creative process - carlyn yandle

Innovation can be a risky business

1/16/2014

Coming up with new ideas is not without its hazards. The world-renowned Noma restaurant is a case in point. Chef-patron Rene Redzepi uses what grows in the area, innovating astounding food creations famously foraged from the local land and sea. Sometimes the magic works; sometimes it doesn't. He's even admitted to his own spontaneous bowel reactions to his experiments.

Mountains of Christmas lights headed for the grinder in Shijiao, China (Atlantic Magazine)

One outfit in the southern Chinese town of Shijiao has innovated a low-tech method for squeezing a livelihood out of the great bulk of broken Christmas lights. Making use of the empty shipping containers returning to the global export hub and North Americans' addiction to buying cheap throwaways, the strings are thrown into a grinder, then shovelled into a water bath that separates the heavier metal wire fragments from the plastic insulator bits. The metals are eventually separated into reusable copper and other metals, and the plastic is used in slipper soles. (Check out the fascinating video.)

Granted, there are problems, like the possibility of lead in the plastic that ends up cozying up to the soles of feet and the spewing pollution from copper processing.

That necessity to make a living is one mother of invention, a prime example of the hard birth of a global leader in innovation.

Baled copper. Carlyn Yandle photo

Considering the glut of stuff and our continued rampant consumerism, it's becoming unconscionable to me to use materials that are not either post-market or readily re-usable. That's easy to face down in the making of sculptural objects. I find inspiration through foraging in my own environment, where culturally-weighty artifacts from spider-webby doilies to crushed copper play with concept.

But I'm stymied when it comes to painting. I love the exploration but can't stand the materials. I rely on petroleum-based paints and resins, first-use softwood stretchers, brushes and canvasses. Acrylic paints allow me to do the layering I can't achieve in oils, creating that fine line between the handmade and digital.

Untitled, 2013, Distract series, acrylic on canvas, 24" x 30" on panel.

I feel it all coming to a head: Am I willing to lay down the paintbrush to reduce my own carbon footprint? Not quite.

But I am taking a few baby steps. I've been experimenting with composing larger paintings out of my painting studies, to incorporate the patterns of both the painted surface and the piecing, not unlike a quilt made up of well-chosen materials that have outlived their original purpose.

It may just be that necessity to reduce my consumption that pushes me into innovating in painting. Like other innovations, there will be failures and disasters. Somewhere in there is a new way to approach painting.

Making merry makes the maker

12/20/2013

The Crassmas season is one big distraction to me. But once I remind myself that a gift does not have to be a solution to someone's problem but a simple, seasonal gesture, I embrace the chance to make, and make it merry.

The place is a happy mess. Wool strands are stuck to my glue gun nozzle, my slippers are splattered with spraypaint. Black plugs of leather from my new punch tool are lodged in my laptop keyboard and tiny glass beads have rolled into every corner of the apartment.

There is some method in all this mad, frivolous playing and decorating, but I only see the playing with ideas after the fact.

Turns out my spontaneously created (ie. still in pajamas) 'copper pipe' wreath (sliced wrapping paper rolls and copper spraypaint) was a practical exercise in understanding patterns of circles within circles — the focus of a major project next year.

Glass-bead snowflakes, a dark-weeknight distraction, was a lesson in math ( a five-inch-diameter object requires a five-foot strand of beaded wire) and an experiment in creating area and density from line.

Crocheting chunky-wool slipper booties had its own lesson in scale; in this case, what looks cute in a kiddie size looks hideous in an adult version. (Breathe easy, teenagers.)

The gingerbread A-frame cabins involved more industrial design than I anticipated and more geometry than I normally like to endure but was essential for gaining the most area out of four cookie-sheet squares of dough. The possibility that math can be fun is matched by my new-found fascination of some basic chemistry that reveals the power of heat to turn granular sugar into glass, and the power of water as the only solution for pots cemented with rock-hard sugar syrup.

I can't rationalize the pounds of candy and icing sugar I bought for the four kids to decorate the gingerbread camp. That I would ever indulge in that sort of seasonal folly is a freakin' Christmas miracle.

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.

A potent show of Fabric unfolds at the Vancouver Art Gallery

10/11/2013

Kimsooja with curator Daina Augaitis

Internationally renowned artist Kimsooja was verklempt at the opening reception for her show, Unfolding, at the Vancouver Art Gallery Thursday.

