creative process - carlyn yandle

Wild, brilliant colour is rocking my concrete-grey foundations

11/17/2017

A wall of a Peruvian restaurant in Merida, Mexico is devoted to customers' reviews written on ribbons. Carlyn Yandle photo

Modern science calls it bunk but I am fully on board with chromotherapy, an alternative medicine branded by the labcoats as a pseudo-science. The preferred term is photobiology now, an acknowledged science that includes the indisputable benefits of light therapy. I prefer the more mystical "chromotherapy" because it's less about rational explanations and more about feeling. And, for the synaesthesiasts (more specifically, those of us who experience chromesthesia), the beautiful music.

Consider these accompanying images from southern Mexico. Bask in the warmth of these visual fields of wild, intense, unrestrained, unleashed colour jumping out of our monochromatic devices.

A sewing notions store display of zippers in Merida, Mexico. Carlyn Yandle photo

Still in my first couple of weeks here in the Yucatan, I am bobbing around the crowded city streets, slack-jawed at what just may be the direct opposite palette of a Vancouver B-Line bus on any given November rush hour. My outlook has shifted from a low-level, gunmetal-grey resignation to a hot-fuchsia/blood-orange exhilarating mixto, all from looking at the zipper selection in a notions shop (of which there are plenty and another reason for exhilaration), or a glimpse into a hot-pink and aquamarine courtyard restaurant.

But it's not all feel-good. I am seduced by vibrant art and I use it to seduce in my own making: first the beauty, then the crack in the beauty. It's working when I think, "This is pretty and pretty horrifying."

Bright, hand-stitched floral motifs on everyday clothing say more for the Mayans than "pretty." Carlyn Yandle photo

If colour didn't entice then Walt Disney could have saved himself the price of acres of paint and Disneyland would be just metal and asphalt. The superstore cereal aisles would look like a newspaper periodicals library. You get the monochromatic picture.

Colour is a social statement in the bright, face-framing embroidered embellishments around a huipil (blouse) worn by mainly older women, or the brilliant woven blanket hanging from a balcony of a colonial facade. There is some needling in all that needlework, but without the dazzling hues we might not clue into the significance.

All this visual heat here in the southern part of North America is creating my own little inner unrest, clashing with my northern hometown palette of bruisey skies infinitely mirrored through the city's colourless glass towers. My concrete-grey foundations are being rocked. And I like it.

A dazzling woven blanket appears to appropriate the space of colonialist architecture, in Merida, Mexico. Carlyn Yandle photo

Courtyard restaurants in Merida's downtown entice diners with fiesta-hued interiors. Carlyn Yandle photo

A beautiful craftivism in a flowery part of the world

11/8/2017

MORE THAN DECORATION: Flower images carry deep cultural significance for the Maya. Left: A figure dating from 600-900bc nestled in a lily. Centre: Needlepoint detail from a huipil (top), part of a traditional everyday dress. Right: Jesus emerging from a lily in an oil painting of the Immaculate Conception. Carlyn Yandle photos

I've made it my mission to shake things up by injecting the handmade domestic — doilies, quilts, sweaters and rugs — into austere, authoritative spaces and places, from pristine galleries to sketchy undersides of my city, pushing back on everyday misogynistic descriptors like 'girly' or 'old-lady' or the slightly derogatory 'frou-frou' and 'flowery.'

Then I landed in Merida, Mexico, last week where there is no fight against things flowery and archetypical feminine. Here in the capital of the Yucatan state and the ancient Maya culture (not dead but flourishing against all odds, by the way, like Canada's indigenous people) the streets are a flowery visual field of richly needleworked garments and handmade decorative traditions woven throughout the city, from tiled floors to architectural details and murals.

Above and far right: Carpet-like ceramic tile floor artworks are more than decorative. At left, a four-petal flower signifies universal realms; Centre: Merida's impressive El Gran Museo Del Mundo Maya pays tribute to the importance of the handmade floral motif in one of its exhibit salons. Carlyn Yandle photos

Flowers are so sacred and symbolic in the highly complex Maya culture that the Franciscan missionaries, in service of the Catholic Church, appropriated specific flower designs in their battle for their souls, in a cultural war of the roses (and lilies and other healing, spiritually-weighty blooms).

Left: This rare depiction in oil of Fray Francisco de Santa Ana appeals to the Mayan sense of the sacred. At right, typical religious imagry is embellished with rich floral motifs in a visual appropriation of Mayan culture. Carlyn Yandle photos

Coming from the land of yoga pants, I'm fascinated by this idea that an acceptable form of everyday dress is one's own hand-stitched art piece in the form of brightly-coloured cultural patterns of flowers on white cotton or linen tops and tunics, over an underskirt edged in a thick band of white lace.

