Category:

When more is more

11/5/2025

I’ve learned to live with a head full of bees but these days it’s all about wasps.

So. Many. Wasps. Wasps that retreated indoors last week after the pest-control guy shot up the kitchen fan vent with a killer powder. Wasps that just wouldn’t stay away even after two pest-control guys came back to deal with the discovery of an impressive-sized nest metastasizing inside the wall. I spent most of the week whacking at wasps and sucking them up in the hand-held vacuum cleaner. Whacking and sucking, whacking and sucking.
It’s not the sight of a single curled-up carcass that gives me the willies; it’s the sheer volume of them. A ladybug on my forearm might prompt that little rhyme, Ladybug, ladybug, fly away home / Your house is on fire, your children are burned… Wait, what is that all about? My point is, if a cloud of ladybugs landed on my arm I would be screaming like Tippi Hedren in The Birds. Hitchcock knew all about the power of numbers to turn bird-friendly movie-goers into ornithophobes.

Poster art from the 1963 Hitchcock classic, “The Birds.”

A large mass of harmless insects doesn’t even need to touch me to get my skin crawling, like the summer when I watched my mother slap at a few flying ants on the window with her fly-swatter while behind her a black mass of hatchlings oozed out of a wood ceiling beam and swarmed the room. Even writing about that overabundance gives me the heebie-jeebies.
Large accumulations of a single object — animate or inanimate — cranks up the visual volume. Canadian artist-photographer Edward Burtynsky introduced viewers to the extreme-scale reality of global trade in Manufactured Landscapes from the first scene of some sewers bent over their machines in the Hongqingting Shoe Factory, Wenzhou, Zhejiang Province, China. There is no commentary as the camera slow-pans down the length of what emerges as a stadium-sized building full of several hundred workers, allowing us to fully grasp the enormity of this production. (And that was 20 years ago.)

Edward Burtynsky’s large-format photograph, Manufacturing #17, Deda Chicken Processing Plant, Dehui City, Jilin Province, China, 2005 via Public Delivery (https://publicdelivery.org/edward-burtynsky-china/)

But the power of increased scale, accumulation of objects and repetition of patterns isn’t always in service for horror; how or when to use that power comes into question whenever I’m developing new work. Is more more here? Or does repeating the unit or method dilute its essence, reducing the overall work to an underwhelming pattern? More importantly, is my interest in pumping up the volume in art just hoarding?

An accumulation of matchbooks is just a collection.

“Matchy Matchy”, an atypical presentation of an accumulation of matchbooks (left) and a three-hour painting-sketch of that collection (right). (Carlyn Yandle)

A benign single ‘log cabin’ hand-stitched quilt block.

The growth potential of “Hearth” (2020), hand-stitched log-cabin quilt blocks of different sizes, is limitless. (Carlyn Yandle)

When more is more: A large scale painting of an overabundance of layered squares aims to overwhelm in “PopUp: Triptych,” 2010, acrylic on panel, 96”Wx48”H

These are the busy-busy bees’ questions that mostly come at night when the wasps have gone to sleep, resting up to torment me another day.

Taking it Outside

5/1/2025

Escaping the dark world of scrolling the socials

“Take it outside” was a standard parenting directive back in the 1900s, shouted at the kids when pro-wrestling or trying to extricate a running shoe from the dog’s lock-jaw or whining for no reason. Taking it outside is harder to do if you live in an apartment tower but there’s no alternative if you’re a teenager hoping for a social life.

My old high school was surrounded by condo towers and mid-rise apartment buildings that are now being razed for higher towers. Hanging out indoors was not an option for many of my friends who lived in one-bedrooms with a single parent. Instead, we migrated from one friend’s building to another, buzzing intercoms to meet them in their lobbies and then go harass some other friend on shift at the Shoppers Drug Mart or hover in front of the fish-and-chips place to try to get the cute server to notice us. We mingled outside at the mini parks and the beach until we were old enough to get inside the clubs.

The club life is a dim memory but I am still compelled to take it outside. When the pandemic lockdown hit, I switched from working in an art studio to hand-stitching a large project on my porch. As the weather improved, I brought any old small thing to stitch to the neighbourhood park, two metres apart from others. That evolved into an improvisational mobile, outdoorsy art practice that begins with a piece of found linen, usually an old stained tablecloth that nobody wants.

