Category: Knotting

The nodes know

1/30/2026

Hope empowers quirky denim objects

I’ve had this exchange a few times this past week:
You’re so busy. What are you working on?
Uh… hard to say.

It’s hard to put into words this curious crafty endurance with a deadline. Better to just hold up my needle-scarred fingers and gnarled hands. Hand-work stuff. For exhibition.

I have only myself to blame for spending these glorious foggy-sunny mid-winter days indoors cutting out seams and waistbands from discarded jeans and stitching them into quirky little coils and nodes. But they want to emerge, like characters in a novel that surprise even the author. They want to sprout like spores out of a knotted network of denim created back in the months before the global pandemic lockdown.

Resurge started as a compulsion during the first tempestuous Trump administration and soon after the release of an alarming report on climate change and rising sea levels. I fell into a daily rhythm of knotting and braiding a pile of discarded jeans, for the simple satisfaction of bringing new life to this particular abject material. The work revealed itself as a ground-zero eruption, an unstructured sprawl of frayed tendrils and rivulets of global brand logos in a very West Coast marine palette.

But now Resurge wants to rise above its heaviness, no longer limited to the floor but installed at a vantage point that suggests topography: a whole new world.

I didn’t overthink the urge to needle up a population of nodes to insert into a tumultuous water-scape. Instead I’m immersed in the material and the method, allowing the swirl of ideas and responses from local and global realities to infuse and entangle. The making is irrepressible, eclipsing my weekly writing time, as I make one benign conical object after another. Soon — hopefully — a critical mass will emerge that must be reckoned with.

In 2019, this slippery, shapeless sea of knots held space for more layers of meaning. In 2026 Resurge offers regrowth and resilience, from the fracture. I hope it will resonate in these perilous times.

(Cross-posted at https://carlynyandle.substack.com/)

UNRAVEL, Mixed media works by Tatjana Mirkov-Popovicki, Amanda Wood and Carlyn Yandle runs from Feb. 3 - March 14, 2026 at Seymour Art Gallery, Deep Cove, B.C. Reception: Sunday, Feb. 8, 2 - 4 p.m.; “From Conversation to Practice” Program with Amanda Wood, Sunday, Feb. 22, 2 p.m.; “Hearth” social stitching event with Carlyn Yandle, Sunday, March 1, from 2 p.m.; artist talk with Tatiana Mirkov-Popovicki, Sunday March 8, 11 a.m.

Awkward family moment informs art-making aesthetic

7/14/2024

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Original artwork by Kathryn Lissack (@kathrynlissack)

'Foundlings': Kids' works of terrible beauty

7/2/2019

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Clockwise from top left: "This Little Lump", Sylva and Shyla; "Garbage Catcher", Coco; "Little Worker", Kahlio, Basha and Ari.

Everyone is feeling that relentless creep of plastic that is threatening to consume us, the consumers. I felt myself drowning in the tsunami of stuff over this past year of grad studies at Emily Carr University. Art, as one instructor stated, is a wasteful business.

Even as I retreated back to my green, pristine Gulf Island I was hit with it at the end of the long drive through forest to the local dump: a mountain of garbage. This, from a small off-grid community known for its environmental consciousness.

My art practice is driven by a need to physically grapple with the unfathomable when words are not enough. In the strange way that an idea for an artwork takes hold, that sight of that mountain of petroleum-derived recycling-rejects led to my latest project: Foundlings.

For a while I’d been trying to land on a low-barrier, low-skill technique that could involve kids in the making of objects from found, non-recyclable and non-biodegradable materials. Then I landed on the work of late American sculptor Judith Scott, whose many exhibitions of her curious bound and woven fiber/found objects have led to discourse on “outsider” art, disability (she was profoundly deaf, non-verbal, and had severe Down’s Syndrome), intention, new sculpture forms and the privileged art world.

