creative process - carlyn yandle

Mammoth social sculpture going up at Draw Down event

6/5/2015

I'm not knocking social media. Hitting 'Like' to one posted act of injustice after another is nothing like joining a sit-in at your MP's office or marching in protest. But I also get that there is power in those tweets and online petitions. We saw it this week when Tim Hortons decided it had had enough bad press and was breaking its ad deal with Enbridge.

Still, there's a lot we lose by going through life connecting with one another mostly via screen-pecking 'like' or tweeting or 'gramming. We are, after all, a social species; our well-being is dependent on sharing space in the actual physical world. Consider this: If someone took away your ability to connect on social media you might get seriously miffed. If you were allowed unlimited social media access but had to connect in physical isolation from all other humans, you might get seriously unhinged.

Early days of the Network. Photo by Debbie Tuepah

There is something profoundly healthy about being around the energy of other people. It's the why for clubs and associations, parties and gatherings. And it's the why behind the Network sculpture/social engagement project.

Artist Debbie Tuepah and I came up with the idea just a few years after the birth of Twitter and Facebook, and within a year of the debut of Instagram and Pinterest. We felt a need to create a physical alternative to all this virtual social networking — some low-barrier, small-footprint way to bring people together. Something that would be collaborative but less skill-based than, say, a quilting bee, but offering similar tactile engagement.

This thread of an idea soon joined other threads: the materials should be found/donated and should be the stuff that ordinarily ends up in a landfill. Synthetic, petroleum-based fabrics and sheeting would do the trick. (No one knows what to do with those lurid-coloured Fortrel bedspreads and vinyl shower curtains.)

The more people work on it, the more visually interesting it becomes.

We cleared the decks and hung several strands from a hook in the studio ceiling, like I did as a kid when making those macrame plant hangers. We added one strand to another by simple knotting. We held parties and invited friends to bring their friends to tie one on. Kids got knotty and businessmen who thought the whole thing a little weird at first were soon weaving free-style.

We knew we were onto something. A year later it made its public debut at the Mini Maker Faire at the PNE, where it grew into the gargantuan piece it is today.

The Network is too big for any studio parties now. This mammoth collaborative sculpture demands the kind of space like the Atrium of the Mount Pleasant community centre, where it will be suspended on Saturday, June 20, 10 a.m.-2 p.m. as part of the city-wide Draw Down event.

Come on down, tie one on, grab a thread and take part in this social medium in the actual, physical world.

One bit, two bits, green bits, black bits

3/13/2015

Toybits (green) - made from broken toys (Carlyn Yandle photo)

This may be the third or fourth column/post I've written that could come under the headline, 'Overthinking will be the death of me.' There is definitely a book in there somewhere about the power of overthinking to sabotage the creative process.

My latest overthinking sabotage occurred as I was experimenting with binding up broken toy bits (consciously not overthinking why).

I was taking care of my sister's kids while idly binding one green toy remnant to another. At some point, the curious object appeared to be done. And it was good.

It's an intriguing object but when photographed is also a visually absorbing abstract. It has richness in its ability to conflate the second and third dimensions. It is heavy with cultural reference yet lightly humorous.

I was onto something.

Toybits (black) - final version (Carlyn Yandle photo)

After a couple of hours I quit because it clearly would have no logical endpoint. But if there's one thing I've learned about the creative process it's to let the failures hang around and stink up the joint for a while. In my experience, the only way to get to the source of the stench is to keep it in the periphery. And a couple of days later it came to me: I was so hell-bent on the outcome I had completely negated the making, which, when referring back to the green toy-bits cluster, was the essence of the thing: play.

I took it all apart, then started over, finding the fit between one bit to another bit, then adding one bit where it fit. (Maybe the book should be in Dr. Seuss language).

It had a beginning and an end, and the entire process was an adventure without a map. The result is a sculptural object with implied power that appears as part engine, part vehicle, part robot. It has composition, balance, architecture, intriguing sight lines and varying perspectives. It has something to tell me: Your instincts are good, keep going.

