carlyn yandle
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Needling at patriotism and protest

7/7/2024

 
PictureThe American penchant for patriotic treats is impressive, from jelly shots to meat trays. (Instagram collage)
We all sort of forgot about celebrating Canada Day last weekend, up north, on a farm. No fireworks, no flags, no impressive array of themed party foods in the American way. That doesn't make us UnCanadian, a term that doesn't have any of the gravitas of UnAmerican. We may stand down from celebrations while remaining upstanding.

I feel a complicated gratitude about my Canadian citizenship, what with my settler-ancestors basically occupying traditional Indigenous territories. An inordinate number of maple leaf flags on a vehicle or house feels a bit aggressive and any big show of patriotism makes me itchy.

I started school in the U.S. All I remember about Kindergarten was learning to pledge allegiance to the flag while facing said flag, hand on heart, and also learning America the Beautiful and The Star-Spangled Banner. Then going home. I'm sure there were crafts but I'm thinking they were about all that too. Our rented house had American-eagle emblem wallpaper in the dining room and a flag mount at the front door. To Canadians, that's a lot of patriotism.

PictureInstead of wringing my hands I start needling at local and global issues.
Starting back in my East Vancouver elementary school, I was far more interested in singing “God save our gracious Queen” to that portrait of the bosomy, bejewelled young Elizabeth that hung in every classroom and in the auditorium. There was O Canada too, and the Lord’s Prayer for a while. These days it's just the anthem and mostly for sporty public events but ask anyone around here and it’s a good bet they will not know the updated lyrics. (As if we need a daily reminder of the anthem, the first four notes of O Canada are blasted from a horn heard all over the city centre every day at noon.)

But what’s going on down south of this border has got my rapt attention and I’m not the only one. "Two-thirds of Canadians think the American democracy will not be able to survive another four years of Trump at the helm,” according to a January 2024 poll by the non-profit Angus Reid Institute. Further, “a Trump victory has many predicting dire consequences for both sides of the 49th parallel” with half of Canadians polled reporting they worry that the U.S. “could be on the way to becoming an authoritarian state."

I am compelled to work out these big-picture worries in a joyful kind of making. These days the source of the most relentless anxieties is the fear-mongering that stokes disinformation, anti-immigration, genderism — all the human-rights-violating -tions and -isms. Currently I'm needling at it, layering up those worries through trending heavy hashtags in a weighted blanket, part of an ongoing series of Discomforters. 

But it's not all solo projects. In 2019 I joined a needling army of joyful resistors to the Trump presidency, in the Tiny Pricks Project (@tinypricksproject), curated and created by a maker in my corner of the world, Diana Weymar. Her invitation via social media to contribute to the public-engagement project resulted in a tsunami of more than 5,000 stitched sentiments. Galleries on both sides of the border were filled with Trump's angry tweets and comments rendered impotent in stitches and embellishments.
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From left: A Trump quote surrounding Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, for the @tinypricksproject, 2019. (Carlyn Yandle); detail of a gallery installation.
Being a part of that and other public craftivist projects started, for me, while living in central Mexico in the weeks leading up to the largest one-day march in American history on Washington. A grassroots social-media campaign had people all over the world taking up needles and hooks and stitching up pink pussy-hats, in comedic reference to the rape-y comments of the President-to-be. The pink sea of 2.6 million marchers on the day after Trump’s inauguration in 2017 remains an iconic image. It is yet to be seen which hat will be more enduring: the for-profit, mass-manufactured MAGA hat that his son-in-law claimed raised $80,000 a day during the 2016 campaign? Or the hand-stitched pussy-hats made singularly or in groups, and worn or gifted to marchers around the world?

That depends on who writes the history, and who owns the media.
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From disaster to 'Discomforter': 5 lessons learned

5/15/2015

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There is really no way to know whether a blanket covered in brightly coloured buttons will read until the very end of all the work so I wanted to build in the likelihood of failure. That's how I came to decide on "The devil is in the details" as the line of text that would appear on a QR code reader. If it didn't read successfully at least it would prove the rule.

But it wasn't as simple as that. The details that bedevilled me began with my big idea to use masking tape to indicate the grid instead of tailor's chalk (too dusty), disappearing-ink marker (fades too quickly) or basting (tedious).

