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Materials matter, and Those of loved ones gone can live on

5/26/2018

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Clockwise from top left: Great-Grandfather Quilt; Dad's Throw; Tie Cushion. (Carlyn Yandle photos)
Materialistic. People say it like it's a bad thing.
But there's not necessarily anything selfish or hoardy or wasteful about feeling deeply connected to materials. If we all started being a little more materialistic we might not be now contending with the Great Pacific Garbage Patch or space junk. I want no part with parting so quickly from one-use-life materials when a meaningful second life is possible.

So when a couple of people dear to my heart were clearly torn about parting with some favourite clothes of their loved ones who recently passed away — one within this year, the other within 18 months — I felt it too.

These bits of cloth are interwoven with the memory of the wearer, his style, the special occasions and the everyday. Just looking at them hanging in the back closet brought the son, the wife, to tears. Some of that emotion is also about feeling at odds with what to do with it all. Yet holding onto useless things, especially in this town where we're so squeezed for space we have to go outside our living spaces just to change our mind, can even bring on some shame or panic that we can't let go, move on.

I felt the potency of the pieces too, and suggested selecting a few items to be repurposed into something that would bring comfort, and in remembrance.
The first project this spring was the Great-Grandfather Quilt, for the first of the next generation who missed meeting his great-grandfather by 9 months. The second was Dad's Blanket, which lives on one of the two matching sofas where father and son watched the baseball in his last three years. The third is a lumbar-support cushion made from silk ties that's parked on his wife's favourite reading chair.

It takes a bit of faith to allow those blazers and sweaters, ties and dress shirts to leave their dark cupboards and be subjected to my fibre-art experiments but I'm grateful they did. It was a little unnerving, plunging wool blazers into a hot-water-wash and tumble-dry, or severing several silk neckties in one swipe of the rotary cutter, but that's the deal with making and innovating: sometimes you have to take a deep breath and boldly go, risking failure.
And there is definitely failure in all of this making. Design changes happen on the fly, dictated by odd dimensions of the pieces and unpredictable fabric behaviour. (It's a thing.) Trying to wrestle slippery bias-cut silk, unstable cashmere knit and coat-heavy woven wool into submission enough to lie flat together is a test of one's patience. The trick is to embrace imperfection and keep the big picture in mind. I think about the Gees Bend quilters I saw a few years ago at Granville Island and the gospel spiritual song two of them sang at the start of their talk, and I say a little prayer myself: God I hope this works.

The other challenge is creating works that resonate with the spirit of the original wearer, so it's not just a matter of chopping up the clothing into tiny unidentifiable pieces to be re-fabricated in a generic quilt. You don't want to be too literal either, appliquéing ties into a Ties Quilt or (creepier) using every last button and pocket or (horrors) just sewing all the clothes together into a blanket or something.

Binding the one blanket with necktie fabric and appliquéing the suit labels in one corner of an army blanket backing (for the man who served in the US Army) felt like the right balance.

I post each Remembrance Pieces project on Facebook to inspire other material girls and guys, and to pay my respects to the stuff of life and to those of this life no longer.
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Am I blue? Yes, and grey and silver too

3/29/2017

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“Your hair seems blue,” a friend noted over dinner.
It really is. I’ve joined the blue-rinse gang — emphasis on the blue. Denim blue is an unnatural hair hue that seems only natural now that I'm surrounded by heaps of old jeans and altering all those tones of denim. As usual, I’m not questioning why, but how: how to add some pleasing form to a traditional working fabric; how to infuse some lacy aspect into that utilitarian cloth.
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What I do see is that after four months exposed to the bright colours of urban Mexico and the glare of the garish new Trump era, I am thirsty for cool, serene tones and patterns of rain-soaked skies and coastal stones rolled smooth by the sea. I returned to discover that I am, in fact, attached to the world of hot-water bottles, mugs of tea and toasty quilts, the coziness against the cold.
 
Blue is my touchstone: something real and eternal to cling to in these uncertain, unfathomable times. I may be seduced by sun-baked yellow, spicy red, lethal lime green and sunset pink but my deep, serene dreams are all denim blue.

