carlyn yandle
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Home isn't someone else's investment unit

9/17/2024

 
New modular building blocks create a visual for more humane density
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I blame my dream-home fantasies on that OG influencer Martha Stewart.
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When the thick, slick Martha Stewart Living was queen of the magazine racks I was there for the Crafts: the rustic doorstop animals made of French linen tea towels; the velvet lavender sachets for drawers and for gifts. Soon I was sucked into the glossy paper vortex of step-by-step tableaux of Martha — in cropped jeans and crisp Oxford shirt — engaged in various Good Things like washing her paned windows using vinegar from a glass sprayer or sweeping her freshly-painted porch with a birch-twig broom. I was led to believe that people who weren’t already trained pastry chefs or architects could create the Halloween gingerbread haunted mansion, and that one day I too would have a fireplace mantle to display handmade snowglobes nestled between mason jars of glittered cedar boughs dangling with tiny crocheted snowflakes. Never mind that my wreath of pinecones tied with tartan ribbon and tacked to my apartment door wasn’t adding any rustic Christmas vibes to the purple-and-teal common hallways. This was all temporary.
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By the time Martha finished doing her five months for fraud, I was half way through 20 years in the same apartment, engaged in the more practical project of trying to live a creative life in a small space (sprawling in comparison to the majority of new builds in Vancouver). I ended up writing a weekly newspaper column on the subject and even partnered in a home re-vamp service that funded four years of art school. Dwelling design remains one of my Special Topics so when I heard first thing this morning (at the time of this writing) that the provincial government had released some free modular plans for small-scale multi-unit housing, I jumped onto the site for a look-see.
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Streetscape concept of multi-unit integration with single-family homes, Standardized Housing Catalogue, BC Ministry of Housing
Because when it comes to affordable housing in this town, things can’t get worse (barring, of course, the imminent earthquake a.k.a. “The Big One”). According to one report, last year Vancouver’s median home price was more than 12 times the median household income, making it the third most expensive housing market in 94 cities around the world. Many of the investment units in Vancouver’s soaring glass towers are now languishing on the market, because even if they were affordable, “home” does not conjure up visions of 35 floors of stacked 500-square-foot rectangles with one wall for windows and no outdoor space.
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The customizable building blocks are an attempt to provide an option to this modern-day warehousing of humans, a step toward addressing the missing middle between standalone houses and condo towers. They were developed following recent zoning changes that allow three or four units on the standard city lot, to the horrors of NIMBY owners in those single-family-home neighbourhoods and to cheers from developers. To curb design and construction costs and expedite the permitting process, the limited options of modular blocks are basic. One shows two bedrooms with a shared bathroom. The common-area block shows a surface that is both dining table and kitchen island with sink, with the rest of the kitchen along one wall. No balconies are indicated and there are not a lot of windows. Every unit shows stairs.
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Placement options on various lot sizes, from the Standardized Housing Catalogue, BC Ministry of Housing
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Common space options, Standardized Housing Catalogue, BC Ministry of Housing
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Multi-family dwellings on a standard city lot, Standardized Housing Catalogue
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On the upside, they are connected to the earth and integrate into established communities. They open up the possibility of having a baby, aging in place, living with or beside other relatives or families of choice. They are the kind of home that might incline a crafty type to collect pinecones from the mature trees in those longstanding neighbourhoods and glue-gun a wreath to hang on the front door. 
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It’s a Good Thing.

VIDEO tour: 'Joyful Making in Perilous Times'

4/21/2021

 
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Click HERE for a 10-minute journey through the methods and motivations behind this MFA thesis. (Film made by Ana Valine, Rodeo Queen Pictures, August 2020)

We're taking on capitalist forces, one stitch at a time

8/30/2019

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Back when I was still transitioning from workaday newspaper editor to mainly work-for-free artist I applied for a Nexus card.
"Whaddaya you do for a living?" asks the clerk in her American drawl, without looking at me.
When I get this question I always wish there was an easy answer, some simple keystroke like in the relationship status options on Facebook.

"It's complicated," I say. She sighs.