From the junk of life emerges new life.

You can see it in the above photo; it's a mess. Even as I was binding it I thought, This is not working, this is not working. Why is this not working? It has no balance, no composition. it is artless. And it was a chore from the get-go.

Toybits (black): first attempt (Carlyn Yandle photo)

So, like every creative I know, the ol' mental processor starting whirring away in the background, rolling over this concept. Friends and I talk about this slightly obsessive stage when developing a new work. You're still functional in your daily routine but that whirring puts you in a slightly distracted state. It's sort of like falling in love; there's always something there to remind you of that growing passion. And when I fall in love with an idea, I fall hard. I'm consumed by the topic like the Paul Rudd character in The 40-Year-Old Virgin who can't stop talking about Amy or The Big Lebowski's John Goodman character who links any conversation to his days in 'Nam.

I've been seeing toy-bits inspiration everywhere, including in a car column in the morning newspaper. The picture of an engine reminded me of the toy-bits clusters and suddenly I was shoving aside breakfast dishes and breakfasting people and dumping my hoard of broken toys onto the table.

I will make that engine-y thing, I said. And therein lies the fatal flaw.

Everything I know about design I learned in newspapers

2/6/2015

One of the biggest lessons learned from a career in newspaper journalism was, surprisingly, the difference between decoration and design. It began when I built up basic layout skills using paper dummies, reduction wheel, metal pica-pole (also good for gouging into office drywall when it was all Just. Not. Working), non-repo pen and something my favourite production foreman coined 'The Yandleometer' — a sort of parallax-viewfinder deal I improvised.

When I finally got the gist of that, we were required to give up the physical tools and wrestle with clumsy emerging computer design programs. But this wasn't the big lesson part; that came when I truly understood that laying out a compelling page of stories and photos was function first, form second. And if that form included a bunch of clip-art snowflakes or needless drop shadows, those had to go. The scanning eye needs white space over decoration.

Good design requires a good editor, but too much editing can kill the soul of the visual field, whether that's a newspaper double-spread (I'm dusting off all the ol' industry relic terms here) or a building.

The staircase at Les Haras in Strasbourg is functional sculpture. (Photo from sncf.com)

The editor likes her windows clean of pouffy valances and floors free of scatter-rug litter, but she doesn't want her voice to echo in her interior space, either. There's a fine line between the functional beauty of the spare Bauhaus-based International Style and objects that are designed primarily to optimize mass-production.

The residual of a near-dead layout skill is that I'm constantly second-guessing structures and spaces with a specific line of questions: Too much? Too little? How much is design and how much is decoration?

I see this image of the astonishing staircase at the Les Haras brasserie in Strasbourg, designed by Jouin Manku Studios, and I wonder, is all that strapping structural? If not, what would it look like with the superfluous strapping removed?

The new arts centre on Lasqueti Island, shingling in progress. (Photo by Carlyn Yandle)

But, in the end, is less really more?

At first glance this Gulf Island community building is something out of a Bavarian folktale, more in line with the Volkisch movement that celebrates the hand of the craftsperson.

Yet that decorative shingling is sound design in the rainforest vicinity, and uses locally-sourced renewable materials. The two planks flanking the window are structural components, too. Above all, the design of the shingling hold the function of reflecting the mountainous region rising out of the sea, and the kind of creative activity that will take place at this new arts centre, while the planks are twin silhouettes of the tree trunk they came from.

The 19th Century English artist/designer/social activist William Morris would have loved it. He would have appreciated this collaborative work that integrates architecture with art and in so doing eliminates any boundary between form and function.

It's a happy, slightly chaotic dwelling-object, quite the opposite of the Bauhaus "minimal dwelling" ideal, but would it benefit from an editing?

No freakin' way.

Shab-fab granny squares cover it all

1/16/2015

Maybe it's the chilly monochromatic climate at work here, but I'm suddenly wrapping myself up granny squares. The more I think about them, the more potential I see.

