carlyn yandle
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Resistance can be beautiful

4/6/2025

 
Hand-making outside the dominant economic system
The news is inescapable. The Trump tariffs announced last week will “rupture the global economy,” warns the Prime Minister. This is on top of the inflationary wallop on 45 per cent of Canadians who reported that rising prices were “greatly affecting their ability to meet day-to-day expenses in the spring of 2024, up 12 percentage points from two years earlier,” according to Statistics Canada. Further, almost one-third of Canadians are “experiencing financial difficulties,” up from 18.6 per cent in 2021. It’s all led to a “gradual deterioration in life satisfaction” especially among younger adults and those with financial difficulties. On top of all this, Canada is in the throes of a snap federal election.

Yet life goes on. That robin outside my window is still doing its 4 a.m. wake-up call. The cherry tree it perches on is about to burst into pink snowballs. Below the tree canopy the Amazon vans still roar through the neighbourhood and the UberEats drivers still double-park to keep up with their orders.

Maybe, and I’m just spit-balling here, we can be like the blossoms and flourish independent of the consumer economy and the attention economy, that battleground that has us in a near permanent state of distraction. I searched how reverse life dissatisfaction and received this AI Overview:

“To reverse life dissatisfaction, focus on identifying the root causes, setting realistic goals, practicing self-care, engaging in meaningful activities, and seeking support when needed.”
​
Even this banal Google-bot response on the general theme of self-reflection begins with the word ‘focus’, followed by ‘practicing’, ‘engaging’, ‘meaningful’, ‘activities’, ‘seeking’ and ‘support’ — words in direct opposition to ‘distraction’, ‘escaping’, ‘frivolous’, ‘inertia’, ‘ignoring’ and ‘undermine.’ There are no Tips and Tricks in the AI Overview for reversing life dissatisfaction through retail therapy, no easy instructions to move fast and break things, or buy bit-coin, self-medicate, move somewhere else or to hang on tight to your privilege.
​

The beautiful thing about having a number of ongoing art projects is that there’s always one that fits the moment. Right now that’s Hearth.

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Social making sessions resulted in this first installation of 'Hearth.' (Carlyn Yandle)
Started back in the beforetimes of 2019, Hearth is an infinitely-expanding grid of log-cabin quilt blocks that began with an idea: What kind of art-making would be engaging and easy enough to attract a diverse population, a big-picture zero-waste project that would cost nothing? What could create the chance to learn a new skill, meet people beyond one’s usual social circle, that would include the joys of giving and receiving, all toward a gallery exhibition?
​

Over the next six months, dozens of friends and friends-of-friends, neighbours, colleagues and people just happening by gathered at art studios, porches, around kitchen tables and living rooms. In groups from two to a dozen, we hand-stitched log-cabin-style quilt blocks from strips of donated fabric in improvised spirals around a central (“hearth”) square.
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Some early stitching sessions (Carlyn Yandle photos)
The blocks were eventually all installed into a massive wall installation as part of my MFA thesis exactly one day before the university shut its doors for several months. We didn’t give up our will; we organized contact-free fabric swaps and took the project online, sharing ideas and stitching instead of drinking.
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Socializing at a distance: a Zoom stitching session (Carlyn Yandle)
When the lockdown rules relaxed, Hearth was instrumental in rekindling social activity. Any in-person awkwardness dissipated as we focused on hand-stitching or just dug through the heap of fabric strips to create a pleasing palette, for our own blocks or to offer someone else.
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RE-START: An early post-lockdown session with MFA colleagues
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A street-front gallery show in the early post-pandemic; interior detail
It takes about two hours for anyone who can hold a needle to stitch a block, about the same time as any social visit. The makers, many of whom learned that in fact they could sew a straight line, were free to take their finished piece home, maybe to use as a cushion cover, placemat or the beginning of a quilt top. Most contributed their blocks to the Hearth project so their own handwork would be a part of a gallery show, with due credit.
​

As normal daily activity resumed, I moved the one bin of fabric strips and the other of finished blocks into deep storage. But just as sure as that cherry tree outside my window will burst into bloom, that project is coming back out for a show of its own. It’s a new chance to focus on practicing engaging, meaningful activity designed for those seeking connection and support outside this dominant, volatile economic system, away from forces screaming for our attention. In these perilous times we’re creating something bigger than our individual selves, one stitch, one block at a time.​

Repairing is caring

9/21/2024

 
Making things better requires thinking creatively, not throwing it all away

Can you do me a favour, a neighbour-friend asked, and I knew his sweet, destructive dog had done it again.
The pup, bred to herd, over large tracts of land, has made uneven progress adjusting to his home in an inner-city townhouse. Over the past year I’ve patched up a sofa seat cushion he was on his way to destroying; re-stuffed his new, disemboweled dog bed; and fancy-stitched an L-shaped rip on a beloved, specially-ordered Western-style shirt (the friend’s, not the dog’s).