That tape plan might have worked if I had removed it in a timely manner, like within a few days or even weeks. But when you pull masking tape off of fine white cotton sheeting after 13 months you are left with a hard, yellowed embedded adhesive residue. You scrape it, scrub it, attack it with solvents and still it does not un-adhere. In desperation, you ball up the entire quilt and chuck it into the washing machine, despite the raw edges and exposed batting. When it comes out in a tight mass of threads and shrunken batting you curse your hare-brained impulsiveness. You let out a little scream when you realize that the colours from many of those buttons have inexplicably run, bleeding all over the white cotton.  (Lesson 2: Research your materials.) At this point you roll yourself up into a little ball and go fetal in a corner somewhere until you're ready to rejoin humanity.

I knew going into my second QR Quilt project that there was a very good chance that after sewing more than 1,000 buttons into three layers of fabric the pattern may not be recognized by the QR code reader. But I also knew that I had a fighting chance after the surprising success of the readable QR Quilt: After Douglas Coupland. My quilt version of his painting, I Wait and I Wait and I Wait for God to Appear proved that a quilt composed of scraps of coloured business shirts and scattered buttons could contain a message as easily as the typical black and white grid. After several weeks of piecing over 1,000 squares together into one queen-sized square I stood back, aimed my phone at the quilt, and prayed. The sentence appeared, like a message from god.

I wanted that euphoria again. I needed it. (Lesson 1: Avoid great expectations.)
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You eventually decide that the title has suddenly gained poignancy (Lesson 3: Embrace unexpected results) so you pick away at the binding selvedge threads from the quilt-ball until you can hang the wet, lead-apron-heavy slab of fiber and plastic to dry for several days. You start to notice that the sheeting is puckering from the shrinking and is sagging from the weight of all that hard plastic in this queen-sized quilt of the damned. Turns out some of those buttons were of some early plastic vintage that were painted after they were fabricated. (Who knew?)

You attempt to find salvation from a bottle of stain-remover -- Out, damned spot! Out, I say!  -- but it looks worse. The next time you have the nerve to look at this fabricated failure you notice that -- praise the lord -- the bleaching agent has worked -- sort of. You stipple-quilt out the sags and bags and the rest of the discolouration disappears -- also sort of. You trim it square and bind it in black with a devil-may-care attitude. After it's finished you realize that the stippling was essential for creating enough rigidity to prevent the buttons from sagging when it hangs. You like the resulting topography. (Lesson 4: Innovate solutions.)

Then you air the whole sordid story on your blog, knowing that sharing the anguish is part of the process, though you regret you don't have any images that would give the full impact of the horror story. (Lesson 5: Photodocument the process, even failure.)

The title of this work is Discomforter (The Devil is in the Details). It's a cumbersome title befitting this project that took me to the edge of my sanity, or at least close enough to see that there is in fact an edge and I know I can't go there again.

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Just a bad craft? Time and techonology will tell

11/29/2013

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I'm posting this picture because if I don't do it now I might cram this doomed project into a green garbage bag and stuff it where the sun don't shine: in deep storage.

 I've seen through some fraught, laborious projects in my time but I may have met my match. After months of hoarding buttons and hounding others to surrender their button jars "for art's sake" I'm thisclose to admitting this thing is a colossal waste of time.

The plan was to create a companion piece to my QR Quilt: After Douglas Coupland, a scrappy quilt translation of the artist's QR Code Paintings.

This new one will be a 'whole-cloth' quilt, where only the buttons would bind the layers. And of course it will be readable with a QR code reader app. Trouble is, since I designed this coded button blanket last year I'm starting to think that QR codes are a fleeting technology, like the fax machine. The geeky chatter on the interwebs also tells me so . So, in a few years when the industrial marketing complex has made the stampede over to some  other state-of-the-art attention-grabbing software schtick, the whole point of this project will be rendered obsolete. How did I not see the futility of trying to grapple with fleeting technology through a painstakingly slow craft method?

The inner negator has been bullying me throughout week one of sewing one found button after another onto my marked grid. It's not helpful realizing that in the unlikely event that I have selected the correct colours to read black, and have sewn in enough button-density to create a readable pattern, I'm still left with an unwashable, lead-apron-heavy quilt. I can't even dedicate it as a shroud in my final wish for a sustainable green burial, as my corpse would be cocooned in all that non-biodegradable plastic poundage.

This is normally the time when I call for reinforcements in the form of artist friends, who will invoke the usual mantra: 'Trust the process, trust the process.'

I get it and I'm going with it. See it through. One button at a time, one day at a time. The week-one picture is posted. There's no pretending it's all still just a concept. This matter of time, technology and endurance matters.





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    Cross-posted at
    carlynyandle.substack.com

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