There's a lot of culture woven into those fuzzy little colour grids. They're there in the background of popular culture, infusing irony and cozy home-yness, nostalgia and disdain. One graces the couches of neuroscientist Amy Farrah Fowler's nerdy apartment and Roseanne's working-class house. Jemaine sleeps under one (badly).

Sure, they achieve that soupçon of shabbiness or tastelessness essential to the story but those set decorators are no idiots; granny squares inject hits of high colour and pattern to the visual field. They are trippy, decorative non-decor objects. Their form is used because of their assumed function over form.

They are the throws that are thrown around, their colourful geometry reflected and refracted so that they radiate western domestic culture, love it or hate it.

Cate Blanchett adorned a designer version on the red carpet, to a chorus of derision by the fashion police, which secured the actress more publicity.

There's something delicious in the mix between haute couture and the easy, scrappy crochet method that results in over 13,000 Etsy items under the search term, "granny squares".

I've loved/hated granny squares ever since my cousin and I were given matching shrink vests at age 10, from our moms. I would have been wearing that single, large purple granny square at a time when the Italian dads in the neighbourhood were setting up that granny-square pattern in concrete breeze walls around their brand new Vancouver Specials.

One breeze wall in a photo essay by the author of joy-n-wonder.blogspot.ca

Like the blankets, the breeze walls evoke utility and thrift but are visually interesting enough to warrant new consideration. The modularity of granny squares and breeze-wall blocks ooze with potential, especially as a mash-up.

Granny squares command attention. The Los Angeles Craft and Folk Art Museum took on new dimensions when it was covered in thousands of donated granny squares as part of its CAFAM Granny Squared installation a couple of years ago.

Suddenly, a city that is generally at odds with notions of the handmade, the domestic and the artisanal was attracting mainstream media attention for its collaborative crocheted culture jam.

A couple of years before that, in 2011, members of many Finnish women's organizations and the craft teachers' union blanketed Helsinki Cathedral's steps in 3,800 granny square tilkkupeitosta (Finnish for 'quilt').

The modular motif marries beautifully to existing architecture, as the granny squares take on a Tetris effect, cascading down to the giant public square in this domestic intervention.

But what about the granny square as a building block itself? What if a building appeared to rise out of a giant crocheted coverlet? How could concretized crocheted granny squares be utilized as sculpture?

It's a fuzzy concept worth building on.

Plastic toy glut Horrifies — and inspires

3/28/2014

Euphoria 100320, toy assemblage

I am tormented by the plastic bits of toys, discards from the kiddies in my life, that I have been unable to toss (the toys, not the kiddies). There is no practical excuse for holding onto all those scraps from their evolving toy inventory, as well as the remnants from numerous birthday party gift bags, McHappy Meals, dollar-store impulse buys and stocking stuffers.

There is now a solution (in this city at least) to my little problem of hoarding boxes of bits: the Beyond the Blue Box program that accepts the normally rejected plastics on the third Saturday of every month (details at bottom).

But I'm still holding onto the art possibilities, my last excuse for hoarding all that brilliant-hued detritus. I just haven't come up with my own fabrication plan yet, hence the torment.

But I am inspired by the likes of Japanese Hideki Kuwajima, whose assemblages of toys evoke beetles, reminding me of the Japanese penchant for beetles as pets (and the Kyoto neighbourhood supermarket that sold them.)

And I am in love with Irish artist Ryan McElhinney's powerful assemblage sculptures composed of old action figures and figurines typically found in dusty china cabinets, dollar stores, or abandoned toy boxes. The Westminster grandfather clock shown here is composed of Hulk and Toy Story action figures among other items. It was commissioned for a residence in The Palms, Dubai (a massive-scaled artwork in itself). Below, McElhinney's Pixar-lamp-esque figure is the concept in reverse: a figurine that evokes assemblage.

The Irish artist found his inspiration for this work from a photo of a boy soldier.

Similar, but incorporating other throwaway forms than action figures, American artist Rondle West's work is described as evoking Hindu shrines.