(For a sample of my 
blue-jean fabrications, check out my other site, Workwraps.weebly.com)

Below: Recent experiments with denim include dousing doilies in bleach and imprinting them on on jeans before cutting for quilts.
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Impression of two overlapping doilies on a pair of jeans.
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Detail of the lacy traces through the bleaching process.
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Samples of experiments with different dilutions of bleach, duration and fabrics.
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A roll of quilt binding made from three denim shirts.
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Big painting shift at little house on the prairie

9/19/2016

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PictureDay 12 painting: Embroidered details in a scene of a newly "thrashed" hay field.
I've just returned from a month in the big country of southwest Saskatchewan: big skies, big farming operations, big empty days that were all too much at the start of my artist residency at the Wallace Stegner House.

Suddenly agoraphobic, I pulled down all the blinds and paced around that lovely century-old house, wondering what on earth possessed me to throw myself into this imposing patchwork landscape. I am not a landscape painter; that's my dad's bag.

Plus I came by plane and an eight-hour car ride, so even if I did want to paint, I didn't have my usual large stretched canvases and totes of paints. I did bring a few of my usual travel essentials: embroidery hoops, needles and floss — and an old bed sheet. I knew there was just a couple of stores in town, and none would be selling art supplies so I packed a tiny travel set of liquid acrylics, a few brushes and a pad of mixed-media cardstock.

My sketchy plan involved, well, sketching with my father, who has spent some of every summer in this tiny town of Eastend ever since he filled the Stegner House with his landscape paintings 15 years ago.

We were quite a pair: me, not at all comfortable with the whole plein-air tradition, and him, increasingly unfamiliar with his life's work of painting that involved biking into the country to sketch then returning to his basement to paint in the heat of the day. (Actually we were mostly a trio, his wife acting as facilitator for whatever this was, supplying us with water bottles, sunhats, sketch pads and willow charcoal, and generally getting us on the road.)

We circled around this vague idea of mine as we circled around this dead-quiet, struggling little town every morning. But the awkwardness turned to anguish back at my studio as I undertook the tedious pursuit of finding some interest — or even the point — in painting puffy clouds and dun-coloured hills.

A week later and out of sheer frustration at my lack of landscape-painting prowess, I resorted to dropping diluted paint on a taut scrap of bedsheet in an embroidery hoop just to watch it bleed. I threw the first painted scrap away and did another, with a little more intention, then threw that away too. Within a couple of hours I figured out the right water-to-paint ratio to create a slightly controlled bloom with each stroke. A lot of other distracted behaviour (baking apple crisps, walking by the river, venting via text to my artist friends) meant that each additional stroke was added to a dried layer and by the end of the afternoon, a landscape was emerging on a miniature stretched canvas. That one I didn't throw out. But it was still a little hazy. That's when I thought about using my stash of embroidery floss for final line work. 

I sat in the cool of the front screened porch that evening and embroidered some more information onto the painting. It was a clumsy first effort but soon I was enjoying the daily practice of biking in the morning with my father, painting something inspired by the ride in the afternoon, then embroidering some details in the evening, inviting others to join me for stitching sessions on the front porch.

I did this every day until I had 12 little paintings, each a progression from the last. I saw them as blocks for a future quilt, which led to a well-attended culminating exhibit, "Scenes from a Quilted Landscape."

But now I'm viewing them as something beyond a quilt and beyond the horizon. I'm calling them Points of Interest: something to build on and build with.


As with all creative pursuits, forcing solutions is futile. My original idea of coaxing my father back into his painting studio by getting him to share some of his process with me was a non-starter. These days he finds everyday joy in the moment, whether that is spotting a hawk while biking the backroads, playing a languid rendition of The Girl from Ipanema on piano in the hot afternoons, or watching the town's many cats on the prowl from the front porch of the Stegner House while his wife and I embroidered the summer evenings away.

I'm not sure if he knew it but he passed on to me the most valuable lesson for painting a scene: You have to actually see it.