Her audience would soon feel that emotion unfolding as the soft-spoken artist led a tour of the new exhibit that runs to Jan. 26.

Revisiting some 30 years of her deeply personal works, with her son and other close family and friends in attendance, was clearly overwhelming for the Korean-born New York artist , who recently wrapped up another wrapping at the Venice Biennale.

'Overwhelming' is a good descriptor for the show, too.

Bright, satiny boulder-like mounds presented in the Bottari tradition of wrapping gifts in colourful fabrics contain material scraps the artist retrieved from the Tsunami-struck region of Japan.

Visitors feel the unfolding of a singular vulnerability in a cavernous room as simultaneous video screenings reveal the artist standing still in a crowded street in various urban corners of the Earth.

The mix of rusty, worn mechanical objects and brilliant satin fabrics is a visual feast.

Another room featuring truck overloaded with a heap of colours evokes displacement or an unwieldy migration.

This retrospective is a reminder of the potency of found fabric, a culturally embedded material that can be a medium for painting or sculpture, often at the same time, as Kimsooja does so powerfully.

The artist raises those stakes by making material a metaphor for the wrapping and unwrapping, the enfolding, the unfolding, the concealing and exposing that resonates long after leaving the gallery.

A performance of Kimsooja's A Beggar Woman (see video clip, below) is set for Nov. 29 as part of Fuse.

Waiting to be inspired by hoardy pile of plastic

3/1/2013

My not-quite-resolved plastic quilty test.

I’ve been left high and dry, marooned by a foul waste stream — a particular category of non-recycled stuff that ends up in Vancouver’s landfill.

This category consists of many boxes of rigid-plastic toy bits that my nephews leave in their wake of play. I nabbed the lot a couple of years back because I loved their indeterminate shapes, their hot colours, their embedded culture. The big plan was to turn these remnants of their childhood into a scrap-quilty, uh, thing. I never really did have a sharp objective for the objects.

But that was before I embarked on my Great Leap Forward Toward More Space campaign in January. Now the toy detritus is the last of my hoardy habit left to face down.

I’ve done the math and have realized that the number of hours required to explore and execute the various art projects that involve all these bits encroaching on my living space probably exceeds my estimated lifespan. But I have another reason for not wanting to part with the toy parts: no one accepts them for recycling in these parts, as dude at the Recycling Hotline (604-732-9253) informed me. All non-numbered rigid plastic junk is just chucked into the landfill where they will stay intact pretty much forever.

Photo of artist/designer Adrian Draigo from www.draigo.com.

There is another option, he said; I could drive the stuff to a monthly drop-off location in another community set up by Pacific Mobile Depots, pay $7 per big bag to take it all away for use in some plastic-lumber business down the road, or I can pay $30 to arrange a pick-up. It’s a service that is probably used by a tiny minority of households —a tiny drop of effort in the plastic tsunami.

Meanwhile, the quandary is major: Until our governing bodies stop acting like whipping boys to the global petroleum industry and start regulating against the sale of non-recyclable plastic products, we’re all left to either try to make use of the stuff that’s piling up around us or stuff it into the earth.

Many designers have put the glut of a particular waste stream to good use, creating ingenious upcycled products. London-based artist Adrian Draigo, for example, creates lighting using bottle caps — another plastic reject from most recycling programs — and LED lights. The low-energy, ambient 'Glo' light can be hung anywhere, literally highlighting the issue of this ubiquitous waste product.

It’s a new spin on the old ‘necessity is the mother of invention’ axiom, except the need that drives this innovation is not in the resulting use-object but in reducing garbage. The key to this — and every —upcycling project is creating an object that people want, otherwise it’s just waste transformed.

My urge to use the throwaways falls more within the need to visually express short-sighted (at best) and greed-driven (more likely) global production-consumption actions. The motivation to make my scrappy sculpture starts from medium and works toward idea rather than the other way around. This compulsion to dream up an idea in order to make use of the bits feels overly opportunistic, and it's why I remain in option-paralysis over whether to keep it to maybe one day use it or let it all go. That's what happens when you're confronted by this plastic problem.

photo from www.core77.com

UK artist Stuart Haygarth made good use of what showed up in his environment with his iconic “Tide” chandelier. The suspended sphere is fabricated from the plastic that washed up on a particular stretch of the Kent coastline.