Within a month of escaping the art institution I was driving a pickup-truckload of colourful non-recyclable, non-biodegradable bits from the home-grown garbage mountain to the island’s only elementary school.

Before we got to the making part I sat down with the students and shared some images of Scott’s work for inspiration. We talked about how this artist’s method of wrapping, binding and weaving fibre around objects adds curiosity to what is on the inside. We talked about how working with familiar objects and materials in unusual ways can lead to new ideas. And we talked about how an object can be terrible and beautiful at the same time, does not have to be a recognizable thing nor have utility.

‘Curated’ materials gleaned from the island’s dump.

We worked over time on the pieces, some kids on their own and some in groups of two or three, adding even more fibre and found plastic detritus from their year-end trip to the local provincial marine park. On the final day of school I arrived to pick up the final pieces and was astounded at the creations. They were richly textured, humorous and foreboding, and proof of why I collaborate with children: they consistently demonstrate the importance of letting hands and imaginations fly.
They each titled their pieces in their own hand and I installed them for exhibit on forest plinths (moss-covered stumps from the last big clearcut) in time for the annual Arts Fest. With no chance they’ll degrade in the weather they remain there, pretty and pretty disturbing: our inescapable stuff.

Kids assembling the armatures of their pieces in the first phase of the Foundlings project.

Part of the Foundlings project, installed in a Gulf Island forest.

Snow Pillow, by Mikiko

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Attraction, repulsion wrapped up in one sculpture project

6/5/2019

At first I thought all this must still be debris from the Japan tsunami. But that was eight years ago and the surf in my remote neck of the woods keeps throwing up snarls of monofilament netting, plastic shards, nylon rope, bits of fibreglass hulls, and styrofoam. So much styrofoam.

I’ve been collecting up the stuff, inspired by this Gulf island’s own Styrophobe who’s taken on what some would say is a Sisyphean task of removing even the tiny beads of polystyrene from the clefts of rock along the shoreline.

My gathering is a tiny, maybe even futile, gesture but I’m giving form to the invisible: the bits and pieces we overlook on the foreshore or in the forest that, when lashed, bound, and woven together demand attention. These small but critical masses of debris are inspired by the found-material sculptures of Judith Scott. As I lash, bind, and weave I think of how the kids in my life would like to be in on this: hunting for material, making form from their hands and imaginations.

Inspired by the sculptures by Judith Scott, this mass is texturally rich with culturally-embedded petroleum-derived materials.

My gathering requires connecting with others to access materials. The Styrophobe, who’s also the guy in charge of the local dump, stands on the top of the garbage mountain, holding up uncertain objects for my consideration: How’s this? This stuff looks pretty good. Could you use this?

In 15 minutes I fill the back of the pickup truck with a curated collection of colourful plastic throwaways: pool noodles, watering cans, yards of orange fencing, jerrycans, twine, tape, cleaning-pad refill boxes, five-gallon buckets and lids. I fill up with purple things, red things, plastics in acid green, electric blue, hazard yellow, and caution orange — all the colours of the petrochemical rainbow.

A fan of the local Styrophobe is overwhelmed by the throwaway plastic in this garbage mountain in the forest.

A curated collection of non-biodegrable recycling rejects fills a pickup truck.

After a lot of material prep (cutting off snags and sharp bits, wiping and washing off surface debris), I haul it to the local school where the kids, teacher and I dive in and play with the unwanted stuff. We have plans and we don’t have a plan, which is the right place to be with material exploration. This is where we learn to work with each material and not against its inherent nature, a great reminder of the futility of forcing solutions. This is where we learn to follow our hands, to work on our own or collectively over days and not minutes, to consider colour, form, and techniques for putting it all together, to create something that resonates with this time and place out of nothing anybody wanted.

It’s an important start for the generation that will be forced to deal with this legacy of stuff long after the plastic-agers die off.

Kids take to the colourful cast-offs during Day One of a sculpture workshop.

