carlyn yandle
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Tripping on this troublesome rug

12/6/2019

 
In the final critique of my final work in this second-to-final semester of graduate studies, I could see that there was going to be trouble. 
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​From the start, there was the trouble of actually getting a full view of this sprawling, chaotic, twisted mass of deconstructed jeans. It required everyone to stand around the perimeter of the low-lit white-cube gallery, in a circle, facing in, looking down at this problem child.
 
There was the troubling of its position: Why not on the wall or hung from the ceiling? Since it’s sprawled out on the floor, does it invite being walked on?
 
There was the troubling of method: Why the knotting and weaving and braiding? Why the obvious waistbands and labels? Why spend all this time and labour? Why not just a pile of denim strips?
 
And there was the troubling over concept: Is it too obvious? Too simple? Too many signifiers? Not enough points of entry? Or too many? Is it art or craft? Who is this talking to? And to what end?
 
And those are just my questions. 

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​I question everything, especially as I work, with my hands, intuitively. But my first line of questioning is directed at the material itself. What do you want from me? (Or, to borrow from my then-eight-year-old nephew, in an inexplicable situation: What are we even doing here?)
 
As much as I could have sat and gazed at the striated piles of folded jeans collected, machine-washed and line-dried by my mother and hauled to my studio by my others, now those jeans demanded more of me.
 
Seams, the index of the work by mainly women in foreign factories, needed to be exposed, so I cut them away from the yardage, bound them up in my own hand-stitching into tight, potent fast-fashion/slow-craft units. For what? For now, just for today: my daily reminder not to overthink or force solutions.
 
The labels and tags required daylighting, too, and the more collisions the better between fonts and texts and all that those brands try to stand for.
 
That left the denim textile, the fabric of this whole fraught, toxic industry. Shucked from their constraints of style and function, I ripped them into strips and watched them fall from my cutting table into heaps on the floor like tidepools.

PictureImage-searching "jeans industry" produces a blue-stained global-reality horror show.
As much as I love the immersive works of minimalist textile installations, more would be more here. I would be mining all my own making methods and circulating them into this circles-within-circles piece, in allegiance with all of those who work with their hands for a living or for the love of material. Or both.
 
Like most makers I know, I love the challenge of constraining the work to some specific rules of material engagement so I limited mine to a single material, a knotting/binding additive process and two tools: scissors and sewing needle (well, three, if you count my hands).
 
I intrinsically start from the centre in an almost innate process learned over a lifetime, from macramé plant-hangers (1970s) to braided rugs (1990s) to crocheted giant doilies (2000s) created to cover and protect in the public sphere.

​The work begins with a gathering of material-energy into a tight nucleus of force (I’ve been mixing up issues of 
astrophysics and making over the last year) and spreads outward, finding pattern then breaking that pattern toward new horizons. It’s a process of allowing the material to ebb then roil up again into forces that break into near disintegration, a rhythm that keeps me in the swim of things. As it flows outward into small tsunamis, then eddies, I feel an oceanic, topographic, geologic personality wash over this thing.

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And this definitely wants to be a thing, not an immersive installation. This is an object that requires some finishing, a symphony of soundwaves that started with a bang but wants to end in a hum, in the round. It is a rug you can’t walk on, borne of Seismic Rug that emerged while I was confined to the floor with sciatica,  watching footage of the horror of the 2011 Japan Tsunami flood in.
 
It is a resurgence of that making, and that fear of that flood and of the oncoming higher waters, but also the resurgence of my ability to grab hold of physically-challenging handwork after falling on the low-tide foreshore this summer and breaking my ‘good’ arm in two places. I cast aside those fears of not being able to make/do from the cast-offs of this unsustainable era of human history.
 
Resurge feels right for the piece formerly known as the Monster that raises issues from the ground up, this fuzzy menace.

