw two trends: lots of paper, lots of text.  Here are some of my favorites:

Shawna Munro, Red Letter Cape (detail below)


















The words, cut from books, are hand-sewed to the white cotton backing with invisible thread.

Samara Rosen, Accumulation of Knowledge (detail below)

Strips of text and music cut from books were stitched together with machine zig-zag, and arranged into a 3-D swoosh.  It reminded me of the works of El Anatsui, one of my favorite artists, whose constructions bulge and billow like this one.

No big deal on installation: just pound a couple of nails into the wall and hang the paper construction onto them. 

Carla Tilghman, Moment (detail below)

The weft of this woven piece is strips from telephone books.

Found poetry 2

I wrote yesterday about my newfound literary/art form of found poetry.  I've asked myself why I am so enthralled by this approach -- why don't I just sit down and write a poem from scratch?  Actually I do occasionally write my own, but I'm hesitant to let them out in public. 

I enjoy writing poetry, but am a beginner with a lot to learn.  Besides, I have a strong sense of privacy and am reluctant to put my heart on my sleeve, even for limited distribution.  But for some reason finding poetry is much easier than writing it.  Choosing from pre-existing words somehow mediates the expression and makes me much less reticent -- much as artists often find that monoprints, with their mediated mark-making, are easier to do than painting directly onto the paper.

An artist friend of mine sent me a link to a blog that posed a found poetry challenge.  We were too late to participate in the challenge, but decided to do it ourselves.  The rules were to look through your bookshelves and choose titles that would become part of a poem.  Then stack the books up and take a picture. 

Technically you were allowed to add words to fill out the poem, but I decided to make it harder and use just the titles. 

Here's my found poem:

     Away from home
     living dangerously
     wanting
     a lost love.

     I want it now!
     Set the stars on fire!

     Bad love
     over the edge:
             moment of truth.

     Coming home.
     150 ways to play solitaire.
     Time enough for love
     before I die.

Click here to see what a lot of other people did with the challenge.  I like mine better with no added words.

Found poetry 1

I've been thinking a lot about poetry in the last several months.  Since my last college English class I have never done much of that, but for some reason I got interested in "found haiku," an art form that I don't suppose I invented but have not seen done by other people. 

You tear a page from a book, then search for three phrases -- five syllables, seven syllables, five syllables -- that make some kind of interesting "poem."  Then cut or black out everything else on the page.  I started finding haiku more than a year ago, and then this year started using them for art, mounting them on backgrounds and perhaps collaging them with other elements. 

Part of the impetus for doing more with the poems was joining an internet group that does a fiber art haiku every month based on a common theme.  I asked to join with the understanding that I would not write my own poem, as everybody else did, but use a found poem.  I've enjoyed that greatly; haven't exactly made great art but it gets me working once a month and has been a good discipline in practicing with my collage. (Click here to see what I've made in this group.)

Then I got the idea to do a daily art project with found haiku.  Each day I find a story in the newspaper with an illustration.  I cut out the photo, and then look for my three haiku phrases somewhere in the story and make a little composition in a sketchbook.  I've just finished the first book of 50 days, and plan to do another book this year. 

This approach is different in a couple of subtle ways from the full-book-page poems.  It's a bit easier in that you do have the freedom to arrange the phrases any way you want, rather than use them in the order they appeared in the original.  But it's more difficult because newspaper columns are much narrower than book pages, and many appetizing phrases don't all fall on one line. Sometimes it's hard to find any lines at all with seven syllables!

Here are a couple of my favorite pages.

 

International Quilt Festival Cincinnati 3

One of the special exhibits at the quilt show was called "Text on Textiles" and featured quilts where words were a major part of the design.  Since the advent of computer printing onto fabric, we've seen a lot of words put on quilts, not always felicitously.   It's so easy to simply print out words and plonk them down onto your work, so difficult to integrate the words into the design so it looks like art, not an editorial cartoon.

Here's a quilt with a couple of actual words, camouflaged among a lot of single letters.  I liked the jaunty hand-drawn character of the letterforms, which have some type-like characteristics such as serifs but don't attempt to be type.

Lynda Claus, Spellbound

Here's one that uses a found textile, apparently a feedsack, plus commercial fabric, along with what appeared to be text printed and transferred by the artist.  I liked the way all the elements came together.

Jo P. Griffith, Industrial Age II (detail below)

Here's one with a phrase painted and outline quilted across the imagery.  Again, I liked the way the letters mimicked type, but were obviously wavery and hand-drawn rather than precise.  Now that I review my photos, I can't tell whether the hand-drawn quality came from the paint or from the quilting -- perhaps she started with actual printed or stenciled type and then outlined the letters with wavery free-motion quilting.  In any case, I thought it worked well, and provided a bridge between the long printed passage in the background and the drawing of the images.

Susie Monday, Faith is a Law (detail below)

Here's a quilt that handles text in a straightforward way, simply placing words over the entire surface of the quilt.  This piece used newspaper headlines.  The expanse of text was rendered in different colors to make an overlying image.  A couple of other quilts in this exhibit did the same thing, but this was probably the most successful. 