A useless thing with many functions

4/10/2019

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The brilliant part about being an aging female is your growing self-acceptance. Maybe this is because you don't feel that ever-present gaze anymore so you’re not feeling as judged. Or maybe it’s because you’ve just had enough of all that and it’s tiresome and dammit you like to be cozy so screw them.

Part of my self-acceptance is stepping out of the ‘should-storm’ of art-making and doing what I love to do with my hands: hunting down materials that have already had their first use and playing up their inherent qualities through knotting, weaving, tying, stitching and binding. I want to work repetitively, easily, without technological assistance and without haste or waste. And in doing so I’m carving out space and time to calm down, reflect and to think deeper — more crucial as the distractions threaten to take over.

Nate Yandle photo

In this way the work is not just in the form or connotations but the well-being and challenge that is relatable to makers who may or may not self-identify as artists. Wrapped up in there are issues of endurance, innovation, history of labour, the learning of the skill, dedication (and frustration), the specific culture and history of the method, the muscle memory that extends back to childhood, and the relationships built through the gathering of the materials.

Through this making I make some hay over the established boundaries between the privileged art world and real life, between craft and sculpture, between tactile and political action.

Scaffolds is composed of found spun-polyester building wrap, tarp and nylon cord over an armature of waste construction materials including caution tape, PVC piping, rebar, conduit, baling wire, and junction boxes, all attached through simple knots.

Special thanks goes to the construction workers who delivered these materials from their many jobsites to my studio for my useless work with many functions.

Nate Yandle photos

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Mammoth social sculpture going up at Draw Down event

6/5/2015

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I'm not knocking social media. Hitting 'Like' to one posted act of injustice after another is nothing like joining a sit-in at your MP's office or marching in protest. But I also get that there is power in those tweets and online petitions. We saw it this week when Tim Hortons decided it had had enough bad press and was breaking its ad deal with Enbridge.

Still, there's a lot we lose by going through life connecting with one another mostly via screen-pecking 'like' or tweeting or 'gramming. We are, after all, a social species; our well-being is dependent on sharing space in the actual physical world. Consider this: If someone took away your ability to connect on social media you might get seriously miffed. If you were allowed unlimited social media access but had to connect in physical isolation from all other humans, you might get seriously unhinged.

Early days of the Network. Photo by Debbie Tuepah

There is something profoundly healthy about being around the energy of other people. It's the why for clubs and associations, parties and gatherings. And it's the why behind the Network sculpture/social engagement project.

Artist Debbie Tuepah and I came up with the idea just a few years after the birth of Twitter and Facebook, and within a year of the debut of Instagram and Pinterest. We felt a need to create a physical alternative to all this virtual social networking — some low-barrier, small-footprint way to bring people together. Something that would be collaborative but less skill-based than, say, a quilting bee, but offering similar tactile engagement.

This thread of an idea soon joined other threads: the materials should be found/donated and should be the stuff that ordinarily ends up in a landfill. Synthetic, petroleum-based fabrics and sheeting would do the trick. (No one knows what to do with those lurid-coloured Fortrel bedspreads and vinyl shower curtains.)

The more people work on it, the more visually interesting it becomes.

We cleared the decks and hung several strands from a hook in the studio ceiling, like I did as a kid when making those macrame plant hangers. We added one strand to another by simple knotting. We held parties and invited friends to bring their friends to tie one on. Kids got knotty and businessmen who thought the whole thing a little weird at first were soon weaving free-style.

We knew we were onto something. A year later it made its public debut at the Mini Maker Faire at the PNE, where it grew into the gargantuan piece it is today.

The Network is too big for any studio parties now. This mammoth collaborative sculpture demands the kind of space like the Atrium of the Mount Pleasant community centre, where it will be suspended on Saturday, June 20, 10 a.m.-2 p.m. as part of the city-wide Draw Down event.

Come on down, tie one on, grab a thread and take part in this social medium in the actual, physical world.