Before heading outside I set the linen in the hoop then do a little table work, diluting paint with water and dropping it on the linen to watch the pigments spread through the taut fibres. Sometimes I sprinkle on more water or more undiluted pigment to saturate the colour or increase the bleed, or throw on some salt or soil or a slop of my coffee and observe those effects. I let that dry. I repeat all this in different sections of the linen, maybe including some of the tablecloth design or stitching, then decide which section could use some embroidery embellishments. I cut out that one preferred area, then choose a palette of embroidery floss. My mobile art practice is ready to go wherever I go.

Embroidery-painting essentials: one 8-inch hoop with ongoing linen project, small primary-colour paint set of liquid acrylics, a mechanical pencil, one small paint brush, fold-up scissors, a bag of a embroidery floss and two embroidery needles. (This art go-bag has passed airport security many times.)

Taking it outside the studio has become my way of working when travelling or during these months of long daylight hours. It is my summer work: some are working, some are not (har-har). No matter; it’s all just practice — practice in learning embroidery stitches (heather and blanket, french knot, woven rose), traditional sashiko patterns, and the personal and social histories of found linens. It is in learning mindfulness, by breaking the habit of scrolling through the socials or fixating on iPhone games and engaging with the world.

Inside is for the wintery work of queen-sized quilts and hooked rugs. For the next six months the art studio is simply a storage facility for the large-scale stretched painting canvases, fibre-art hangings, and the clutter of tubes of paint, rags and brushes. This is the season for shedding all that bulk, reducing this art practice to fit into a toiletries bag that lives in the daypack that I take on bike rides all over the city. I pull it out in ferry-passenger lounges, on long bus rides, at park picnics.

An evolving mobile, outdoorsy art practice confined by materials and method.

Inside is where all the screens are, the source of the unfathomable, dark news of the dismantling of democracy and political extortion. Outside is where all the social and political action is. That includes the global Mend in Public Day last Saturday, April 26, a Fashion Revolution creative action to resist the cycle of excess, through repair and reuse. This year in Vancouver, that was at the Main Street and East 21st Avenue plaza and Granville Island.

Time to find focus

1/4/2025

Depicting a distracted mind might not be helping

Disrupting the grid, upending predictable patterns. Acrylic on canvas, sewing pins, 24” x 24” (Carlyn Yandle)

If the person I share the bed with is to be believed, this morning (as of this writing) I announced in my sleep: “I’m sorry we’re going to martial law again.”

I have only a dim notion of what martial law entails. I’m also not sure if this ‘sorry’ is in the Canadian sense, as in “Sorry bus full” on the rush-hour B-Line that really means “Suck it up, buttercup.” Or is it regret that martial law is again here? In any event, I’m impressed that my id (if you’re a Freud follower) even has a notion of the word ‘sorry.’

I assumed this bit of sleep babble was a call to end this seasonal distraction or maybe our collective distractive state in general. I admit I am worried about my own eroding focus exacerbated by the commercially- and politically-corrupted internet. And I’m not alone; half of US adults are getting their newsbits on TikTok, part of the bombardment of unrelated snippets of (mis)information from maybe humans but increasingly AI.

Thoughts of doom-scrolling, pop-up ad windows, investment-building booms, Amazon fulfilment centres and faceless Cloud storage mega-facilities. Acrylic on canvas, 34” x 27” (Carlyn Yandle)

Over the years I have developed a near-obsessive way of working to evoke a seductive, unsettling visual field, somewhere between pretty and pretty distracting. This laborious process immerses the body in the subject while opening up time and space for the mind to consider some questions like: Are American reporters putting themselves in danger by exposing white supremacy groups? Is it safe to be trans in a small US town? Will women run the risk of more hate and harassment as the top trending phrases, “Your body, my choice” and “Get back to the kitchen” spread online? Is Canada the next alt-right nation? I’m concerned that as long as we’re preoccupied by our next Amazon orders to be fulfilled, or wasting hours killing foes in Call of Duty or dreaming of a career as an influencer, we’re not seeing some harsh political realities coming soon to a White House near you.

I wish I could be content to paint pastoral scenes or voluptuous florals that people would actually want hanging on their walls but this is where I’m at. I lose myself in this work of painting acrylic skins, slicing them into razor-sharp edges and right angles, then positioning them, layer after layer with tweezers and brayers, building and negating grids until my eyes start to cross and my back seizes up. And as the old song goes, I still haven't found what I'm looking for.