The toys don't have to be intact, in fact, the remnants can take the work into a more abstracted field, as seen in Wavelengths (below), by UK artist Steve McPherson. The artist states that his work was created using "unaltered marine plastic debris objects found on the UK coast, 1994-2013."

Perhaps the plastic I've been hoarding has already served its purpose: motivating me to discover these artworks and artists. I am thisclose to parting with them.

The Beyond the Blue Box program hosts drop-offs on the Eastside (Britannia Community Centre) and the Westside (Lord Byng Secondary school) on the third Saturday morning of every month.

Hit the link to find out more about the last-chance recycling for the rejects from the City's recycling program.

QR button blanket: Epic fail or a larger reading?

3/21/2014

After three months of sewing one donated button after another into a giant QR code, the big moment arrived this week: time to stand back and scan that baby with a reader app, translating this quilt-thing to read, "The devil is in the details."

Except it didn't read. Don't panic!, I thought, then spent the entire next day working with a photo image of the QR Button Blanket, Photoshopping in more buttons and darker buttons and bigger buttons, trying to add the minimum amount of density for the software program to register the pattern and work its magic to produce the punchline. No luck; even a sliver of white in one button cluster puts a wrench in the wholecloth works. I filed this one under the category of Epic Fail, not worth finishing it as intended, framing it in black bias binding. I do not want to create something that is 'still' good; I want the thing to be good, full stop.

Failure demands confronting the why. Why conceive such a laborious, risky project in the first place? Why endure the painstaking process when half-way through it was becoming abundantly clear that this was not going to 'read'?

But there is another power here, and that's tied to the process beyond the product. The achievement may lie in the endurance (in an increasingly A.D.D. world) that is not necessarily attached to the product after all. It may be in seeing it through, without the promise of a sure result. The power may lie in the humble, everyday materials and the community of women who contributed all those bits of plastic saved from the waste stream. (There should really be a global ban on production of billions of plastic buttons. Plant-based plastic, bone, wood, and leather- or fabric-wrapped tin buttons eventually return to the earth.)

But what's really starting to click in for me is the cultural reference of this button-grid design. A decade ago, it might have been viewed as an oddly arranged colour field or an abstracted grid but we're so acclimatized to codes that the pattern begs to be 'read.' The fact that this is irresolvable might be annoying. And that's interesting.

Wavy Gravy, marker on synthetic velvet, 58" x 43"

The possible multiple references could be more engaging than the one answer provided by a QR reader app. There's something to be learned in the discomfort of the open-endedness.

Moments like these, I seek out the artists who have embraced what New York artist Polly Apfelbaum calls the 'tough beauty' of visually exciting works that incorporate everyday materials in surprising ways. Apfelbaum, who calls herself a bad crafter, articulates the process of hard work in this video.

"I work all the time," she says, without a schedule and in a highly experimental way. "You make the work and then you hope for the best."

"It's very important to get your fuck-you back."

I'm going with that.

true craftsman makes a crazy idea real

12/13/2013

While the rest of us are scrambling to post our recent activity, build our brand, be a part of the online conversation, Noah is solving problems through metal. His underwhelming website is testimony to what he does instead all day long instead of sitting at a computer, often seven days a week, for money and for love.

I found him through a trusted recommendation and knocked on his hand-crafted metal-ball door-knocker back in May, with my metal problem: I wanted to make a quilt out of reclaimed copper piping and other old gizmos. I had my pitch all ready to go, something along the lines of, "I know this sounds crazy but hear me out..." but I could see he was already loving the idea.

"I really want to do it," he said, and I could see I had found the right craftsman for the job.

For the next four months, Noah turned my full-size paper pattern pieces into two mirror-image, six-foot-square quilts of 10 lapping 'log cabin' blocks, which was installed in the front entrance of the City of North Vancouver's new Operations Centre last night, at the time of this posting.

