carlyn yandle
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.

The future is fungal

1/18/2025

 
Mushrooms and more for troubled times
When you spend a good portion of your winter cowering from the cold and the rain, it’s hard to fathom the fiery desert winds that are obliterating entire neighbourhoods just a three-hour flight south. In the near-real-time images and video only chimneys, mangled metal and concrete driveways hint at what used to be.

But then you notice the vestiges of palm trees, bougainvillea vines, laurel hedges, tufts of sisal and succulents. Before the last tendrils of smoke dissipate and the insurance battles begin, these plants hold the promise that buds and leaves will sprout and new colonizer species will emerge, boosted by an ashy soil. They are a reminder that whether it’s our perilous planet or our own contorting guts, flora heals.
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This front line in ground recovery is below the surface, a mycelium network of fungal lace that can erupt in reproductive spores, most noticeably after wildfire as a bright orange carpet of tiny caplets.
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Mapping entanglements: Crocheted cotton, acrylic on panel, 12”x12” (Carlyn Yandle)
Mycelium is all the rage these days, embraced for its regenerative properties. I may be a little disturbed by the tiny fungal ecosystem flourishing in a dark corner of my damp art studio, and mushrooms on my tongue may feel like phlegm balls, but I get excited at the news that mycelium is being explored to fight cancer cells and alleviate physical and psychological trauma.

​The earth-sustaining potential of mycelium is unlimited: just one bus-ride away from my studio, at UBC’s Biogenic Architecture Lab, bricks and other building 
materials are being made from edible fungi like oyster-mushroom mycelium; the late actor Luke Perry’s final wish was to be wrapped up in mycelium embedded in a Mushroom Death Suit for his green burial. (And he was.)
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Mapping entanglements II: acrylic on panel, 12”x12” (Carlyn Yandle)
Mycelium spores, unlike seeds, are resilient to toxic compounds, high temperatures, drought and radiation — food for thought as footage of those Los Angeles homes, typically composed of and containing a wide array of synthetic polymers, go up in poisonous, cancer-causing smoke.
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Spore: Acrylic and mercerized cotton thread on found linen, 12”x 9” (Carlyn Yandle)
I see mycelium as a pattern for social regeneration after natural and unnatural disaster and scorched-earth policies. Its spreading network of tendrils mirrors our innate need to connect with one another, finding and nurturing our common ground despite divisive forces. Those thickening entanglements bring comfort and joy because we are pack animals. It is in our human nature to come together; we can see it right there in the aftermath of LA fires.
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We may be on shaky ground but I can feel the rumblings as we emerge/erupt/bloom, mycelium-like, when the conditions call for fresh energy. Bloop! Bloop!

'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.”
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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.)
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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.
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“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
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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.
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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.

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

From mind-numbing to mindful

9/30/2024

 
Dropping out is easy. This art practice is about tuning in
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Flat on my back in the chair last week, the dentist had just plunged the second needle into my eroded molar area and her assistant was now affixing the rubber dam. This is when my go-to flight response kicked in: I'm not really here! I'm not really here! I'm not really here!

Full disassociation is appropriate when two dental professionals are bearing down on you with drill and suction tube and you are required to relax your gag reflex. But checking out of reality to avoid the pain of the Divided States of America’s Presidential election campaign is not the answer.

In this Disinformation Industrial Complex age it’s tempting to drop out and go on a bed-date with the vape pen to binge Love Is Blind. But we need to stay engaged — yes, even Canadians. We need to tune in to reliable sources of news,* turn on our own brains and hearts so we can discern the rational from the irrational and the hopeful from the hateful. And when the time comes (in any public election), we need to turn to voting our own conscience and not what others expect from us. 
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The trick is to do it all without risking mental instability, starting with the premise that we are not all going to Hell in a handcart. We need to believe in ourselves as part of the greater good. Adding to ‘believing’ is the need for time away from the too-many screens. True, a growing number of US adults (58 per cent) say they prefer to get their news on their digital devices but we can choose which news sources and the conditions for absorbing it. 
This is how I approach any artwork: through belief and time. I believe that a large-scale or complex project can and will emerge through small, individual actions. I give myself the gift of time to focus on one stitch, one paint layer, one quilt-block, one knot, one row. Or, for the purpose of this weekly writing, one sentence at a time.
The following meandering, improvisational stitching-painting hybrid (linen on wood stretcher) was started this past spring, growing in complexity over the summer:

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Cotton floss, monoprint on paper, 10” x 14”I’m not sure if what I’m making these days reflects what I’m listening to, or if I’ve devised this improvisational way of working to allow my brain to fully concentrate on the information. I do know that this voyage of discovery is a symbiotic relationship, a positive-feedback loop that drives me to continue developing this emerging work in the studio while reaching a deeper understanding of the world beyond.
In another example, this recent exploration into redwork embroidery could have been influenced by tuning into news features on Vancouver’s global investment-induced construction boom, housing shortage, “renovictions” and homelessness.
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Cotton floss, monoprint on paper, 10” x 14”
At the time of this publishing there are 42 days of increasingly outrageous tactics before a new US president is elected. However we get there, a resting heart rate is required to see fear-mongering for what it is: just a desperate power grab.
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*For those looking online in Canada for news that means looking elsewhere besides Facebook and Instagram, since parent company Meta chose to block their users from quality and local news instead of paying those news sources. (Google is exempt from the Online News Act after it agreed to pay Canadian news publishers $100 million a year.)