I’m starting to think that my martial-law proclamation is directed at my own obsessiveness and toward good orderly direction. We’re all going to need that kind of focus in 2025.

'The unknown' is a monster

12/14/2024

I'm betting its bite will be worse than its bark

Lately I’ve been asking anyone I come across: Is it just me or are we all sort of in a calm-before-the-storm, high-alert mode? So far, the score is 100-per-cent ‘Yes.’ Although in retrospect those affirmatives could mean, Yes you’ve asked me that already many times or Yes it is just you please let me pass.
My state of mind is somewhere between what former Village Voicejournalist/author Laurie Stone noted the night before this writing: “Everyone I know feels the edgy nothing” and satirist Samantha Bee’s last post: “Things are about to get fucking WILD.”

Anecdotal evidence through reading rational opinion reveals that countless numbers of engaged humans are not waiting to exhale but bracing for impact of the incoming turbulence in the Divided States of America — and beyond. The unknown is unnerving. It’s also intentional and we’ve seen it before:

Above: That other lying Donald, back in a 2002 press conference spreadingthe Big Lie that launched the catastrophic war in Iraq.

Living in the unknown has already taken its toll as seen during the global pandemic. Heightened fear and paranoia have morphed into the cultish desire for a strongman/daddy figure to fix it and us. And the geo-political trend shows no nation is immune.

To anyone prone to dismissing me by using the C-word (catastrophizing — what were you thinking?), consider this pre-emptive journalistic self-censoring under Trump 2.0: the two MSNBC “Morning Joe” hosts apologizing on air last week for possibly offending Fox News. (See “‘Morning Joe' Sorry David Frum Made Forbidden Joke About Fox News, Please Don't Hurt Them!”) To be clear, this is a left-leaning cable TV network obeying in advance by apologizing to “one of the most malevolent corporations in all of America, whose decades of lies, propaganda, and racist brainwashing are perhaps more responsible than any other single entity for America’s current slide into brain-damaged ethno-fascism,” in the words of the managing editor of Wonkette. Frum, a Canadian-American former Republican and speechwriter for George W. Bush then took issue with its apology in The Atlantic with the kicker: “It is a very ominous thing if our leading forums for discussion of public affairs are already feeling the chill of intimidation and responding with efforts to appease.”

Suffice it to say this is an early-warning signal that the way things are now won’t be the way things are after Jan. 6. But how to proceed until the big hammers come down on respected, fearless journalists and all the other perceived enemies? Is it more helpful to read Robert Reich’s latest, “How Trump could bring on a second civil war” or bingeing How to Become a Tyrant on Netflix? (True, there is no mention of the American meddling in the making of some of those dictators but the playbook tracks.)

I’ll think on that while I continue to do like the kids and live in the moment, channeling creative energy, even — or especially — the negative.

“The Unknown”, embroidered linen on hoop, 2021. Felt-pen drawing (inset) and words by young nephew Kaleb.

Tips for tired women

11/25/2024

From rolling your eyes to sinking in sawdust

Like a dream it was: A half-a-million-strong pink procession on Washington, a sea of singing, shouting, laughing people, surging forward in the shared pursuit of basic human rights, in their hometowns and around the world. There was hope in the organizing, joy in the making. The resistance was too fabulous to be ignored.

Memorializing the moment: Embroidered cartoon by Bob Krieger and Carlyn Yandle, 2017

Things are different in Trump 2.0. Social justice advocacy groups are stunned, fractured, unorganized. Those who led the last charge are feeling defeated and tired.

Screengrab of story in The New York Times

I’m running from the worst that this state of affairs can bring on: apathy. I’m so busy busy busy painting my studio floor, constructing a queen-sized quilt here, reorganizing rooms there, making so many plans! No space in this head for intrusive thoughts of how this is all going to shake out under the trifecta power of narcissistic, vengeful billionaires and Project 2025.

It is tiring work, all this busyness, but on the upside I get things done and sleep like a log. I realize it’s not sustainable. Luckily for me there’s a handy Globe Mini Mag for that.

Searching for answers from one of my Great Aunt Ivy’s many Mini Mags and Dell Purse Books.