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Left: A colleague lists initial reactions during critique; right: pattern and collapse seen in one section.
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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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Urban design lesson for Vancouver: Life in full colour blooms in car-free streets

12/10/2016

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The steps of the Teatro Juarez transform by day and night for the benefit of the walking public. (Carlyn Yandle photo)
A month after I landed in Guanajuato, Mexico it finally dawned on me: there are no traffic lights in this bustling city. You'd think that would be obvious from the outset but those kinds of details are not readily apparent when you're gawking at a guy hoofing it down the narrow city streets with a side of raw beef on his shoulders, or a teenage girl unfurling her frothy pink ballgown from a truck parked at the end of the pedestrian zone.
Not only are there no traffic lights, there are no pedestrian crossing signals or any restrictions on the walking public. The downtown is teeming with people but with such narrow, winding vehicle thoroughfares, topas (speed bumps) and gloriettas (large versions of Vancouver's "traffic-calming circles") you learn quickly to go with the slow flow. Pedestrians zig-zag with ease across streets, almost brushing the rear of a slow-passing car so the vehicle behind doesn't have to shift down to super-slow. This is not a town to venture into if you're a driver in a hurry. Cruising speed is such that you could start a conversation with people on the sidewalk. Road rage is inconceivable.

So how are all the goods and services delivered? Most of that happens under the plazas and winding streets in old floodwater-diverting tunnels. Parking lots are also mostly situated under or outside the city centre and on-street parking is a rarity. There are no filthy downtown back alleys dedicated to dumpsters and delivery trucks. No urban blight of parked cars flanking both sides of every street.
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A narrow 'calle' is transformed into a weekend-long wine-tasting venue. (Carlyn Yandle photo)

As a result, the major calles (streets) are in constant transformation, a jumble of bakeries, cafes and newsstands in the morning, market stalls in the afternoon, and music-filled evenings and special events like a recent wine-tasting weekend along a red carpet through to the historical centre. The previous weekend saw a chalk-mural draw-in where local art students were down on their knees, working their ideas into the surface near that morning's bike race finish line.

These are the possibilities for streets where pedestrians come first.
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Art students take to the (permanent) car-free streets. (Carlyn Yandle and photo)
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Narrow spaces invite humane activity. (Carlyn Yandle photo)
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Street musicians head down to the outdoor restaurants. (Carlyn Yandle photo)
I fail to see the downside in squeezing out cars in heavily populated areas. In contrast, pricey Vancouver's sketchy, rat-infested downtown alleys and acres of meter parking look like a colossal waste of potential commercial and cultural space. How impossible would it be to conceal dumpsters in locked building bays and restrict garbage pickup to, say, 2 a.m., and then entice tiendas (street vendors) and the mom-and-pop shops that have been all but banished to the fringes due to high rents?

The more I wander and wade through all this colourful human activity the more I resent the privileged position of the private motor vehicle in North American urban "planning." Cities in their relative infancy like Vancouver could learn a lot from organic urban centres like Guanajuato that came into their own before there were cars.

​My hometown is already teetering on the edge of becoming a boring luxury resort city; a bold directive towards people and away from the private motor vehicle could pull us back from that precipice.
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A religious procession is part of the passing cultural parade. (Carlyn Yandle photo)
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Vehicle thoroughfares and parking areas are mostly on the fringes and below the city. (Carlyn Yandle photo)
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When words fail to describe form, make up new ones

4/3/2015

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There is not a coffee shop in town where two people, heads almost touching as if in shared prayer, aren’t focused on one pocket-sized screen. Sometimes one of those people is me, in answer to an artist friend’s question, What are you up to these days?
PictureThree not-doinks, from top: bull kelp, honeysuckle, barge tow rope, 20"diameter (Carlyn Yandle photos)
That ability to instantly share an image is a godsend to those of us who are more comfortable communicating visually than verbally. (The test: We are fully on board with Ikea text-free picto-instructions.) It saves us from resorting to wild hand gestures to describe abstract forms and ideas.

Some things are indescribable but according to the enquiring friend, I have been making ‘doinks’, “a ball of a single material.” Yay! A new term to help place these pieces. I asked him about the origin of ‘doink’, which he said was a word supplied by another artist friend, and could possibly be Finnish or Mennonite.

I was so hoping it was Finnish as those are my people but all translator sites came up zip for ‘doink.’ I became obsessed and pushed him to supply the contact info for this friend (all while he was en route to Paris) and before long this friend-of-a-friend and I were tangled up in possible roots of this nice, naughty-sounding word.

“I wonder if the word comes from the sound the doink makes when it hits something?” she mused. “Doinks are one of the only things I remember being allowed to throw at someone, and throw inside the house.” She knew the expression from her dad, who grew up in Winnipeg, but her husband was also familiar with ‘doink.’

“It was a generally used word from the ‘70s,” he said. “Always in the context of something crumpled that you could throw, like tape.”