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My first effort: a clunky rendition of the Wallace Stegner House
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Day 2: Black bridge behind the Stegner House, in black stitches
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Day 3: Fun with architectural detail and embroidered lettering
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Day 4: Sky and hills and embroidered sunflowers facing the morning sun
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Day 5: Our hangout: coffee shop and pottery studio, surrounded by gardens
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Day 6: The silty back roads, llike biking on velvet. (Wheel-seizing "gumbo" when wet)
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Day 7: Embroidery showing the flight path of a hostile hawk
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Day 8: Big skies and tiny grain elevator
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Day 9: Old Beaver Lumber building in the nearby almost-ghost town
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Day 10: The observatory, in some of the darkest skies in Canada
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Day 11: "The Town of Eastend" rock formation in the hills, in embroidery

Slide-showing the process:

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Mammoth social sculpture going up at Draw Down event

6/5/2015

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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.
PictureEarly 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.)

PictureThe 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.

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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.


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3 artworks a day for 5 days -- and an extra challenge

2/20/2015

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Vancouver artist Connie Sabo threw the current Facebook challenge (three artworks a day for five days) to me this week. I'm taking on the challenge for the chance to create three art experimentations per day, as opposed to sharing three artworks on each of those five days. Because there's nothing like a daily deadline of three new works to eliminate my usual obsessiveness and overworking, while pushing in new directions. I call it Fun with Failure.

And just to ensure there will be no preciousness in the program I added another element to my personal challenge: none of the materials used may be new.  I'm using stuff that's already had a first use.

Here then is Day 1 of my Nothing New 3 Artworks in 5 days mission. The rest will be posted on Facebook for the next four days, culminating in a look at the outcomes of the challenge next Friday in this space.
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Coffee bag collage, 1 coffee bag, gluestick, paper, 12" x 12" (Carlyn Yandle photo)
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Typography cluster, discarded magazines, gluestick on paper, 12" x 12" (Carlyn Yandle photo)
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Paint-chip block, paint chips, gluestick on paper, 12" x 12" (Carlyn Yandle photo)
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Shab-fab granny squares cover it all

1/16/2015

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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. 

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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. 



PictureOne 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. 

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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').

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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.



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Art student's off-grid heater would make quite the gift

12/19/2014

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Dear Santa,

I know I haven't written since I was a kid, and when it comes to wants, I'm pretty much good. Unlike a lot of my neighbours who rent homes that are slated for demolition in the coming year or who have to hit the food bank at the end of every month when the money runs out, I'm safe and secure — for now.

You see, I'm a bit of a prepper. I worry about the security of all our food and the hikes in cost of living in the era of climate change so I've been doing workarounds for a lot of that. I have a kitchen garden and my main way of getting around is by bike. My work- and social life surrounds making, mostly with materials that have already served their primary purpose. If the power grid or the banks fail, I can at least charge up my bike lights and headlamps with my Biolite camp stove, using bits of cardboard and twigs so I can get out there and be of some use. My one weak spot, though, is heat. Condos with wood-burning fireplaces being a rarity in these parts, I would have no choice but to go outdoors and hang by the bonfires in the streets. 
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But now I see there is the Egloo, a table-top terracotta dome-thing that can throw off 70C degrees of radiant heat using just a few votive candles. Pant! Pant!

It's the brainchild of Marco Zagaria, a student at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome. Trouble is, it's not quite available yet. Zagaria has been hand-making the prototypes on a potter's wheel (promo video below) and is currently crowd-sourcing funding — already surpassing his goal by 15 per cent at the time of this writing — to have them mass-produced. So here's where you come in, Santa. I don't know if I can wait, what with us all teetering on this edge of the Ring of Fire and seismologists referring to the imminent major earthquake as The Big One. I figure if you can squeeze your girth into a gas fireplace exhaust vent you can put an Egloo under my tree pronto. 

However, as is my nature, I am prepped for the disaster of that not happening as well, so I've sourced some of Zagaria's own research and have latched onto a snippet of his virtual collaboration that he tagged as one of his YouTube 'favorites', a simple arrangement of one clay plot bolted inside another, resting on some thin cinderblocks. (See YouTube clip, at bottom.) It ain't pretty, but it will do the job in a pinch and uses stuff in my immediate vicinity.

Just goes to show, it takes a creative like that Italian art student to arrive at that balance between form and function that marks brilliant industrial design, which begets attraction which begets demand which begets profit motive which begets financial backing which begets wide-scale production which begets marketing to preppers like me. 

What am I saying? — you're Santa. Surely you know all about the value of artists in economics and sustainability innovations. 