I start in about how I was a journalist but then quit to go into full-time Fine Arts studies, then after graduation I got a studio and am now developing an art practice and doing work for upcoming projects... and stop as her eyes fall to half-mast. We go back and forth for a while like this when she announces: "I'm gonna put you down as housewife."
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Even though I've always been self-supporting I decide not to waste my breath defending my non-conforming life choices. But really, I'm using the best skills I have to be a contributing member of society and I'm grateful to be a part of the ever-expanding, borderless community of crafters, craftivists and visual artists, all connected beyond language by hand-making for peace of mind and social, political connection.
Craft creates wellness, it brings humanity during turbulent times, it breaks down hierarchies and is the connecting thread between those who make for personal, tactile pleasure or for use and those who make art for art's sake. Craft is as at home in the home as it is on Etsy or in the white-cube gallery. It has footholds in ancient practices and the avant-garde. It complicates categorization and won't be fenced in (or out).
One of my pieces is currently at home among the works of 20 spinners, weavers, felters, quilters, garment designers, knitters, rug-hookers and others in a current Gulf Island fibre-arts show. Some of those sharing their work self-identify as artists and some as specific kind of makers but all of our pieces hang together in conversation, sparking more conversation and more ideas among visitors.

This exhibition is another reminder that craft is embedded in deeply-personal making activity, the tactility of the culturally-rich materials and the creative communities we live in.
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Making and their makers form an essential humanizing force more encompassing and enduring than even advanced capitalism but there's no way to show that value on a Nexus form.
I reject that line of questioning. And I am not married to a house. 
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'Foundlings': Kids' works of terrible beauty

7/2/2019

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Clockwise from top left: "This Little Lump", Sylva and Shyla; "Garbage Catcher", Coco; "Little Worker", Kahlio, Basha and Ari.
Everyone is feeling that relentless creep of plastic that is threatening to consume us, the consumers. I felt myself drowning in the tsunami of stuff over this past year of grad studies at Emily Carr University. Art, as one instructor stated, is a wasteful business. 

Even as I retreated back to my green, pristine Gulf Island I was hit with it at the end of the long drive through forest to the local dump: a mountain of garbage. This, from a small off-grid community known for its environmental consciousness. 

My art practice is driven by a need to physically grapple with the unfathomable when words are not enough. In the strange way that an idea for an artwork takes hold, that sight of that mountain of petroleum-derived recycling-rejects led to my latest project: Foundlings.

For a while I’d been trying to land on a low-barrier, low-skill technique that could involve kids in the making of objects from found, non-recyclable and non-biodegradable materials. Then I landed on the work of late American sculptor Judith Scott, whose many exhibitions of her curious bound and woven fiber/found objects have led to discourse on “outsider” art, disability (she was profoundly deaf, non-verbal, and had severe Down’s Syndrome), intention, new sculpture forms and the privileged art world. 

Within a month of escaping the art institution I was driving a pickup-truckload of colourful non-recyclable, non-biodegradable bits from the home-grown garbage mountain to the island’s only elementary school.

Before we got to the making part I sat down with the students and shared some images of Scott’s work for inspiration. We talked about how this artist’s method of wrapping, binding and weaving fibre around objects adds curiosity to what is on the inside. We talked about how working with familiar objects and materials in unusual ways can lead to new ideas. And we talked about how an object can be terrible and beautiful at the same time, does not have to be a recognizable thing nor have utility.
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‘Curated’ materials gleaned from the island’s dump.
We worked over time on the pieces, some kids on their own and some in groups of two or three, adding even more fibre and found plastic detritus from their year-end trip to the local provincial marine park. On the final day of school I arrived to pick up the final pieces and was astounded at the creations. They were richly textured, humorous and foreboding, and proof of why I collaborate with children: they consistently demonstrate the importance of letting hands and imaginations fly.
They each titled their pieces in their own hand and I installed them for exhibit on forest plinths (moss-covered stumps from the last big clearcut) in time for the annual Arts Fest. With no chance they’ll degrade in the weather they remain there, pretty and pretty disturbing: our inescapable stuff.
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Kids assembling the armatures of their pieces in the first phase of the Foundlings project.
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Part of the Foundlings project, installed in a Gulf Island forest.
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Snow Pillow, by Mikiko
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Attraction, repulsion wrapped up in one sculpture project

6/5/2019

 
At first I thought all this must still be debris from the Japan tsunami. But that was eight years ago and the surf in my remote neck of the woods keeps throwing up snarls of monofilament netting, plastic shards, nylon rope, bits of fibreglass hulls, and styrofoam. So much styrofoam.

I’ve been collecting up the stuff, inspired by this Gulf island’s own Styrophobe who’s taken on what some would say is a Sisyphean task of removing even the tiny beads of polystyrene from the clefts of rock along the shoreline.