Sometimes ignorance is bliss. I didn't even know what brazing was when assemblage artist (and Noah's neighbour) Valerie Arntzen brought me around to his place. I didn't know that you can't just solder different metals together. I simply handed over the goodies I found at my favourite scrap yards (thank you for putting those gems aside, Richard of North Star Recycling and Dung of Allied Salvage). Apart from some initial head-scratching and smiling, Noah did not harp on the fact these were time-consuming challenges. Had I known the trouble he would take dissembling old spigots and repairing bronze pressure gauges I might have clawed back on the scrappy treasures.

It also had not dawned on me that paper patterns might not be suitable in a workplace that is all fire and molten metal, a problem he solved by laying a thick piece of tempered glass between the patterns and the hot solder and copper. Problem-solving is the mark of fine craftsmanship.

Noah claimed to like the quilter's block-by-block approach to creating complex pattern and texture. I appreciated the fact that he also saw visual value of keeping the soldering drips and the entire range of patinas of copper, from black to turquoise to new-penny pink, instead of polishing it all to a high sheen. That ability to let go of the need to create a perfect joint or a uniform result speaks to the artist in this craftsman.

The nuts and bolts: Hand-drawn renderings were translated into an Illustrator file and printed out as full-size colour-coded block patterns to indicate three levels as well as placements for found features. Noah adjusted for the bulky tees and elbows as he transformed the patterns into a three-dimensional matrix, and situated specific gizmos to enhance the subtle mirror-image effect.

There are many leaps of faith in the making of something never before attempted. No amount of sketching, Photoshop'd artist renderings or 3-D modelling can create the same sense of the actual thing in its intended space. So as City of North Vancouver workers passed by during the installation last night, joking about how it looked like their last job, or asking if we've checked for leaks, or pointing out some gizmo-relic they remember (including some donated from the City's own works yard), we were having our own first look at our collaborated effort. The glints of hand-rubbed corners and the deep shadows on the wall were all pulling together in this soaring, 12-foot-high structure.

And... breathe out. Waterwork is working. Thank you, Noah.

More strange bedfellows: quilts and graffiti

8/16/2013

This is my new favourite colour box, a delicious array of cans of Montana spraypaint. All packed up to take to my largest quilt project to date.

Now I finally get my chance to do what I've been dreaming of for years: blanketing a big, blank white concrete wall with a colourful quilt of triangles — with permission and for the long term, for a change. (My previous secret adventures in unauthorized craft-tagging in the public sphere were painted out within weeks.)

How a quilt will read when spraypainted on a concrete wall I have no idea. I've googled images using 'quilt' and 'graffiti' and 'mural' and haven't found any spraypainted quilts — at least, none that were created specifically with quilts in mind.

Quilts composed of freeform blocks and vibrant colours inspire.

My main challenge, besides enduring working under a respirator for about the same number of hours it takes me to make a queen-sized quilt, is ensuring that the field of bright colours and simple geometry doesn't scream 'daycare centre. ' The colour and pattern choices make all the difference between creating a one-dimensional jumble of happy triangles with what I'm really trying to achieve here: a three-dimensional appearance and a vibrating, discordant colourway, some element of surprise, a reason for the eye to take a lingering second look.

I'll get the 'why' part overwith here: This media mash-up of the visual of tactile, comforting quilts and the harsh process of spraypainting concrete infrastructure stems from my compulsion to visually link the personal with the public, the domestic with the industrial, the feminine with the masculine. Enough said.

One risk in translating quilts into spraypaint is losing textural and pattern details.

But the excitement (mixed with a little fear) about this undertaking is in the risk involved.

Unlike putting together a quilt, which is pretty much pre-planned (all the fun is in choosing the colour and pattern and the rest is pretty much mechanical, which is why so many quilts are started but abandoned), the spraypaint process is additive and more open-ended. It could all go sideways. Or it could emerge as something entirely unexpected and new.

One of several of my early painting sketches for the project.

Hopefully this will turn out to be the best of both distinct worlds: the pleasing geometry and colour-play of quilts and all their cozy references mixed with the hard-surface, large-scale properties of murals made by spraypaint-wielding graffiti artists.