No made-in-China. No apologies, no fading away.

Am I blue? Yes, and grey and silver too

3/29/2017

“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.

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.

Impression of two overlapping doilies on a pair of jeans.

Detail of the lacy traces through the bleaching process.

Samples of experiments with different dilutions of bleach, duration and fabrics.

A roll of quilt binding made from three denim shirts.

Big painting shift at little house on the prairie

9/19/2016

Day 12 painting: Embroidered details in a scene of a newly "thrashed" hay field.

I've just returned from a month in the big country of southwest Saskatchewan: big skies, big farming operations, big empty days that were all too much at the start of my artist residency at the Wallace Stegner House.

Suddenly agoraphobic, I pulled down all the blinds and paced around that lovely century-old house, wondering what on earth possessed me to throw myself into this imposing patchwork landscape. I am not a landscape painter; that's my dad's bag.

Plus I came by plane and an eight-hour car ride, so even if I did want to paint, I didn't have my usual large stretched canvases and totes of paints. I did bring a few of my usual travel essentials: embroidery hoops, needles and floss — and an old bed sheet. I knew there was just a couple of stores in town, and none would be selling art supplies so I packed a tiny travel set of liquid acrylics, a few brushes and a pad of mixed-media cardstock.

My sketchy plan involved, well, sketching with my father, who has spent some of every summer in this tiny town of Eastend ever since he filled the Stegner House with his landscape paintings 15 years ago.

We were quite a pair: me, not at all comfortable with the whole plein-air tradition, and him, increasingly unfamiliar with his life's work of painting that involved biking into the country to sketch then returning to his basement to paint in the heat of the day. (Actually we were mostly a trio, his wife acting as facilitator for whatever this was, supplying us with water bottles, sunhats, sketch pads and willow charcoal, and generally getting us on the road.)

We circled around this vague idea of mine as we circled around this dead-quiet, struggling little town every morning. But the awkwardness turned to anguish back at my studio as I undertook the tedious pursuit of finding some interest — or even the point — in painting puffy clouds and dun-coloured hills.

A week later and out of sheer frustration at my lack of landscape-painting prowess, I resorted to dropping diluted paint on a taut scrap of bedsheet in an embroidery hoop just to watch it bleed. I threw the first painted scrap away and did another, with a little more intention, then threw that away too. Within a couple of hours I figured out the right water-to-paint ratio to create a slightly controlled bloom with each stroke. A lot of other distracted behaviour (baking apple crisps, walking by the river, venting via text to my artist friends) meant that each additional stroke was added to a dried layer and by the end of the afternoon, a landscape was emerging on a miniature stretched canvas. That one I didn't throw out. But it was still a little hazy. That's when I thought about using my stash of embroidery floss for final line work.

I sat in the cool of the front screened porch that evening and embroidered some more information onto the painting. It was a clumsy first effort but soon I was enjoying the daily practice of biking in the morning with my father, painting something inspired by the ride in the afternoon, then embroidering some details in the evening, inviting others to join me for stitching sessions on the front porch.

I did this every day until I had 12 little paintings, each a progression from the last. I saw them as blocks for a future quilt, which led to a well-attended culminating exhibit, "Scenes from a Quilted Landscape."

But now I'm viewing them as something beyond a quilt and beyond the horizon. I'm calling them Points of Interest: something to build on and build with.

As with all creative pursuits, forcing solutions is futile. My original idea of coaxing my father back into his painting studio by getting him to share some of his process with me was a non-starter. These days he finds everyday joy in the moment, whether that is spotting a hawk while biking the backroads, playing a languid rendition of The Girl from Ipanema on piano in the hot afternoons, or watching the town's many cats on the prowl from the front porch of the Stegner House while his wife and I embroidered the summer evenings away.

I'm not sure if he knew it but he passed on to me the most valuable lesson for painting a scene: You have to actually see it.

My first effort: a clunky rendition of the Wallace Stegner House

Day 2: Black bridge behind the Stegner House, in black stitches

Day 3: Fun with architectural detail and embroidered lettering

Day 4: Sky and hills and embroidered sunflowers facing the morning sun

Day 5: Our hangout: coffee shop and pottery studio, surrounded by gardens

Day 6: The silty back roads, llike biking on velvet. (Wheel-seizing "gumbo" when wet)

Day 7: Embroidery showing the flight path of a hostile hawk

Day 8: Big skies and tiny grain elevator

Day 9: Old Beaver Lumber building in the nearby almost-ghost town

Day 10: The observatory, in some of the darkest skies in Canada

Day 11: "The Town of Eastend" rock formation in the hills, in embroidery

Slide-showing the process:

From disaster to 'Discomforter': 5 lessons learned

5/15/2015

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.)