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A Season of snarls

7/11/2014

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Macrame-ing cable wire. Carlyn Yandle photo

A big shout-out to the recycling staffer at my local Return-It depot who painstakingly went through a bin full of snarls of computer cables to select the ones with the most colourful clusters of wire for me.

I find it tough to march right into these kind of dirty, noisy man places but a girl's gotta do what she needs to do for her art. And I needed some cables to macrame for an upcoming show.

I'm in love with cable wire because it almost vibrates with the culture of our times and can be used in place of and in reference to traditional fibers. It's in overabundance (wireless home - hah!) and really pretty.

But to get it you've got to do some shucking. And this is how I came to spend many of these past fine days decapitating each, uh, connector-plug thing, skinning the plastic conduit with an X-acto knife, pulling away insulating woven aluminum or cellophane wraps and bundling the colourful clusters into skeins. (Below: before and after.)

Florence, Italy-based artist Kasey McMahon's life-sized 'Connected.'

I can't resist mixing traditional fiber arts with industrial materials as a starting point and letting the materials kind of take over, shaping concepts. Sure, you could make a few bracelets or wrap a few light fixtures with the stuff but the power of the mountains of those wires, cables, old plastic laptops and toxic dead rechargeable batteries resonates with issues of globalization, environmental hazard, over-work and over-connectedness. Yum!

No surprise that there is an emerging — no, burgeoning — genre of sculptural and installation work that uses tossed computer bits to evoke those themes.

Below left, Democratic Republic of Congo artist Maurice Mbikayi's "Anti-social Network I" is one in a series of works that attempts to grapple with his "digital demons." Below right, it took Polish sculptor Marek Tomasik three years to install an enclosure composed of old computer parts in a 14th Century castle in Poland.

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Art trumps ads by just a whisper

11/1/2013

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They say if you want someone's attention, whisper. Or maybe that was just a line from a Whisper pantyhose commercial back in the '70s.

Whispering to get attention isn't easy in an image-packed urban landscape where slick marketing messages infiltrate our entire field of vision, from pop-up ads on our screens to the clutter of billboards.

There's so much of it that we subconsciously absorb, dismiss then ignore each image as we move through the visual bombardment. And we wonder why we're mentally exhausted at the end of the day.

That's what makes the experience of public artwork in the city landscape so compelling. No call to buy or to back a product or political organization or private enterprise. With no aspirational words (Believe! Passion! Simplify!) or branded images, logos, phrases or text of any kind to cue our automatic-piloted brain to overlook the visual image, a slight confusion sets in. Whoa. What the hell is that?

First comes the double-take, then out comes the smart-phone camera. The proof of the attention-grabbing power of commercial-free artwork on the city environment can be measured by the number of similar google images. You'd be hard pressed to find that Telus panda ad on a Flicker photo stream, but you'll run across multiple images of a single public artwork, like this giant macrame-esque installation created by Jasminka Miletic-Prelovac, at the only tall building (for now) at Main and Broadway. Or Edward Burtynsky's images on Pattison billboards (spotted along West 4th Avenue, below).

These message-free images that appropriate buildings and billboards are enough to compel viewers to investigate further. Turns out Miletic-Prelovac's work was this year's commission to highlight the livable laneways movement. And Burtynsky's images are from his latest book and new documentary, Watermark.

No logos. No brands. No text. These are whispers that can create a small roar.

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Put down that Blackberry and go get some blackberries

8/1/2013

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I so adore this old World War I royalty-free poster created for the Canada Food Board that I post it in my kitchen every year during the putting-food-by months, already underway.

I love the displayed array of fresh produce that would never be pushed by a private enterprise (where's the profit margins in stuff you can grow?) and the chief goals of saving and not wasting. So anti-capitalist. There's nary a scrap of the patriarchy in this national call to action. You want to live well? Listen to what your grandmother's got to say, girl, and you'll be wanting not.

It's propaganda art you can really sink your teeth into.