Wishfully,
Carlyn


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Inspiration from those who make it, through Crassmas

12/12/2014

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It's not too late to say, Nay! I will not be coerced into this coming two-week commercial frenzy. I will steer my little ship into calmer waters! 

Instead of joining the throngs of harried consumers grabbing up plastic chocolate-pooping reindeer and ironic acrylic Christmas sweaters it's possible to turn all this Excessmas into Makemas — not to make gifts necessarily but just to make for the sake of it.
PictureEriksson's home-baked sculpture earns her a TV interview on God Morgen Norge.
Seasonal materials — gingerbread, sugar, snow and ice, fir boughs, candy, lights — get makers going. What starts with a simple plan to make, say, a gingerbread house, can develop into astonishing works.

Norwegian maker Caroline Eriksson took it to new heights last year when she devoted a week and a half of full-time making to compose this Optimus Prime (which really should have been called Insulin Prime). There are 700-800 pieces in this Pepperkokemann — which sounds really funny when you say it out loud. (via gizmodo) It's nerdy but there's something in all that cookie dough that evokes a delicious back story about a sweet gingerbread house that breaks out to lead the Autobot rebellion.

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Jacking up this surrealist season is Toronto fashion shock-rockers Dean and Dan Caten(acci) of DSquared2, who created these spike-heel ice skates a couple of seasons back.

I remain captivated by this very-Canadian wearable sculpture that the makers had the nerve to put into a product line, further blurring the line between surrealism and consumption. The power it has to create so much scorn says something about a culture immersed in acquisition over contemplation of an object. Adding to the cultural weight of this object is in the potential for performance art by the user.

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Austen, Texas artist Emily Blincoe packs a weighty punch into the empty calories of her Color Coded: Sugar Series.

A surprising recategorization of common objects or materials invites a re-think about those objects. A glut of candy organized by colour draws the viewer's attention into issues like marketing, excess, presentation. consumption and value. This fetishistic display of tooth-rotting, diabetic-seizure-inducing "food" endures as long as the no-expiration dates.

But when it's all too much (as Glaswegian Granny used to declare, on surveying the freshly unwrapped loot), we makers head for the woods. Or the beach — anywhere you won't hear the Chipmunks or Michael Buble or Mariah Carey droning seasonal mall music.

PictureA snowball installation speaks the language of textile art. (from cecageorgieva.blogspot.ca)
Making is also meditative.

Textile artist Ceca Georgieva, of Sophia, Bulgaria, works in the natural world, creating time-intensive land art pieces. This snowball installation exudes quietude and fragility, created through a repetitive process that evokes the kind of attention and meditation involved in textile art.


The impermanence of the piece, the precarious balance makes it an intriguing moment in time. Soon it will all blow over and we can start anew.


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Is Instagram a godsend for artists, a social drug, or worse?

11/14/2014

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I've been giving Instagram a lot of thought. And I've concluded that I'm exhausted.
Picture(Photo by Carlyn Yandle)
I realize that Instagam can turn a small-town lady with a crafty idea into an international business success story, but that's quickly eclipsed by thoughts of more insidious, multinational business antics: top-level consumer marketers who court those Grammars' "Insta-fluence": Nike, Holiday Inn, Burberry. (More at this New York Times article.)

I think about how encouraging it is to have people following you in your creative endeavours, but then I think about the shared similarities among the top social-media savvy "micro-celebrities", our exploding narcissistic culture and the easy-pickins' exploitation for big-brand profit and almost-free fame.

I realize that Instagram can open a door for artists to the big wide sharing world and that by refusing to open that door runs the risk of a lifetime of professional obscurity. Indeed, "Instagram is custom made for the art world," says New York Observer opinion-writer/billionaire financier/art collector Adam Lindemann. But he then adds: "You get a quick flash of an image with virtually no text or explanation. There’s no need to read. It’s perfect for people with zero attention span, zero education and zero interest in learning about anything—perfect, in other words, for the art collectors of today. You could go so far as to say that the successful art of this current generation must be Instagramable to succeed, and if it doesn’t look good on Instagram, it ain’t working in this instant-gratification art world: goldfish have longer attention spans than ‘grammers."