On his most recent visit, his owner held up Exhibit A: a favourite art T-shirt with a bite-shaped chunk out of the edge of the sleeve. And then Exhibit B: the same cherished Western shirt I repaired a while ago, now with gaping hole in the lower back.

Do you think the dog might be trying to tell you something? I asked. He gave me the look of one who’s heard that line a lot. But I kid. It is my pleasure to do these repairs. He knows it and I’m sure he felt just as good about bringing over a slow-cooked pork roast when I was consumed by grief.
​
Making is connecting. I share this no-sew method to inspire others to think twice before chucking a favourite piece of clothing. To me, this twice-repaired shirt is a perfectly imperfect object, now rich with the layer of meaning of That Time the Puppy Ate A Hole In My Shirt, over the previously added layer, Fancy Embroidery Where the Puppy Ripped My Shirt. It all connects with the Japanese idea of kintsugi, the obvious and artful repair of broken objects:
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Making useless stuff like artwork is fine for the gallery but I get more satisfaction making useful things out of material that’s already in the world, items that would otherwise be thrown away because we know there’s no “away.”
​
This week, that satisfaction came from taking a can of flat black spray-paint to a metal filing cabinet (everyone’s dumping them; the local Craigslist listings alone showed 36 for sale and three for free this weekend) and converting it into a bamboo planter on casters.
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Perfectionism is part of a runaway capitalist system of productivity and purchase. It exists as a superlative in a black-and-white worldview. I distrust this fixation on perfection and what some will do to try to get there.

There is no time or space in this system for down-to-earth conservation ideals like “make do and mend” or “use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without.” Those Great Depression directives feel quaint in this Great Production era of stuff, even in the face of climate catastrophes.

Repairing is caring — for the object or material, for the person who connects with it, for its history and against wastefulness. It’s a wabi-sabi mindset that values time-worn objects and materials in direct opposition to the sterility of perfectionism. Sharing ideas and building on that knowledge knits up community and reinforces our commonality despite divisive political forces.

This is how repairing a shirt for a friend or finding new life for a throwaway thing and sharing those ideas are small political acts of resistance to market forces that see us as individual consumers to be fuelled with desire for luxury and novelty.
​
Living simply, with our imperfections relegates self-identifying artists and makers to the fringes in a perfectionist world. I happily make do with that.

Joyful Making in Perilous Times

9/10/2020

 
Where is the joy when you’re living in a time of a global coronavirus pandemic and a local toxic-drug epidemic? What is the use of making when your city is seized by global investment-real estate schemes, when there’s too much stuff in a overheated planet and a hateful, superpower president next door?

These questions ricochet around my brain, only abating when this futile, exhausting expenditure of energy hones in on the rote activity of knotting and needleworking. The hand-wringing falls into rhythm as I grasp at lost, tossed threads that I make whole and into whole new ideas.

Making is a very personal physical reaction to perilous times and unstable circumstances but working with found fibre is also an intrinsically social action that weaves in disparate economic circumstances, language, race, age and abilities. Braiding, stitching, knotting, needleworking create resilient connective tissue between one body and another. Strands thicken into solid links between the ancient and the modern, utility and self-expression, the digital and the physical, the personal and the political.

By exploring the inherent qualities of abject manufactured material, the body binds with other bodies and other places, some known, some not. It is work, but outside the tumultuous dominant economic system. It is an experience of the history of production and distribution through the material at hand.

Even in these times, when gathering around a table is a hazardous activity, when our pack species is feeling at loose ends, masked up and reluctantly apart, the tactility of rote hand-making grounds us into the here and now, one stitch, one loop, one knot at a time. We grasp at the tendrils, continuing the work, with the results standing as artifacts of a time, place and our individual and collective states of being.​

Three major works created over one year remind me of the uncertainty, the panic, the perilousness of these times, and of the solace gained through individual making and the joy of making with others. The three are relics of two years of material research that culminated in a Master of Fine Arts 2020 exhibit set up one day before the university locked down.

1. Scaffolds

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'Scaffolds': 2019, 10' x 10' x 8" All materials gathered by workers at residential tower construction sites in the Vancouver area.

2. Resurge

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'Resurge' is inspired by the palette of the West Coast foreshore where it began.
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Spanning 12 feet in diameter and grounded to the floor, 'Resurge' troubles distinctions between utility craft and visual art.

3. Hearth

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'Hearth' serves as a visual archive of five months of community hand-stitching sessions at kitchen tables and art studios.
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A close-up view of the wall installation reveals provisionally-composed strips of fabric and sewing pins framing the several dozen hand-stitched "log cabin"-style quilt blocks by many hands.
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The simple blocks were made by artists and members of the community at large during five months of open weekly sessions.
    Cross-posted at
    carlynyandle.substack.com

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