My gathering is a tiny, maybe even futile, gesture but I’m giving form to the invisible: the bits and pieces we overlook on the foreshore or in the forest that, when lashed, bound, and woven together demand attention. These small but critical masses of debris are inspired by the found-material sculptures of Judith Scott. As I lash, bind, and weave I think of how the kids in my life would like to be in on this: hunting for material, making form from their hands and imaginations.
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Inspired by the sculptures by Judith Scott, this mass is texturally rich with culturally-embedded petroleum-derived materials.
My gathering requires connecting with others to access materials. The Styrophobe, who’s also the guy in charge of the local dump, stands on the top of the garbage mountain, holding up uncertain objects for my consideration: How’s this? This stuff looks pretty good. Could you use this?

In 15 minutes I fill the back of the pickup truck with a curated collection of colourful plastic throwaways: pool noodles, watering cans, yards of orange fencing, jerrycans, twine, tape, cleaning-pad refill boxes, five-gallon buckets and lids. I fill up with purple things, red things, plastics in acid green, electric blue, hazard yellow, and caution orange — all the colours of the petrochemical rainbow.
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A fan of the local Styrophobe is overwhelmed by the throwaway plastic in this garbage mountain in the forest.
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A curated collection of non-biodegrable recycling rejects fills a pickup truck.
After a lot of material prep (cutting off snags and sharp bits, wiping and washing off surface debris), I haul it to the local school where the kids, teacher and I dive in and play with the unwanted stuff. We have plans and we don’t have a plan, which is the right place to be with material exploration. This is where we learn to work with each material and not against its inherent nature, a great reminder of the futility of forcing solutions. This is where we learn to follow our hands, to work on our own or collectively over days and not minutes, to consider colour, form, and techniques for putting it all together, to create something that resonates with this time and place out of nothing anybody wanted.

It’s an important start for the generation that will be forced to deal with this legacy of stuff long after the plastic-agers die off.
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Kids take to the colourful cast-offs during Day One of a sculpture workshop.
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My needling starts with a need to build community

11/10/2018

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The other day I did this because it really needed to happen. All that gleaming new-campus architecture, surrounded by other gleaming buildings and gleaming buildings yet-to-come was begging for a little fuzzying up.

I did my undergrad at the old Emily Carr University of Art and Design campus which was decidedly less smooth and metallic and more crafty, situated as it was in the Granville Island artisan mecca on the ocean's edge. I liked running my hand along the old wooden posts carved with decades of scrawled text, and all the wiring and ductwork that in the last few years looked like a set out of Brazil. I miss the giant murals on the cement factory silos next door and the funky houseboats and the food stalls in the public market and Opus Art Supplies 30 feet away from the front entrance.

The new serene, clean Emily Carr building is surrounded by new and planned condos that most students could never afford, high-tech companies and, soon, an elevated rapid transit rail line. As much as I wanted to return for graduate studies, I was not convinced that I would be a good fit here, so asking for permission and access to the sign was a bit of a trial balloon for me. I got quick and full support for the idea and its installation, and now see this new white space as a blank canvas, ready for the next era of student artistic expression.

This is my first solo yarn-bombing foray. A bunch of us attacked the old school back in the day for a textile-themed student show but I have yet to meet my people here. So the Emily Carr Cozy is not just a balloon, it's a flare. Is there anybody out there?

As I busied my freezing fingers with the stringy stuff (in hard hat, on the Skyjack operated by design tech services maestro Brian) I kept an ear out for reaction. And it was good. Sharing the fuzzy intervention on social media (#craftivism, #subversivestitch etc.) reminds me that I am not alone in my need for needling authority. Indeed, this public performance includes behind-the-scenes connecting with my community of makers to collect their leftover yarn and thrift-store finds even before the main act. (You know who you are.)

Textile interventions in the public sphere have a way of provoking polarizing responses. Some love the often-chaotic hand-wrapping of colourful fiber; others view the crafty messing with architecture with disdain of all things cozy and crafty and engendered female. I liked the idea of having to wear a hard hat and working for four hours in a Skyjack, in the mode of construction workers in the immediate vicinity of my rapidly changing hometown, to complete my knitting job.


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The reverse side of the Emily Carr Cozy, seen only from the interior of the school, is like the work behind the scenes in my making: chaotic, improvisational and maybe more interesting than the public side. (Carlyn Yandle photo)
A visual of the process, below. (All photos by Caitlin Eakins)
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    Cross-posted at
    carlynyandle.substack.com

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