Fun fodder for politically engaged hand-makers

7/28/2024

 
I am beyond excited at the prospect of a former prosecutor debating a current felon on Sept. 10, if Trump doesn’t wuss out. Kamala Harris has said she thinks “the voters deserve to see the split screen that exists in this race on a debate stage, and so I’m ready. Let’s go.” 

“Split screen.” Yesssss pleeease.

If the vice-presidential debate back in 2020 is any indication, this will be a goldmine for us hand-makers. That upstaging fly on Mike Pence’s hair! Kamala Harris’s pearly manicured nails flashing as she raised her hand in that just-stop gesture! Those unforgettable two words, “I’m speaking”!
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Immediately following that debate I started needling at those two words in a frilly font and fly-swatter in a raised fist. My socials were filling up with other joyful handmade responses while the entire Biden-for-president campaign capitalized on those words and that insect. “Truth Over Flies” collectible Democrat-blue fly-swatters were offered for $10 on the official campaign website, and the candidate himself posed for pics with a fly-swatter.
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"I'm Speaking," 2020, created in the days after a momentous vice-president debate. (Carlyn Yandle art and photo)
Political satire created by everyone from cupcake-bakers to news-media cartoonists and comedy writers speaks truth to power and offers levity in the face of fear. At the moment, JD Vance, that loose cannon of a Republican vice-president candidate, is serving up some rich fodder for more joyful resistance.
There are some grand, slick responses to misogyny, racism and authoritarianism but I gravitate to the simple, individual gestures that meet hate with heart, like the sousaphone player who used tactical frivolity to ridicule a KKK rally in South Carolina:
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’m Speaking is now in the possession of a friend, a professional who has endured hot air from the higher-ups her entire working life. Hanging this craft in her corporate offices would be a red flag — risky, even four years later. I appreciate that potency. I also appreciate every woman who has spoken up for what is right even as they’re shut down.

​Kamala Harris never needed to find her voice; it was always there; she just needed high-level support to be heard. She’s coming through loud and clear, with none of the nice-girl qualifiers and question marks that women have had to use to keep the menfolk calm. 
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A stitched appeal/demand during the Trump presidency, 2018, with visual references to Bread and Roses. (Carlyn Yandle art and photo)

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

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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.
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Original artwork by Kathryn Lissack (@kathrynlissack)

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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Stitching a story of a final send-off

6/16/2024

 
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This one’s for my brother, on his second memorial Father’s Day.​

I started the artwork just after returning from his ashes-scattering ceremony on one of the Gulf Islands, as he requested in the few weeks before his death. I had suggested a flotilla led by his “Brudderhood” of friends, on the Sabine Channel. He liked that but said, with some difficulty, They’ll never make it.

But they did, buoyed by a legendary/hazardous flotilla at one of their dads-and-kids camping trips. It was everything he would have wanted. An odd collection of watercraft was rafted together and his two teenage sons poured the ashes into the ocean, creating a cloud of what my brother would have called “a lovely turquoise.”

My sisters and I would exchange smiles whenever he described his many plans as Lovely, usually emphasized with a fluttery hand gesture. It was his signature descriptor in his otherwise utilitarian, East Van vernacular.

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When I got back to the city and into my studio I was listless, managing only to fold and re-fold my stash of old work jeans, many of them contributed by my brother for my art purposes. The scraps of indigos and greys, rips and frays reminded me of that shoreline and those mountains and soon I was layering the pieces together in the sashiko (Japanese for “little stabs”) way, working up a boro (indigo textile repaired and reinforced through sashiko) from memory. 

The urge to use those jeans stitches up nicely with the waste-not-want-not sensibility of mottainai that has been informing my work and life since living in Japan in my early 20s. Old jeans are too rich in embedded modern culture to not use. And these particular jeans needed a new narrative.

When the chaotic patchwork became too heart-heavy I tucked it away. In the year that followed I traveled back to Japan, then Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, and central Mexico, where the connecting threads of narrative fibre-art fuelled new energy for the boro-project.

Stories told in cloth throughout the world are often worked up not as a pre-planned design but as a journey. This is one of those. After I stitched together the scraps of the memory landscape I traversed it with more sashiko in different blues, then added french knots for sand, and in the centre, swirls of stitches in shades of turquoise. I considered adding the kayaks, paddleboard, my skiff, his motorboat, maybe an air mattress or a driftwood log or two but decided against adding that cluttered narrative to the already raggedy, improvisational patched piece.

I chose instead to stick to the feeling of that golden moment of that lovely final goodbye.
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"Lovely", 2024, Found denim, embroidery thread on stretcher, 24" x 24"
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Detail of "Lovely", 2024. Found jeans, embroidery thread on stretcher, 24" x 24"
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