After my Great Aunt Ivy died at a few months’ shy of 105 (and in her right mind until the end), I found some of her Mini Mags and Dell Purse Books. You see, kids, back in the 1900s, before checking socials or scrolling TikTok was a way to pass the time, there were these ubiquitous inspiration booklets, pumped out of publishing houses in New York City and Boca Raton. Women bought them on impulse at the supermarket or drugstore checkout, to be pulled out of a purse at some kind of waiting moment. For Ivy that would be in a waiting room or while waiting for her bus or on the bus waiting for her bus stop. She and millions of others would have found inspiration and tips from any one of the hundreds of titles, from Instant Beauty Tricks to Household Hints to 1970 Financial Horoscope to Fabulous Low-Calorie Desserts.

Ivy was 88 when Why Women Are So Tired (Globe Mini Mag #287, published 1996) caught her eye. She was retired from her job as a longtime companion for a rich lady but was still taking the bus here and there and walking down to the Seniors Centre to volunteer hand massages which was maybe tiring and why she was compelled to take the quiz at the start of this booklet:

Quiz: How Tired Are You? Score 20 statements from 0 (never true) to 3 (usually true)
“1. My eyes are strained and tired.” Beside this statement there is a small, faint “3” written in pen.
“2. My legs are tired.” Another, wobblier “3.”
“3. My attention wanders easily.” This is left blank, which could be your answer right there. Ivy went no further on the quiz, maybe because the hairdresser was ready to see her now, or she had reached her bus stop.
Having abandoned the How Tired Are You quiz she would have missed out on the score that determines her level of tiredness and there’s no hint as to whether she skipped ahead to helpful tips like, Eat a banana (Page 16) or “Sleeping Tip: 1. Eye-Roll.” (Page 60). “Take a Nap” is listed as a “preferred method of stress management of high-powered luminaries of all professions, including (long list of men).” Some other sleeping tips include “Try sleeping with your head at the foot of the bed.”

I reflexively eye-roll and feel energized already.

She must have picked up a tip or two, because this four-foot-eight, what they used to call ‘spinster’ was indefatigable and freakishly strong. (I once humoured her on this hand-massage business she mentioned and stuck out mine for a demo, wincing at her Kung Fu grip.)

More tips: “Say to yourself: ‘My eyes are twinkling and sparkling.’” (Page 34) and: “Rub It Away” (Page 37): “All you really need for a rubdown is a massage book, special sponges and hot oils, a flat surface, and your own two hands.” Or “Take an Enzyme Bath… a steaming elixir of sawdust, rice bran and enzyme powder…. No one disagrees that the bather feels great after soaking neck-deep in a tub of the stuff.” (Many intrusive thoughts here of rubbing and sawdust and hot oils and special sponges and my Great Aunt’s penetrating hands. Do those drapes need ironing?)

Page 45: Get a cordless phone. “Imagine being able to feed the dog, fold the laundry, iron — and talk on the phone at the same time.” (Alternative tip title: Prepare now for your 21st-Century state of permanent distraction.)
Also, “Memo pads: Lots of them — everywhere. In your purse, in your car and even in your bathroom. Use a spiral-bound type for your purse, and sticky notepads for leaving ‘can’t miss’ messages to yourself and others.”

This is very much not helping. Maybe I need to eat a banana.

“Take chances. The risks can be small — like… getting embroiled in a political debate.” Oh, those lazy-hazy Clinton-era days of this book’s publishing, when First Lady Hillary made that historical “human rights are women’s rights and women’s rights are human rights” speech in Beijing and her husband signed into law Biden’s bill for a 10-year assault weapons ban. Judging by my trip to the US over this election, any audible political discussion is not at all considered a small risk.

Final tip for this space — and I’m paraphrasing here — if the problem is a lack of stimulation your mind is on the slippery slope toward full hibernation. Go get a new haircut.

Major score: A Dell Purse Book #4080, published 1969

Luckily Great Aunt Ivy had a purse book for “The Busy Beauty.”

On radical self-care

11/20/2024

Making ourselves whole through making

First there is shock. I saw it in a coffee shop in a small US city the morning Trump was elected — again. The place was full but hushed. “Are you okay?”, one customer after another whispered to the three female baristas. Nods. Shrugs. Back to work.

Another shock hit the next day, when a friend confirmed our worst fears: the cancer had spread, nothing more for it. Silence, then tears all around.

First the shock, then the rage. Why? Why now? Why them? Why us? We cast around for blame. Eventually we arrive at the only thing for it: regrouping, starting from the self and working out from there.