Picture(Photo by Ariel Zambelich/WIRED)
I  realize that it's free and with the help of such apps as Latergram, it's possible to keep the phone-pecking at a daily minimum, but I can't help thinking about these guys: the Instagram and Facebook engineers who recently moved all Instagram photos to Facebook's data centre, without any users the wiser, as reported by Wired. 

I realize that this is a wee worried whisper in the hell-yeah storm of 200 million mostly female, mostly under-35 Instagrammers.  And I realize that I may be overthinking the whole thing. I could be expanding my visual horizons, connecting with artists around the world, but instead I'm fixated on what becomes of the millions of bits of personal information being sucked into that data centre in Forest City, North Carolina (as suggested in the Wired article) every day, and how that data has been used and how it will be, soon enough.

PictureA slideshow still from How the NSA Almost Killed the Internet (wired.com)
Last year the FBI and the National Security Agency were handed over the ability to suck up people's photos, videos, emails and documents, after the largest businesses online allowed the agencies access to their servers. According to a ground-shaking Washington Post article last year, "The National Security Agency is harvesting hundreds of millions of contact lists from personal e-mail and instant messaging accounts around the world, many of them belonging to Americans, according to senior intelligence officials and top-secret documents provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden."

I think about Instagram and I think about what's monitored, what's censored (no pubes!), what's the next app to eclipse Instagram's success (Snapchat or Bolt?).  I think about how all these social media apps contribute to the time-sucking attention to that little gadget that is now as much a part of the restaurant table as the cutlery and that has turned a busload of riders into something resembling group prayer. I think about how Rogers is a dealer, getting rich on its users' increasing dependency on data, more data.

Am I overthinking Instagram and the rest of the global social re-wiring? Yes, but I might not be thinking about it enough either.

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public art exposed: a peek behind the scenes at new show

8/29/2014

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It's one thing to dream up an idea for the back end of the elevated Canada Line track and quite another to see that dream come together in a mammoth aluminum sculpture.
PictureMetal fabrication at the Select Steel shop, Delta. Carlyn Yandle photo
So when I got my first glimpse of the progress of Cluster at the metal fabricators this week, the piercing clang and whine of the shop suddenly seemed to give way to the theme from 2001: A Space Odyssey. 

Whoa.

It was exactly as I had imagined it, except for the immensity. That something so voluminous could come out of a bundle of bubble tea straws was sort of short-circuiting my brain.

Well?, their faces seemed to ask.

"It's... very... big," I said, immediately thankful their earplugs spared them from hearing the bleeding obvious. 

PictureCluster concept sketch (image by Carlyn Yandle)
Of course, no one sees these moments of shock, nor all the anxiety, revelation, frustration, obsession typical of the emotional swings that go into the creation of public artwork. When Cluster is hoisted into position next month, its narrative will be in the eye of the beholder, its entirety read in an instant.

But a new Richmond Art Gallery exhibit (opening next Friday evening, Sept. 5) is pulling back the curtain on the process behind five public artworks that dot the city, in its City As Site show, curated by RAG director Rachel Lafo. Here is where visitors will see evidence of the beginning of the ideas that were pitched, developed, reworked, and finally translated into forms for public placement. Combined with that focus is a survey of all artwork in the local public sphere that is defining Richmond as not just another clutter of condos but a specific space in a particular time.

PictureMetal fabricator Jordan Thys at work. (Carlyn Yandle photo)
For me, laying bare some of my half-baked early concepts and awkward sketches that led to the development of Cluster (as well as the Crossover crosswalk design) is slightly uncomfortable but this is a warts-and-all display. Not shown is the high level of trust that must exist for any collaborative project to succeed: trust in one's own ideas, the physical properties of the materials, the skill and temperment of  fabricators, the foresight of structural engineers, and the patience of the commissioning bodies. Public art projects come with the headache-y package of  issues of insurance, permits, budgets, timelines and many unforseeables. In short, it's much more than a good idea.

Embedded in those physical projects is the intangible quality of faith. Cluster isn't done yet, but I have faith that it will soon be a thing in the manufactured landscape that will spark conversation, which will connect people and by extension contribute toward a unique, vibrant community and cultural hub.

Fingers crossed anyway.



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