The work makes it impossible not to think of the giant garbage patches swirling around the planet.

For more on that staggering reality, hit this Ted Talk:

You can't keep a good maker down

2/1/2013

My mother might remember this: as a kid, I once declared that I could handle a stint in jail, because I would spend the time dressing up the place by making decorations out of any old bits and pieces.
Not a huge leap, as making something out of nothing was already my preferred activity within my own four walls, for hours at a time.

I scored stuff around the house and started fabricating, often without too much of a game plan. I recall a lot of painted papier-mache figurines made of plastic dishwashing liquid bottles, sock puppets from what may or may not have been orphan socks. This is around the first time I heard 'crepe' refer to fabric, and not just to 'paper', as in, "That was my good black crepe!"

Arntzen's models are a work of art themselves. (Photo courtesy of the artist)

I was — and still am — an opportunistic maker. I am inspired by whatever materials I come across, fabricating a lot of experiments, literally playing with ideas. In my world, that's not unusual. The other day a friend reflexively picked plastic bits from the alley while we walked. Another friend I met for coffee smiled in triumph as she held up a small battered bit of found metal, an inevitable component of a future encaustic painting.

Makers might dream of spacious studios or top-quality materials and tools to develop their concepts through doing, but a lack of all that won't keep the making from happening. In fact, restricted space and resources can lead to innovation, necessity being the mother of invention and all that.

I was reminded of this during the Eastside Culture Crawl back in November, while visiting Arnt Arntzen's steampunky workshop in Strathcona, a must-see stop for any passionate maker. Just a few weeks earlier, Arnt and artist-spouse Valerie Arntzen had just returned from six months in a small pied-a-terre in Amsterdam's city centre, so surely he wouldn't have a lot of new examples of his signature reclaimed-wood and metal furniture to show.

Yet there it was: a collection of what this famously humble industrial designer calls models for future furniture, created out of whatever he found around the city and a Leatherman pocket-sized multi-tool. They may have been modest macquettes to him, but to me they are exquisite, concrete proof that you can't keep a good maker down. Six months away from his workshop may have been hard for this hard-worker but the restriction also pushed him in another new direction, and the writing was on the walls: paintings that combine his passion for industrial design with pattern and abstraction.

Random sample of innovation with scant art materials and no tools but a lot of heart:

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.

Soundsuits required in my Heaven

4/12/2011

American fabric sculptor/performance artist Nick Cave parties with decor and the domestic to create his Soundsuits.

I'm fairly new at this. Not the writing part; I've been doing that for quite a while. It's this big scary exploration also known as Developing an Art Practice. Your hands might be busy but you spend a good deal of your mental energy wondering if you're not wasting your time (and money), if you've got any ability at all to innovate, to create, or even to endure all the self-doubts and circular thinking. Some days it hits like paralysis. A friend calls it being "on strike."

I've checked with some established artists and they say that it doesn't get easier. In fact, it often gets harder. How do you filter out the clutter of opinions and stay focused? How do you re-energize and rejuvenate? Do you stay on this path, or take it in a new direction? How do you — and why should you — stay true to your art form?

Sorry I asked.

Then something miraculous happens. Last week it was in the form of the Nick Cave exhibit at the Seattle Art Museum.

Here visitors are confronted with multiple galleries devoted to the hyper-coloured wearable assemblages of glittery appliques, grannie squares, day-glo faux fur, crocheted potholders, fake flowers, porcelain birds, beat-up toy tops and other improbable materials that form Cave's fantastic gaudy Soundsuits. They're like mardi gras costumes created by tea grannies on acid. The mash-up of culture-laden doilies and buttons, rhinestones, shaggy polkadots, braided rugs, beads, twigs and baskets were made even more joyful in the accompanying nightclub-ready videos on four massive screens devoted to the Soundsuits in hyper- and slow-mo action.

Cave is clearly committed to his process. Surely someone along the way must have said these Soundscapes would never sell, that spending his days combing thrift stores for crocheted afghans was a waste of time and stockpiling floral hooked rugs and embroidered cushion covers was just hoarding.

What did I learn? It's time to stop apologizing and get back to work.

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