My no-nonsense inner grandlady tells me to Get a hold of yourself, advice I take in the most loving way. I hold myself up by burrowing in for a nap, taking a walk wherever the trees are, sinking into a hot bath. There is a kind of exquisiteness during this inward time of radical self-care. This engagement with the physical world is a humane activity that breaks the paralysis, the start of ‘getting it together’ or gathering oneself.

Gathering is also a trauma response to life-shattering events (look at hoarding). The urge to collect the shards and scraps is an attempt to make ourselves whole. I find solace in pulling together material scraps of handwork by other makers and other traditions, not to recreate the past but to consider new possibilities, new forms. Puzzling over textures and techniques is quiet, contemplative work. There is no pre-planning, no goal-setting to be achieved; I’m simply forging connections, intent on finding a fresh beauty in the rejected and damaged remains, one stitch at a time in a sort of personal/political practice.

After we collect ourselves we collect up with others because we humans are pack animals. We share our grief because we know that that emotion is a monster not to be ignored. Even the kitties or pups instinctively know when the moment calls for cozying up to their people.

Some of us share our art because we have to. We brew up a mug of Bengal Spice tea, clear a space on the table heaped with scraps of fabric, unravelling lace and stained embroidered linens, plug in the laptop and open an empty screen. And we reach out.

Donated hand-stitched linens and lace offer a further layer of meaning to an expanded painting practice (detail). (Carlyn Yandle)

End of an era for Vancouver makers

9/7/2024

The one great store that fuels textile dreams is closing due to small-business struggles

Judging by the early deluge of reactions on Reddit last week, we Vancouver makers are stunned to learn that our mecca for material and more is selling off its inventory and properties and closing for good. And I’m dealing with it like the full-grown woman I am.

Damn you! Damn you all to Hell!

Vancouver has never had the big shmata (cloth trade) districts like Montreal or Toronto. In these parts, we have Dressew Supply, a sort of rough-around-the-edges department store almost bursting with bolts of liquidation fabrics, sparkly applique patches, headbanger wigs, thousands of buttons, zippers, feather boas, skeins of yarn, rolls of ribbon and every sewing notion imaginable to satisfy the city’s crafty counter-culture vibe.

Vancouver never had the garment district of Toronto, where “Uniform Measure/Stack" (1997), designed by Stephen Cruise (stephencruise.ca), monumentalizes objects of the trade, originally with painted path of yellow measuring tape.

I am with my people here: the grandmothers who sew Christmas-gift pajamas, the goths, the quilters, the film and theatre set designers, the dance-gymnastics girls, the fashion-school students, and more recently, Pride paraders, Halloween costumers and cosplayers. Moving through those jammed aisles of colour and pattern revitalizes the brain, especially in our soggy, dark mid-winters.

I have a long history of ruining homemade garments made from my purchases at Dressew. I blame this on the tedious, mandatory Grade 8 girls’ sewing class designed to turn us into skilled workers or housewives. So when my community-college-student budget demanded I make my own nightclubbing “look” and wedding-guest frocks, I took an improv approach, using the cheapest $2/yard “100% unknown fibers” fabrics that smelled as flammable as they looked. I was lured by the big books of “Make it tonight!” Butterick, Style and Simplicity patterns and when this timeline proved unlikely, I’d game the instructions by swapping, say, a long back zipper with self-adhesive Velcro, or cramming in some thick shoulder pads to try to give shape to my latest sagging acetate atrocity. I don’t have photographic evidence of the voluminous emerald taffeta dress with the watermelon-sized sleeves that I wore to a cousin’s wedding but I can see in the snapshot of the baby-blue Cinderella-style dress at another wedding that I didn’t see ‘fit’ as an area of concern.

Nevertheless I persisted! I dreamed big, undeterred by minimal skill and patience or my wonky sewing machine that I dropped on the floor more than once. These projects were doomed to fail, like the grey pin-striped double-breasted suit for my university boyfriend who actually wore the blazer for a while but who was also likely relieved that the trousers never materialized. And I’d like to take this opportunity to apologize to all those unwilling children in my life who endured the double humiliation of being gifted one of my hand-sewn polar-fleece hats and posing for a photo in it for their mother’s thank-you note.

Evidence of ill-fitting, over-padded and plain cruel past projects.