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.

Nothing new on halloween, and that's a good thing

10/31/2014

What do you do when one of your closest friends is in the hospital with complications and the weather outside is the perfect visual for seasonal depression? You make!

And so I devote this column to the silly business of making and make-believe in trying times.

First, let me say that Halloween is my kind of holiday. It is an intoxicating cocktail of glue guns and spontaneity, material-hacking and thrift-store-hopping, laced with peanut-butter cups and just a smidge of anti-consumerism.

It all sounds a bit contradictory but after a lifetime of costume-making I've pretty much found the place I need to find a little meaning in this sugar-cranked occasion.

It starts in late September, that one time of year when the little people in my life are willing to share their full-throttle imaginations (before their emerging Inner Critic begins to outshout them).

Then I strike out for my usual haunts (thrift shops, ReStore) with an opportunistic eye. My rules for costume-making have been distilled down to one: 'nothing new.' Except for tools and fasteners (glue, thread, pins etc.) all the fabrics and bits must have already finished their first use. There is more than enough stuff already in existence without creating a new market; it's just a matter of moving goods from their past use (clothing, construction scraps, bolt-ends) to my costume purposes.

Finally, there is the fabrication stage, which may or may not involve the tykes in question, depending on age. I encourage them to at least draw something about the costume they envision, or be 'in the manner of' to help me conceive it. I will make a portion of the costume early on for them to play with (business types would call this a progress meeting) and revise as I/we go.

For the price of some semi-toxic treat from their loot bag, I will ensure the costume will be durable and comfy enough for dancing and leaping around during their sugary highs.

To wit, we have three-year-old Mimi's costume this year. She showed me that she needed to be a lock-kneed, arms-extended robot so I scoured the second-hand aisles in search for a way to create the all-important illusion of stiffness. A small bundle of metalic-polyfiber pipe insulation found at the VGH Thrift Store on Broadway and Main fit the bill, coupled with a metallic girls' sweater and silver shoes from the nearby SallyAnn. I found the other bits around the apartment: a couple of unlistenable CDs, metal washers, jar lids, orange wire nuts and silver buttons she selected from my button jars. (Not shown: the extendable treat can made from accordion air duct tubing.)

Dem bones get another daylighting, on another nephew. (Yandle family photos)

I invest some effort in my costumes so that they are durable enough to be passed on to some other kid and have even spotted my handiwork worn, often in new ways, by neighbourhood kids I've never met.

Not a Halloween goes by when someone (always a woman) will say to me, "You have too much free time." It's one of those jokey putdowns but now that I've embraced making full time, I see that throwaway comment for what it is. Mister Rogers sang it to me when I was a kid and I sing it when I'm making with kids: I like to take my time.

My costumes have nothing to do with perfection or approval but are a maker's way of engaging with kids to play in a whole new way before they are fully seduced by the marketing complex.

Like the Mister says, you can think about things and make-believe; all you have to do is think and they'll grow.

QR button blanket: Epic fail or a larger reading?

3/21/2014

After three months of sewing one donated button after another into a giant QR code, the big moment arrived this week: time to stand back and scan that baby with a reader app, translating this quilt-thing to read, "The devil is in the details."

Except it didn't read. Don't panic!, I thought, then spent the entire next day working with a photo image of the QR Button Blanket, Photoshopping in more buttons and darker buttons and bigger buttons, trying to add the minimum amount of density for the software program to register the pattern and work its magic to produce the punchline. No luck; even a sliver of white in one button cluster puts a wrench in the wholecloth works. I filed this one under the category of Epic Fail, not worth finishing it as intended, framing it in black bias binding. I do not want to create something that is 'still' good; I want the thing to be good, full stop.

Failure demands confronting the why. Why conceive such a laborious, risky project in the first place? Why endure the painstaking process when half-way through it was becoming abundantly clear that this was not going to 'read'?

But there is another power here, and that's tied to the process beyond the product. The achievement may lie in the endurance (in an increasingly A.D.D. world) that is not necessarily attached to the product after all. It may be in seeing it through, without the promise of a sure result. The power may lie in the humble, everyday materials and the community of women who contributed all those bits of plastic saved from the waste stream. (There should really be a global ban on production of billions of plastic buttons. Plant-based plastic, bone, wood, and leather- or fabric-wrapped tin buttons eventually return to the earth.)

But what's really starting to click in for me is the cultural reference of this button-grid design. A decade ago, it might have been viewed as an oddly arranged colour field or an abstracted grid but we're so acclimatized to codes that the pattern begs to be 'read.' The fact that this is irresolvable might be annoying. And that's interesting.