Anecdotal evidence reveals it is not in common usage among kids  - in these parts, anyway - and there’s no sign of it as a descriptor for an orb in any online slang dictionaries. It may be an archaeic, onomatopoeiac classroom term referring to any orbital projection that is beaned (another great, graphic schoolyard word) at a classmate when the teacher’s back is turned, resulting in neither noise nor injury.

Based on my research and interviews, I have concluded that I am in fact not making doinks, as any one of these single-material spheres could cause significant bruising (the one made of barge tow rope weighs in at 20 pounds) or at least an uncomfortable sliming (10 pounds of kelp will do that).

So I’ve come up with a term of my own that I hope takes root for these hefty natural-fibre wound balls: Orbbits.


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Who says sculpture has no business in business?

3/27/2015

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Picture"Unfixtures": Found lamp bases, utensils, gesso.
I liked the idea of messing with the overlooked and the banal to open up possible new understandings about preconceived notions.


There was something delicious about a collection of attractive objects -- flat white familiar forms at a personal/counter-top scale -- that is also just a little disturbing for its wrongness. Those little electrical cords suggest hazard. They seem to say, Whatever you do, don't plug us in, so in a sense they have some visual power.

I was thinking about Martha Rosler's groundbreaking feminist video, "Semiotics of the Kitchen" (1975 - edited version below) when I came up with my "Unfixtures" sculpture series.
Ah, the power of uncertain objects. What was an experiment in found-object sculpture is an eye-catching visual for a company in the business of creative work.


PictureEggbeater Creative's new brochure (Clay Yandle photo)
"I love the plug part," my brother Clay said in a text the other day, after sending me pics of his company's latest brochures and business cards. "It makes it real... like you could fire it up and it would start doing whatever the hell it would do."

Unfixtures are a permanent fixture (when they're not showing in a gallery) at my brother's office. One of the pieces in particular seemed to be speaking to him as he was trying to come up with a name for a new web-design/branding partnership a while back.

"It was the perfect storm of me trying so hard to come up with a name and just staring at the sculpture led me to understand how this business was the mix of two companies," he wrote. eggbeater creative was born.

"It was whimsical and interesting, and then there was the obvious part of the eggbeaters working as light bulb (idea) metaphors. The sculpture had traditionally conflicted parts, but they were together in a way that worked." 

The company logo (seen at the bottom left of the brochure in this image) riffs on the sculpture and the lower-case 'e'.

Below: A time-lapsed view of a painting commissioned for Eggbeater Creative:

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One bit, two bits, green bits, black bits

3/13/2015

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PictureToybits (green) - made from broken toys (Carlyn Yandle photo)
This may be the third or fourth column/post I've written that could come under the headline, 'Overthinking will be the death of me.' There is definitely a book in there somewhere about the power of overthinking to sabotage the creative process.

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

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

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

I was onto something.

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

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

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

From the junk of life emerges new life.

You can see it in the above photo; it's a mess. Even as I was binding it I thought, This is not working, this is not working. Why is this not working? It has no balance, no composition. it is artless. And it was a chore from the get-go.
PictureToybits (black): first attempt (Carlyn Yandle photo)
So, like every creative I know,  the ol' mental processor starting whirring away in the background, rolling over this concept. Friends and I talk about this slightly obsessive stage when developing a new work. You're still functional in your daily routine but that whirring puts you in a slightly distracted state. It's sort of like falling in love; there's always something there to remind you of that growing passion. And when I fall in love with an idea, I fall hard. I'm consumed by the topic like the Paul Rudd character in The 40-Year-Old Virgin who can't stop talking about Amy or The Big Lebowski's John Goodman character who links any conversation to his days in 'Nam.

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

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

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Everything I know about design I learned in newspapers

2/6/2015

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

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

Good design requires a good editor, but too much editing can kill the soul of the visual field, whether that's a newspaper double-spread (I'm dusting off all the ol' industry relic terms here) or a building.
PictureThe staircase at Les Haras in Strasbourg is functional sculpture. (Photo from sncf.com)
The editor likes her windows clean of pouffy valances and floors free of scatter-rug litter, but she doesn't want her voice to echo in her interior space, either. There's a fine line between the functional beauty of the spare Bauhaus-based International Style and objects that are designed primarily to optimize mass-production.

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

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

PictureThe new arts centre on Lasqueti Island, shingling in progress. (Photo by Carlyn Yandle)
But, in the end, is less really more?

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

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

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

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

No freakin' way.

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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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