The magic of that store is in the endless possibilities and I always left with hope in my heart that this time I will read the directions. I will take breaks. I will use pins. I will find scissors that don’t chew the fabric. I will not view interfacing as optional.
I eventually redeemed myself as the family-and-friends’ Halloween costume-maker, taking the bus downtown with one kid or another while conferring over their concept drawing that I assigned to weed out the uncommitted. They also had to help cut, sew, glue and paint as required, so I wouldn’t take all the blame for shoddy workmanship.

Learning to sew is more fun when it’s a costume.

I also got pretty good at reupholstering because I had the good sense to take some continuing-ed classes on the subject as a young adult (rather than a self-conscious, hormonal 13-year-old) led by a retired skilled professional. Still on a tight budget, I learned to revamp found vintage armchairs with Dressew’s bargain upholstery fabrics but moved over to making crib quilts for all the new babies. Eventually I got serious about fibre art and went to art school. When the pandemic lockdown hit I re-focused my plans for my stash of quilting cotton and sewed up three-layer cotton masks — so many masks — to fill the early gap in the supply chain. Elastic was a scarce commodity and that’s where the owner at Dressew stepped up, delivering yardage of elastic to me from the shuttered store’s back alley door, like a dealer doing a drop.

So many Covid masks, made possible during lockdown by Dressew.

The imminent demise leaves me — us — in the lurch. Shopping by the hand-feel (and smell) of fabrics, yarn, fun fur, trims, felt, wigs, and all the strange liquidation items is an in-person experience in the energizing milieu of other creatives. So now what? Will next year’s Halloween costume missions now take place around the ol’ iPhone peering at fabric images on Amazon, not really knowing what will show up as we hit ‘Add to cart’?
That’s a hard no. Sorry kids.

Awkward family moment informs art-making aesthetic

7/14/2024

When I first started out as a suburban-newspaper reporter I had a single original artwork tacked to the wall in my basement suite. It was a life-sized acrylic-on-paper, a nude holding her maybe-pregnant belly against a landscape of spewing factories and techni-coloured streams.

I watched this gaunt, world-weary figure emerge in watery brushstrokes from the hand of the newspaper photographer's girlfriend. This is how she worked, in their basement suite, pulling yardage from a large roll of cheap paper, painting straight from her head and heart, with no plan to keep or show or sell her paintings. She saw that this one resonated with me too — what twenty-something in a committed relationship doesn’t have this weighing on her mind? So she gave it to me.

Hanging it felt like supporting an ally, even if it was only hanging in my dark, featureless space that nobody would see besides the boyfriend on weekends. Then one day some of his family made the trip for a visit. They complimented my hanging flower baskets, my thrifty decor. I didn’t hear until much later that the painting had become a topic of conversation among various relatives, a bit of a joke about that subject and, by extension in my mind, this girlfriend.

I had none of the inner fortitude to see this painting or my choices as acceptable and eventually I rolled it up and hid it in a closet. I married into that family within three years. The boxed wedding dress joined the poster tube containing the offending painting for two more moves until I finally ditched the artwork at the Sally Ann. The dress is another story.

Detail from 'Unbridled,' the artist's handmade silk wedding dress embroidered with significant events. (Carlyn Yandle photo)

'I Dissent,' aesthetic design with a political position marking the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Acrylic on panel, 2020 (Carlyn Yandle)

But I did keep something from that painting: some lessons that have informed an aesthetic that I carry to this day but might not even recognize until after each artwork is completed, or is at least on its trajectory.

The first is the power of attraction. Not to be confused with the pseudoscientific Law of Attraction, this is a drive to create aesthetically-pleasing, familiar domestic objects and fields that upon closer inspection have something else to say besides cozy or pretty. An early example of one of my pretty/pretty disturbing objects is Clutch (2007). Hundreds of sewing pins were pierced into a thrifted clutch purse in a colourful beaded pattern covering the entire surface. The clasp opens to reveal an impenetrable thicket of steely pointy ends.

Another valuable lesson is context, or time and place. Gallery-goers may prepare themselves to be confronted by artwork but I don’t wish that on houseguests. There are none of those Live-Love-Laugh type directives or IKEA Eiffel Towers and tulips on the walls at home, but what is there is selected to engage, not repel. Home is a place to feel safe. The studio is a place to not play it safe, but it’s still a covert operation, playing on that first impression of domestic objects that reveal cracks in the beauty of the everyday.

