Junk mail haiku 1

I've written before about a twist on found art where I search out "found poetry" on the printed pages of books and newspapers.  I've posted some of my compositions here, and more on a blog called Haiku Art.

Recently I started a new project, finding haiku in junk mail.  This is an ideal art project for the terminally frugal: your raw materials are in endless, renewing supply, and your equipment cost is minimal, one glue stick lasting for many months.

The rules of this project are simple: the junk mail has to come in a conventionally shaped envelope, and I paste the found haiku onto the front of the envelope.  If our address is printed on the envelope, I cover it with a blank label and put the poem there; if there's a window I usually put the poem inside it.

Eventually I plan to bind the "pages" into a book, but for now I'm just finding the poems.  I've been on a roll in the last several days, as I'm trying to go through the piles of stuff that accumulated on my kitchen and dining room tables during the months I was quilting nonstop.

When I work on projects like this with a strong element of conceptual art, I find that half the fun is thinking about the different ways to categorize and organize the work.  When I made bundles last year, for instance, I enjoyed grouping them by contents, by theme, by source, by size, by style of labeling tag, etc.

This project is no exception.  Having finished almost 100 so far, I'm delighted to sort and contemplate the many themes and variations that are appearing.

Let me talk first about the poetry, and come back in later posts to the visual aspects.  My basic choice is whether the poem should be a fair representation of the appeal, or whether I should take words and phrases out of context for surprise, irony or humor.  Much as I enjoy the latter, I sometimes feel it's disrespectful to make fun of the real human suffering in question.  I tend to play it straight with humanitarian appeals, but exterminators, insurance agents and used car salesmen are fair game for anything silly I can find.

Many of my haiku end up simply describing the dire situations that the appeal is trying to deal with.  You can't always tell exactly what is under discussion, but you certainly get the drift.

Slightly different are the poems that present the appeal itself.

Still others present a call to action.

Are you sobbing yet and reaching for your checkbook?  The poems will be more fun in the next post, I promise.

Photo suite 37 -- containment

Following two long sea voyages on cargo ships, I have developed a love for containers, those basic boxes that serve as the red blood cells of our global economy.  Whenever I see them I photograph them, stacked on ships, stacked on land, or best of all, in transit dangling from a crane.

Long Beach CA

Taraunga, New Zealand

Barcelona

Salvador, Brazil

Lisbon

Ushuaia, Argentina

Trinidad

going through the Panama Canal

Sign of the week

Another collaboration

Last year I resolved to do a bunch of collaborations with other artists, and managed to complete ten projects in photography, embroidery, collage, quilting and calligraphy.  Several of those projects were what pre-school teachers call parallel play, in which the collaborators make their own work on a common theme.  But a few were shared efforts, in which both people actually worked on the same piece of art.  I found the latter kind more challenging and in some ways more rewarding.  So I was happy to accept when Rosemary Claus-Gray, a good friend and fellow fiber artist, invited me earlier this year to do a hand stitching project.

The rules of the game were that we would each start stitching on a 12-inch-square ground.  We were to make some kind of map, but it could be literal or metaphorical.  After a while we exchanged pieces, but without telling the other what the map was about.

Rosemary has been far more diligent than I in working on this project; she's done her bit on my piece and sent it back to me.  I put in some finishing touches and I think it's complete.

After she sent the piece back I told her that the map shows many of the different routes that I can take between my house (the yellow square at top right) and the post office (the yellow square at center bottom). There are lots of different ways to walk, and since I've lived here for 26 years and have walked to the post office a bazillion times, I'm always looking for a bit of variety in my route.

Rosemary added a bunch of different paths, all of them more curvy than my city street grid.  I was particularly happy that she added a wide street going past my house and out the top corner of the piece.

In reality our house is at the bottom of a cul-de-sac, blocked by a creek, and I can't tell you how many times I have wished we could simply teleport across the creek and be on our way instead of taking the long, three-right-turn way around.  So Rosemary fulfilled my wish without even knowing what it was!

I should have planned a bit more before I started mapping my grid onto the fabric, because I had a lot of empty space around the edges.  I filled in one of the big spaces with feather-stitched flowery vines before I sent it on to Rosemary.  She filled in another with a little airport.

Aside from the flowery vines, I was pretty literal in my first pass at the map.  The only things I stitched were the streets and the routes.  But when the piece came back to me, full of fantasy, I found myself freed to use whatever shapes and lines popped into my head.  I suppose that, in a nutshell, is why people collaborate -- the other person's imagination lifts you out of your own mental habits and ruts, in ways that you might not achieve on your own.

Now I have to get to work on finishing Rosemary's piece and getting it back to her.  I made a good start on it when it first arrived, but have been submerged in quilting for the last couple of months and neglected my other projects.  I'll take photos, of course, and will share them with you when she declares her piece complete.


Update:  I linked this post to the new blog site that shows what a bunch of other fiber artists have been up to this week.  Please check out their work!

In Stitches

Interweave Press, which publishes Quilting Arts magazine, also puts out an e-magazine called Quilting Arts In Stitches, and I am one of the featured artists in the new issue.  I talked and wrote about my daily art project of hand stitching, and provided tutorials on some of my favorite embroidery stitches.  Here's an excerpt.

I admit to having felt technologically obsolete when the folks at Interweave sent out emails asking the artists to blog about the new issue.  The magazine is available only on iPad, and since I don't have one, I can't even read it.  They did send me a pdf of my own article, which I thought was pretty nicely done -- I don't mean to compliment myself, but to compliment the photography, layout and design by the Quilting Arts people, who always put out a high-class product.

I was a bit surprised to find that the magazine was published exclusively for iPad, and apparently I wasn't the only one, because after the new issue was announced, there were questions and complaints.  Interweave explained that software companies are putting all their development money into tablet technology, not into stuff for desktop computers.

"As a result, it costs a tremendous amount of money per eMag to build it for an acceptable PC/MAC viewing and reading experience and the sales numbers couldn't continue to support this effort," they said in July.

But apparently the questions and complaints continued, and Interweave blinked!  "Due to overwhelming demand from desktop eMag readers, we have decided to release Quilting Arts In Stitches volume 7 for the desktop.  All of the eMags going forward will be offered for both desktop (Mac and PC) as well as for the iPad."  In addition, they're revisiting several publications that were issued earlier this year for iPad only, and making them available for desktop.

This strikes me as an excellent decision.  Considering the demographic of people interested in art quilts, I suspect a lot of them are like me, iPad-less.  It seems counterproductive to limit the distribution of a high-end product to a single platform, thus ruling out a significant portion of one's potential audience.

So those of you who do have iPads can get the magazine right now.  Those who want to read it on their old-fashioned computers will have to wait a bit till that version is available, but I'll let you know when that happens.

And by the way, doesn't it make you feel a bit decrepit to remember that not so many years ago, desktop computers were cutting edge, not old-fashioned?  Having been an early adopter of WYSIWIG in the previous century, I cling to my self-image as avant garde, not hopelessly behind the curve.

Photo suite 36 -- Ken on vacation

As we have vacationed in many beautiful places around the world, we have noticed many of our fellow tourists taking pictures of one another rather than of the magnificent scenery in front of them.  On a trip to Greece and Turkey I did an art project in which I photographed my husband in notable places (although you'd never know it to look at the photos) in the style of those tourists.

Ken at Hadrian's Arch, Athens

Ken at the Acropolis, Athens

Ken at the Agora, Athens

Ken at Troy

Ken at Ephesus

Ken on the ferry to Chios

Ken at Pergamon