Sign of the week

Completely different (the portrait)

I seem to be on a revolutionary streak this spring, wanting to make art that doesn't resemble anything I've done in the past.  I made two small art pieces (here and here) by stitching directly onto cotton duck with no batting or backing, and was excited by the way the machine stitched line is neither straight nor precise (I guess I could get it to be that way if I tried hard enough, but I don't want to).

Having finished those two pieces, I wanted to keep going, and the obvious choice was to use the new technique on a small piece that I had agreed to make for the annual auction of the Louisville Visual Art Association.  We were given 8x8-inch canvases for the project.

I had a small piece of canvas left over from one of my little stitched pieces, just big enough for the 8x8 format.  I made this little guy by stitching onto the canvas in several colors, then stitching it to a piece of beige cotton, which I stretched and stapled to the base canvas.  Then I covered the staples by wrapping some twine around the edges of the canvas.

It doesn't take much dense stitching to make the underlying canvas bulge and buckle, which is particularly noticeable on his bulging eyes and eyebrows.  The 3-D effect is something I need to play with more in the future.

I sketched the face and embroidered the eyes and mouth with free-motion stitching, but everything else was done with a straight stitch.

I love this little guy so much that I'm not sure I can part with him, even though I don't have much time to start over (and would have to acquire a new 8x8 support).  Probably my best approach is to donate this guy to the auction as planned, then make a bunch of siblings in the same technique.

Note: I wrote this post several weeks ago, the day I finished the piece, but have held it for publication now since the auction, held last month, is supposed to be anonymous.  Only after you buy a piece do you get to turn it over and see who the artist was.  Of course many artists are quite recognizable by the cognoscenti, but I'll bet that nobody who knew my work would have identified me as the artist of this piece.  And that makes me happy.  I was also happy to learn that the piece was purchased during the first hour of the auction.

The Mending Project 3

I did my first shift as a volunteer for The Mending Project last week, and it was not particularly edifying.  I guess when it's a gorgeous spring day outside, museums always suffer, although we did have 10 or 12 people wander through -- none of them bringing garments to be mended.  I gave each of them an explanation of what the project is about and urged them to come back and bring something to be fixed.

In the first two days of the project they acquired and mended a dozen garments, most of which appeared to be owned by museum staffers, which is fine, because it would be embarrassing to sit there with nothing on the table.  I was there on the third day, and peeked at the ones that had already been fixed.

You call that a successful mend???

Whoever mended this sweater apparently got tired halfway through, so I went back and finished the job.  That was the only mending I did.

Fortunately I had brought my own art project to work on, one of my knotting constructions.  I decided to incorporate some of the shiny polyester thread from the Mending Project into my knots.

So it wasn't a wasted afternoon, but I hope there will be more activity in the future.  You know, if a performance art project happens in the forest, and no performance actually takes place, is it really art?

Photo suite 175 -- sewing in the gift shop

Whenever I see sewing things in a museum gift shop I take note, because that's not where you generally find your needles and thread.  Rivaling anything in my home fabric store is this array of notions in the gift shop at Blenheim Palace, the grand estate of the Dukes of Marlborough in England.

Whoever knew there were so many kinds of pins?

I wonder who buys this stuff!

Special for Derby Day: horses + quilting

Today is the Kentucky Derby, which probably doesn't mean much to most of you, but in Louisville it's the biggest day of the year, when rich people come to town to party and the rapidly obsolescing sport of horse racing has a day in the sun.  Today I'm pleased to bring you a Kentucky Derby post that also has to do with quilts -- and if you think that was easy to accomplish, think again.

You've probably heard of Eadweard Muybridge, the early photographer who in the 1870s was able to capture a horse's gait in stop-motion.  Before his work, people thought horses always had one foot on the ground, but the photos proved that at one point in the gait, all four feet are airborne.  An art pal of mine told me that if you look at paintings of horses in motion -- for instance, those of Degas, a great portrayer of race track culture -- you can tell exactly when Muybridge came along because artists suddenly changed their depictions.

The Horse in Motion, Eadweard Muybridge, 1878

So in the fullness of time, a quilter came up with the idea of not only making a quilt out of Muybridge's horse silhouettes, but to do an animation of the 12 different frames.  The quilter is Nina Paley, and you can see the animation and read all about the project on her blog, here. (You don't have to actually read anything but you MUST go to the site and watch the horse gallop for a bit.  I command you!!)

Nina Paley, Horse Quiltimation, 2015

I think this project is wonderful and I spent a long time wandering around on her blog and website reading about this and other quilt projects. Basically her expertise is drawing, and working out ways to computerize elaborate quilting designs to execution on some truly impressive huge quilting machines.  If you're into computer-aided quilting, make sure you check out what she and her partner, Theodore Gray, a science geek, are doing, here.

The Mending Project 2

I'm working as a volunteer in "the Mending Project," an installation under the aegis of artist Lee Mingwei at the Kentucky Museum of Art + Craft in Louisville.  He will not be here during the exhibit, but came to town last week to set things up and hold a training session for the volunteers.

Here's Lee, surrounded by volunteers, pointing to one of the first garments to be mended.

Visitors walk in, sit down at the table and give you their garments to mend.  The first thing you do is ask the visitor to tell you about the garment.  Lee explained, "It's important for them to share the story of their garment; is there a personal history or memory behind it?"

When he conducted this project in other venues he heard many remarkable stories, such as a woman who brought a suit made by her grandmother, a concentration-camp survivor, and a soldier who brought the pair of camo fatigues that he was wearing when he was shot (complete with bloodstain).

He also had strange moments, as when a woman reached up under her blouse, unhooked her bra, wiggled out of it and handed it to him to be mended, since the underwire was coming loose.  (He couldn't figure out how to fix it.)  He told us that we're allowed to decline any garment that makes us feel uncomfortable, setting off a flood of silent speculation as to just what sort of garment that might be.

If a visitor asks, "Are you the artist?" Lee says to say yes, "if you feel comfortable saying that."

"When you're sitting in that chair it's your project," he said.  "I hope (the visitors) don't tell you what to do.  You're giving a gift to them; the receiver doesn't get to decide."

He compared his work to that of the performance artist Marina Abramovic, who famously sat silently in the Museum of Modern Art for 736 hours while one visitor at a time sat silently across the table and looked into her eyes.  "If it's Marina it has to be Marina sitting there," Lee said, "but if it's me it doesn't matter.  The most important thing is a stranger sitting there doing a generosity to another stranger."

Dozens and dozens of cones of shiny polyester machine embroidery thread are displayed on the walls of the gallery as a backdrop, and installing the thread was a serious production; "We were very intentional about making it look unintentional," said Marcus Siu, the art handler who got to do all the hard work. "It's a very Zen process," Lee agreed.

Because polyester machine embroidery thread is not the material of choice for garment repair, he suggested holding three or four threads together in the needle for greater strength.  Sometimes Lee simply puts a little doodad of thread onto a garment as a decoration.   He said it would be OK for us to bring some fabric to use for patches, or to bring beads for embellishment.

I asked him whether, since the mending was not really functional, he thought of it as decorative, metaphorical, or some of both.  He replied, "It's up to you. It's very much about the moment, when you encounter the person and the garment."

The visitors sit there while the garments are mended, but are asked to leave the mended garments on the table for the duration of the show, although it's OK to let them take the garment away in special cases, such as out-of-town tourists or those who might freeze to death without their newly mended coat.  (Fat chance of that happening in Louisville between April and September.)

Those were our marching orders; I'll let you know how things work out.  Stay tuned.