There's an art to putting food by without relying on electricity, and an art to harvesting what's wilding in your environment, also known as foraging. We do it with intention (in jeans and long-sleeved shirts, with hook, snips, and yogurt containers) or without intention (leaning one's barely clad beach-bound body into the thicket for a few juicy morsels).

We are not wanting for blackberries in this corner of the world, to put by, or put in a pie — and not just for the fruit. In what should become an extension of this very Vancouver (and Vancouver Island) activity, the ubiquitous rogue species of Himalayan blackberry can be harvested for their durable 'vegetable leather.'

David Gowman photo from The Georgia Straight, straight.com

The time of this writing is the perfect time to reap a particular harvest, according to local artist
Sharon Kallis. It's late enough in the growing season for the canes to reach the thickness of a baby's arm and shoot 10 feet in the air in search for cyclists to take down or paths to take over. But it's not so late in the season that the menacing-looking vines are too woody to be able to be stripped. That hits around mid-August.

Why would want to strip the canes? It's a rhetorical question for anyone who likes to make something out of nothing, and this is even better: make stuff, while hacking into this invasive species' ability to turn diverse urban woodlands into a thorny monocrop.

Kallis, whose special interest is in social engagement, shows how to strip blackberry vines (or watch this video) to wrestle down this barbed invader and amass some very usable material that can be used immediately or stored for later to make useful things like baskets or privacy screens, and useless, more interesting things like installations. Some inspiration from the prolific American sculptor Patrick Dougherty:

Crossing Over, American Craft Museum, New York, New York, 1996.

Dougherty installing at the North Carolina Museaum of Art, 2009.

Summer Palace, 2009. Morris Arboretum, Philadelphia.

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Thinking outside our little boxes

4/19/2013

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I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one who is aching to make a break from the indoors and take it all outside. Now that the weather is improving (well, theoretically at this writing) thoughts go to how to set up an outdoor setup for sketching, fabricating, painting or plotting our next moves or just playing with materials.

In my neck of the woods, where the studio is often someplace at home due to insanely prohibitive rental fees, personal outdoor space is more likely a balcony and one that's none too private either.

It's a challenge to carve out a little outdoor sacred space in our vertical built environment. And even if we're allowed to create some delineation, on the Wet Coast there's no point hanging billowy curtains or installing anything that would sag and sog at the first spring shower. We're looking for something attractive yet weather-proof.

These are the kinds of things I think about when I scan all those online image collections on Tumblr, Houzz and Pinterest. There's no shortage of ideas for ideal outdoor sanctuaries, but I like the ingenious solutions, the ones that make use of all the excess lying around, like the flip-flop bead curtain composed of plugs of the foam soles in Nairobi:

This blogger composed a collage of flip-flops found on a Nairobi beach during a single morning walk, as well as the pic of the storefront with the fun foam curtain.

It's the perfect case of necessity being the mother of invention, and an inspiration to make use of what's in over-abundance locally, relying on little or no tools in the making.
And since we're in the artwork-making world, we'd rather invest in supplies than decor anyway.

It reminds me of this little project I made a few years back, after I was searching for a way to deal with the ubiquitous plastic bags that are not accepted in my building's recycling bins. I shred the bags into roughly two-inch strips with a rotary cutter (scissors work fine too), tied them together into strands, then tied one end of each strand to each eye of a simple ceiling-mounted curtain rod. Voila!: a blossom-y sun-filtering retractable screen that to this day has withstood the elements, and grows as bags accumulate.

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<<Previous

The nodes know

Awkward family moment informs art-making aesthetic

'Foundlings': Kids' works of terrible beauty

Attraction, repulsion wrapped up in one sculpture project

A useless thing with many functions

Mammoth social sculpture going up at Draw Down event

A Season of snarls

Art trumps ads by just a whisper

Put down that Blackberry and go get some blackberries

Thinking outside our little boxes

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