Deb Cashatt and Kris Sazaki, Fault Line (detail below)

Finally, here's a piece in the exhibit where I thought the text detracted from the art.  The quilt has a striking graphic image, surrounded with four or five screenloads of narrative explaining it.  The story is compelling, dealing with the long siege of Sarajevo in the Bosnian War of the 1990s.  The artist served as a military peacekeeper in that city, and noted that following the siege, the citizens identified places where people were killed by mortar fire as they moved about the streets.  The explosions left scars in the cobblestone pavements, and they were later filled in with red resin that resembled flowers and forever commemorated the huge civilian casualties of the war.

Renelda Peldunas-Harter, Sarajevo Rose

Obviously the viewer appreciates the image more after it's been explained, but I wished the explanation had been provided on a wall sign rather than on the quilt itself.   

Text in art -- Bette Levy

I wrote last week about text in art, and said that I think using found writing is a good way to avoid the self-conscious, heavy-handed effect that sometimes occurs when artists use words to augment their visual imagery. Today I’d like to share a remarkable work of art made by my friend Bette Levy. Bette is best known for her beautiful silk embroidery but for a recent show she made two stunning pieces from found writing.

The found writing was her own – her parents had saved every one of the letters she wrote home in college and for years after graduation. She took the fronts of each of the envelopes, arranged them chronologically, stitched them together in rows, then coated everything in wax and suspended the envelopes from a rod.

Bette Levy -- A Life and Times

A Life and Times -- detail

She also treated the letters in the same way – except she cut them into small pieces first, not wanting people to be able to read them.

Bette Levy -- Letters Home

Letters Home -- detail



















What made these two pieces so powerful was the reality of the letters having been kept through the years. Bette said in a gallery talk that she thought at first the two artworks were about her: how the envelopes reflected the changes in her own life, becoming more colorful, more dramatic, more psychedelic. But as she worked on the project she realized that the artworks were about her parents, who kept the letters and loved her even though they didn’t fully understand or approve of her hippie lifestyle.

One of the classic messages in art is the expression of love, and it’s not all that simple to achieve that honestly yet simply. Many artists have done it by picturing their loved ones; Bette has done it with the potent metaphor of letters as connections. I suppose you could also do it by putting the word “love” on your artwork, but could that possibly be anywhere near as elegant and understated and powerful as Bette’s envelopes?

Text in art

As with anything that’s entwined with your whole life and soul, I have a certain ambivalence about text in art. That is, pictures with words in them.

I spent my career writing for a living and when I decided, upon retirement, to be an artist, I struggled with how to express myself in images rather than words. This was foreign territory to me. For several years, in fact, I made quilts using letters of the alphabet as kind of a compromise.

The alphabet, of course, lives somewhere in between word and image. It’s indispensable to making words, but it is not the same thing as words. Other alphabets may use ideographs, where you have a symbol for “ox,” but ours has evolved over the millenia and the symbol for ox has long since become A. Working in this halfway place allowed me to walk for some time with one foot on each side of the street, learning to work with images without entirely abandoning the old familiar words.

I had a solo show in 2005 with a quilt for every letter of the alphabet. When the show was over, I decided I was done with the alphabet, at least for the time being, and since then have become more confident in using images alone to say what I want to say. I like to give a little clue in the title, but let the viewer figure the rest out (or not).

Black I

Gray G
















Similarly, I tend to be wary of text in other people’s work. I think that in many cases, people use words as labels or signs to convey meaning they can’t do in images. To my eye, these labels often seem heavy-handed. And I think I see them far more frequently in fiber art than in other mediums.

I’m especially annoyed at the cheesy signs that you can buy at the craft store ready to affix to your “art” – you know, the little metal doodads that say “inspiration” or “love” or “friends.” Don’t like using faux scrabble tiles or old typewriter keys to spell out “sisters.” Don’t like using rubber stamps that say “Paris” or “Casablanca.” But I digress. That stuff isn’t art, it’s middle-aged ladies playing at art using other people’s ideas.

On the other hand…

I like letterforms. I like writing. I like words. I like printing. I like type. They are very important things in my life. And if there were a way to incorporate them into my art without being heavy-handed and cheesy, I might like to do so.

Having given this a lot of thought, I now wonder if one way to avoid the HH&C effect is to use found writing. I am happy using printed materials in my paper collage works, because the words are incidental. The words may be readable, but they‘re not there because of what they say.

Found writing is to deliberate writing as unposed photos are to portraits – and maybe not just unposed photos, but photos taken without the subjects even knowing they were being photographed. There is a place for portraits, but the unposed, even surreptitious snapshot often reveals far more and is far more interesting.

Jeanne Beck, whose blog I follow and from whom I had the pleasure of taking a workshop several years ago, has embarked on a new project where she’s collecting handwriting from as many different people as possible. If you’d like to participate, here’s what she wants. I’m very interested to see what she will do with it!