Wavy Gravy, marker on synthetic velvet, 58" x 43"

The possible multiple references could be more engaging than the one answer provided by a QR reader app. There's something to be learned in the discomfort of the open-endedness.

Moments like these, I seek out the artists who have embraced what New York artist Polly Apfelbaum calls the 'tough beauty' of visually exciting works that incorporate everyday materials in surprising ways. Apfelbaum, who calls herself a bad crafter, articulates the process of hard work in this video.

"I work all the time," she says, without a schedule and in a highly experimental way. "You make the work and then you hope for the best."

"It's very important to get your fuck-you back."

I'm going with that.

Designs on the halter dress-tool belt combo

1/30/2014

The denim Dakota, from hedleyandbennett.com

Most people will admit that their everyday clothes are a sort of uniform. We need to keep it pretty simple because we're likely dressing in the dim of the still-dark morning when we'd rather spend those extra minutes sleeping.

My own uniform is basically a T-shirt, tights and boots under what I view as a Western-secular abaya — a wrap sweater, long hoodie or whatever else is lying around — and a raincoat. Just this side of 'not crazy' and pretty functional for weekdays at the studio.

It's taken some trial and error to figure out how to adapt this bike-friendly getup to a day of painting or carving or casting or sewing, climbing up and down ladders or working on the floor. I need a combo toolbelt and day dress, something I can switch out with the sweater-abaya thingy.

These designs take time. You need to walk a mile in a maker's apron to figure out how it needs to function. That's what former culinary school grad Ellen Bennett did. As a cook she saw the need that led to her own L.A.-based online business, Hedley and Bennett. I'm inspired, and denim is definitely the way to go. The tool pockets are essential but the backless style doesn't work over tights. I need me a work dress.

Back in the day, women had housework dresses, but they were a little too light duty. Sewing one up in denim would basically create a lab coat, and I hate to be encumbered by sleeves. I'm thinking more halter dress than coat.

Back to the drawing board. I need big front and side pocket-compartments for the brushes, Xacto knife, painting rags, latex gloves, hair clip, micro computer/stereo system and some sort of accommodation for earbuds to enable hands-free operation of said iPhone. I was following my instincts, obeying my gut, but this was all starting to sound a little familiar. I was conjuring up the maximum-convenience garment version of The Homer.

Like all enduring design, function trumps form, and it takes a lot of mulling to simplify that form. I separated the 'must haves' from the 'nice to haves' and finally settled on sewing up a durable grey denim wrap dress, for ease of movement, with right-side tool/communication pockets.

My beta version is now encrusted with more than a year's worth of paint and gesso so it's a good time to roll out Work Dress 2.0. I still like the wrap design but I can see the top section should pull over the head apron-style so I can use that upper front real-estate for slim pockets for the pointy tools that don't sit pretty in side pockets when I'm sitting. Oh yes, and it needs to be made out of old jeans, pockets and all.

I may be taking orders for the Work Dress by next year, or not taking any orders on what is appropriate daywear.

The beta version of the workers' wrap dress.

Earbuds buttonhole above the side back pocket: check.

Just a bad craft? Time and techonology will tell

11/29/2013

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.

A potent show of Fabric unfolds at the Vancouver Art Gallery

10/11/2013

Kimsooja with curator Daina Augaitis

Internationally renowned artist Kimsooja was verklempt at the opening reception for her show, Unfolding, at the Vancouver Art Gallery Thursday.

Her audience would soon feel that emotion unfolding as the soft-spoken artist led a tour of the new exhibit that runs to Jan. 26.

Revisiting some 30 years of her deeply personal works, with her son and other close family and friends in attendance, was clearly overwhelming for the Korean-born New York artist , who recently wrapped up another wrapping at the Venice Biennale.

'Overwhelming' is a good descriptor for the show, too.

Bright, satiny boulder-like mounds presented in the Bottari tradition of wrapping gifts in colourful fabrics contain material scraps the artist retrieved from the Tsunami-struck region of Japan.

Visitors feel the unfolding of a singular vulnerability in a cavernous room as simultaneous video screenings reveal the artist standing still in a crowded street in various urban corners of the Earth.

The mix of rusty, worn mechanical objects and brilliant satin fabrics is a visual feast.

Another room featuring truck overloaded with a heap of colours evokes displacement or an unwieldy migration.

This retrospective is a reminder of the potency of found fabric, a culturally embedded material that can be a medium for painting or sculpture, often at the same time, as Kimsooja does so powerfully.

The artist raises those stakes by making material a metaphor for the wrapping and unwrapping, the enfolding, the unfolding, the concealing and exposing that resonates long after leaving the gallery.

A performance of Kimsooja's A Beggar Woman (see video clip, below) is set for Nov. 29 as part of Fuse.