I’ve also learned that my creative energy comes from joy, not pain. I have no urge to make when I barely have enough hope for the day to put on pants. Heavy realities may be the driving force but the work develops from a position of hope for comfort and social connection, a hunger for nourishment of new ideas and new materials to explore. The joy is in learning while doing, imagining new collective futures.

What first appears as a frilly white textile barely conceals the chaotic armature of conduit casing, hazard tape, metal pipes, and other construction-site debris behind layers of discarded Tyvek building wrap. (Nate Yandle photos)

Finally, my position is not fixed. In my mind I have that 1985 photo portrait of Lily Tomlin in a black T-shirt with white lettering that screams EVOLVE OR DIE. And look at her now. My sensibilities are always shifting and I am growing more at peace with the idea that what other people say about me is none of my business. When an artist friend turned 50 on an artists’ retreat the rest of us toasted her in a welcome to the I Don’t Give a Shit Club. When you’re part of that club you stop second-guessing every decision and tending to other people’s feelings first.

This is how I recently became the owner of Fuckwit. I was attracted by the sweet rosebud fabric appliqued in tiny blanket stitches precise as Letraset on a lacy linen. I like the artist's choice of font and word. It’s an overt, uncomplicated work that hangs near the front door, visible before guests would even have their coat off. If people get offended, blame the artist, not me. I just like the beauty in that crack.

Original artwork by Kathryn Lissack (@kathrynlissack)

Just a reflection, of a reflection, of a reflection, of a reflection

6/20/2024

I have my share of obtrusive thoughts but this week it’s an ear-worm: Arcade Fire’s "Reflektor."

It jumped into my head while on a brilliant morning bike ride this week, after passing someone walking while talking into her phone raised in that most flattering angle of a few inches above her face. A few minutes later I passed another camera-ready performer, also sharing sunny enthusiasm into her screen. And before I finished my ride I saw another person in the same mode of performance. Aside from the tricky logistics of walking with a screen in front of one’s face, I wondered if an authentic, personal experience of the physical world is possible if you’re doing it while engaging through the mediated space of a tiny screen.

I thought I found the connector. It’s just a reflektor.

Inside Teamlab's 100,000-square-metre Borderless Digital Art Gallery. Photo by Charley Yandle

My nephew, a fine-arts student, just returned from Japan where he spent many hours at various digital installations presented by the Tokyo-based Teamlab “artist collective.” The images and videos he took while moving through the 100,000-square-metre Borderless Digital Art Gallery show multi-levelled mirrored spaces, light shows and walls of sound.

Just a reflection, of a reflection, of a reflection, of a reflection, of a reflection

The several Teamlab immersive experiences in different regions were the highlight of his month-long trip. Is it just for young people?, I texted. All ages, he replied. As these massive permanent installations sprout up in shiny boom cities from Singapore to Abu Dhabi I am seeing a more dystopian view of humanity crowding into these cool sensory retreats from some burning global realities.

I scanned the website for any writing on social or political context beyond “Life is a miraculous phenomenon that emerges from a flow in a continuous world.”

Thought you would bring me to the resurrector. Turns out it was just a reflektor

I’ve learned to trust the confluence of obtrusive thoughts and my experience of the world. It’s a brain-hurt process that I work through by writing and through conversations that might begin with my four favourite words: “I have this idea.”

I have this idea, I said to a different young nephew a couple of months ago. Soon we were doing photo portraiture in the forest, exploring a mirror’s ability to erase the subject.

Above, left and right: Forest portraiture with subject-negating mirror.

I have this idea, an artist friend said to me last month, and soon I was sewing up a garment from the picture in his head. This became Abyss, a wearable artwork featuring two FaceTiming iPads to create the illusion of a torso with a large hole straight through the back. Performing Abyss attracts attention to the self for having nothing of substance at the core.

Will I see you on the other side? We all got things to hide

Above: Testing the invisibility effect of ‘Abyss’ by artist/architect David Weir (@djweir.art)

I guess I’m reflecting on that notion that is as old as Greek mythology: one’s mirrored reflection is a seductive trap, or a distraction on the path to complete social disengagement. And I’m reflecting on the opposite, that mindful reflection and self-reflection is the route to social engagement.

Crawling out of that trap, or taking a different path, may be as simple as reflecting on the sign on the door of my old apartment neighbour, a social worker: “Don’t just say something, stand there.”