I'm in the thick of it now, relying heavily on my experience making complex quilts to reduce the intimidating scale of the job. It's all about focusing in, taking it on one block at a time, trying not to think about the work ahead. Eating that elephant one bite at a time.

Day 1: Facing the fear of the unknown, in full respirator.

Maker's mecca in downtown Toronto (for now)

11/9/2012

A real trip: Toronto's textile-retail district is a visual feast for any kind of maker. (Carlyn Yandle photos)

Stephen Cruise's 1997 public artwork at Richmond and Spadina. (Carlyn Yandle photo)

Like other Vancouver makers, I mourn the latest closures of stores dedicated to those who work with their hands, hearts and heads, for love or livelihood. Last month it was the needlework shop in my neighbourhood. Dressew is fast becoming the city's last great fabric store standing.

So the first chance I got while in Toronto last week I headed to the mecca for fibre-arts-makers: the Queen/Richmond/Spadina area. This bit of heaven boasts 100-year-old storefronts jam-packed with notions both humble and grand: a button shop — just buttons — next to one devoted to beads or ribbon or wool or shiny embellishments. Across from a luxury textiles boutique is a warehouse crammed with tables heaped with remnants. All in the space of a couple of blocks, and right in the thick of the city.

Yet even Canada's biggest textile retail district appears threatened by encroaching condo towers. (Note the billboard in this photo hawking pre-sale units in the "Fabrik" development on the site of the old King Textiles building.)

Just when you think you're the last fabric-hound standing there's the World of Threads festival to restore the soul. This multi-venue Oakville-Toronto event showcases staggeringly skillful works embedded with rich ideas and spaces to consider, and to transcend. Despite the diversity of media and methods, a thread runs though this fest: in an all-too-consumptive art world these artists are grateful for the chance to show. The value of the work is not foremost in commericial saleability but is in the maker's connection to the material itself, the often transcendent physical experience of the making, and the connectedness to the pattern of art forms that pass down through families and through every culture.

Pushing the work, with a little help from my friends

7/18/2012

You'd think the biggest challenge of artists is deciding what to make. But every artist I know is challenged by deciding what not to make. There are so many competing pursuits that tend to be part of the lives of creative types: gardening, music, cooking, hanging with kids and animals, communing with nature, going to art shows and performance events. So many things we'd like to dig into, so little time.
Deciding what not to make is sort of essential if you want to get any one thing actually made. There's a big, delectable smorgasbord of potential projects and processes out there and as much as I'd like to throw a clay bowl/solder silver jewelry/silk-screen/arc-weld/blow glass/wood-turn (etc.) I need to stick to a diet of work that moves my major focus forward. So I resist the temptations of reconnecting with my old Pentax ME SLR camera or singing in a group, but I do allow myself to collaborate with other artists on smaller, ongoing exercises that push my fibre/pattern-based abstraction obsession.
Which is how my friend Val and I got the idea of starting Co-Lab a couple of years ago. This involves us each doing something to a 12-inch-square wood panel, then swapping panels so the other person can add (or take away) an element or layer, then swapping again. And sometimes again. Sometimes we go too far, and there's no going back. They are un-pre-mediated and rarely pretty, but who said pushing one's comfort zone is pretty? The results are often quite monstrous, as illustrated here with a panel we called "Monster":

WIth only 'blue' as our over-riding theme this year I covered a panel with painted relief-work, as I was exploring casting possibilities of acrylic paint and different distressing methods.

Val immediately thought 'reptilian skin' so added a cycloptic eye and feet evoking Eastern spiritual traditions, a theme that connects much of her assemblage work.

We've completed several panels but whether they'll ever see the light of day is beside the point. We post them on a private blog simply as a way to record the processes - the good, the bad, and the ugly.
Currently I'm collaborating with two other groups of artist friends. Mixing sculpture, painting, drawing and assemblage are not always easy, but there's something to learn in each of those mash-ups.