Audio version of this post is at carlynyandle.substack.com

Circular thinking can be a flow state too

6/2/2024

I opened up my studio yesterday to the public to get some general feedback on a new series of paintings. Because even though I’m compelled to keep working on it and even though I’m enjoying a growing proficiency in this mash-up of stitching and painting I’m having trouble articulating why — or if — they’re not just pretty faces. Mostly I've been answering their questions with questions of my own.

“Why” has always been the trouble. Also aggravating: Why ask why?
This is the reason I’ve named this growing collection of paintings that all basically follow my own set of rules of engagement Circular Thinking. The connotation is negative but hear me out.

Asking ourselves existential questions while we create is infuriating (Shut the hell up, Inner Critic) but it’s also part of a process that can guide us to where we want to land. I would like to be settled with the obvious reason that it’s my route into flow, or actual, real fun. (The “so fun” episode of the We Can Do Hard Things podcast here was recommended to me by my sister.) And they do get me there: into the flow of playing with colours and opacities, of focusing on one stitch at a time, watching how each layer of paint or stitching changes perception.

But I can’t settle with just what’s in it for me. Making is my way of connecting with the world. Much of my work is collaborative, so those involved naturally have a stake in the final projects. Often that’s in the gathering of abject materials, or the actual simple hand-working methods that bring folks together. So it’s easy to see the ‘why’ in these crafted objects and fields; beyond their own resonance they stand as an archive of the social interaction, an artifact of the engagement with materials.

The Circular Thinking series has none of that. Each painting is a singular, intimate effort. It does not reveal any agency embedded in unwanted/useless materials and objects. So in the making, despite the flow part, I feel a whisper of guilt and shame that many women of a certain age might also hear when not doing for others: selfish, self-indulgent, self-absorbed.

There is definitely something in the ‘self’ there that is the driving force in these improvisational, unpredictable and unsettling paintings: self-care. I ache for solid, reliable ground in these perilous times so I start with a grid, like the criss-cross of rebar that sets the concrete footings in every new tower crowding the Vancouver skyline, or a typical nine-patch quilt block. Nine eight-inch-diameter circles in a 24" x 24" "block" anchor to that grid and then I’m off, free of all straight lines, off-setting those circles by half in paint, offsetting again with more layers of colour in paint or thread until I arrive at an attractive/distractive done-ness. It is an improvisational process of revealing and concealing (repeat!) petal-like sections of circles, creating unsettling, kaleidoscopic fields. It is the kind of all-consuming process that reduces hours to minutes, that absorbs all attention, a safe space away from the visual onslaught of social media, yet reflective of our ‘everything is awesome’ screen-field of vision.

It might be easier to eat this elephant one bite at a time by knocking down specific why-questions:

Why paint?
Colour-play. Especially important in this watery corner of the world. It can also act as a dye/stain.

Why canvas?
It’s fabric, with so much possibility for exploring its essential characteristics.

Why the wood stretcher?
Another fibre product that is a natural with fabric. It's basically a quilt frame or embroidery hoop for painters. Building stretchers and stretching the canvas is an investment in the project ahead (a trick I learned from my father @dennisyandle).

Why the stitching?
I like to needle at the hierarchy of painting over craft processes. Each stitch feels like I’m sticking it to convention. Stitching into painting offers the digestible label of “expanded painting practice.”

Why all the quilt references?
The geometry of quilt designs is fascinating, mesmerizing. I have little aptitude but a lot of respect for the beauty of mathematics. The tactility of that geometry connects to present and past makers of objects that exist as art pieces or as items of comfort, utility and gifts, an expression of love. This is a less-digestible "expanded quilting practice": improvisational, mixed-media works with none of that cushy filling.

$Picture$

The geometry of circular quilt designs remains a beautiful, captivating mystery.

Why this scale?
24" x 24” is my standard sample-block size. I dream of an exhibit of all my sample blocks blanketing white-cube gallery walls.

Why two-dimensional?
Closer inspection reveals the third dimension, in the stitching. Also, the aforementioned sample-block dream show is a three-dimensional, immersive space of pattern and colour chaos. (I want to go to there.)

Circular Thinking is both the name of this latest series of grid paintings and shorthand for how I approach every new project: play, think, write, share, think, research, share, write, repeat.

Through this writing part of that feedback loop I can see I just might stop torturing myself with the existential Why and get back into that flow.

@carlynyandle

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