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Keeping Our Eyes on our work while cranes Swing overhead

8/29/2013

They say some of the happiest people in the world live in the most precarious of circumstances. One theory says the self-reported happiness of these people is related to the fact that they live in the moment because a shaky future is too much to bear.

This is how I feel about my studio. Content, fortunate — for the time being. I suffer from no desire to change up the configuration or make improvements. I don't even concern myself with the mouldering drywall or occasional mouse-sighting because I know that this could all be gone in a month's notice. The forest of cranes surrounding my studio neighbourhood of East 2nd Avenue and Main are a constant reminder of that.

The skyline looking south up Main has changed dramatically since this photo was snapped in March.

It's all so precarious, I feel a small leap of joy every time I am not greeted by an eviction notice taped to my studio door. The inevitable redevelopment of the property that my squalid building sits on keeps me on my toes.

There is no time to procrastinate at the studio; there is work to be done before the backhoe shows up and knocks down the cinderblock walls. And then where will I go? And what will become of my two artist studio-mates, the several ceramic artists in the three studios down the hall, the special effects guys who work in the film industry in two other studios, the musician and the fibre artist on either side of our shared space?

VIVO Media Arts Centre GM Emma Hendrix, with cranes looming. (Rafal Gerszak photo)

This is a topic to be avoided when I meet for coffee with artist friends from nearby buildings, who are also trying to carve out an art practice in a race against time and property speculation, in what is easily the most expensive city in Canada to rent work space. We are already cheek-to-jowl, many forced to share their own workspace in a sort of split shift, or subletting for a few months to ease the financial burden.

Everyone has a story about someone who's moved to the Sunshine Coast or her basement or Toronto, or who's had to switch from sculpture to jewelry-making due to a lack of space. We try not to dwell on the fact that a long commute from our apartments to a studio is a deal-breaker for many of us who decided to buy art materials instead of a car. We stay in the moment, stay on the topic of the work at hand, but even if we keep our head down, refrain from looking skyward, there are constant reminders. A Globe & Mail story this week by venerable reporter Frances Bula states that the VIVO Media Arts Centre property has been sold and it has to be out by May, after 20 years helping local artists and activists create video and music. We know that with every bit of news about high-clout galleries relocating next door, more controversy over highrise development, our days are numbered.

In this corner: Happy to have space to crochet on a grand scale.

We are happy. For the moment.

On the other side of the studio: Space for large ink-on-paper play.

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More strange bedfellows: quilts and graffiti

8/16/2013

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This is my new favourite colour box, a delicious array of cans of Montana spraypaint. All packed up to take to my largest quilt project to date.

Now I finally get my chance to do what I've been dreaming of for years: blanketing a big, blank white concrete wall with a colourful quilt of triangles — with permission and for the long term, for a change. (My previous secret adventures in unauthorized craft-tagging in the public sphere were painted out within weeks.)

How a quilt will read when spraypainted on a concrete wall I have no idea. I've googled images using 'quilt' and 'graffiti' and 'mural' and haven't found any spraypainted quilts — at least, none that were created specifically with quilts in mind.

Quilts composed of freeform blocks and vibrant colours inspire.

My main challenge, besides enduring working under a respirator for about the same number of hours it takes me to make a queen-sized quilt, is ensuring that the field of bright colours and simple geometry doesn't scream 'daycare centre. ' The colour and pattern choices make all the difference between creating a one-dimensional jumble of happy triangles with what I'm really trying to achieve here: a three-dimensional appearance and a vibrating, discordant colourway, some element of surprise, a reason for the eye to take a lingering second look.

I'll get the 'why' part overwith here: This media mash-up of the visual of tactile, comforting quilts and the harsh process of spraypainting concrete infrastructure stems from my compulsion to visually link the personal with the public, the domestic with the industrial, the feminine with the masculine. Enough said.

One risk in translating quilts into spraypaint is losing textural and pattern details.

But the excitement (mixed with a little fear) about this undertaking is in the risk involved.

Unlike putting together a quilt, which is pretty much pre-planned (all the fun is in choosing the colour and pattern and the rest is pretty much mechanical, which is why so many quilts are started but abandoned), the spraypaint process is additive and more open-ended. It could all go sideways. Or it could emerge as something entirely unexpected and new.

One of several of my early painting sketches for the project.

Hopefully this will turn out to be the best of both distinct worlds: the pleasing geometry and colour-play of quilts and all their cozy references mixed with the hard-surface, large-scale properties of murals made by spraypaint-wielding graffiti artists.

I'm in the thick of it now, relying heavily on my experience making complex quilts to reduce the intimidating scale of the job. It's all about focusing in, taking it on one block at a time, trying not to think about the work ahead. Eating that elephant one bite at a time.

Day 1: Facing the fear of the unknown, in full respirator.

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Discarded doilies demand attention

8/9/2013

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Wrap (I), polyethylene fibre, 96" diameter

In my fourth-year sculpture class venerable artist and (now newly-retired) Emily Carr instructor Liz Magor took one look at my first installation of a kazillion doilies stretched across the cavernous classroom and said, "You seem to be in love with doilies. Maybe it's time to break up and find something else to love."

It was just the kind of motivation I needed to embark on a three-year challenge to bring the thrift-shop throwaways into the gallery fore.

Wrap (II), polyethylene fibre, 96" diameter

I admit I am in love with spidery, handmade doilies. My hands barely know the work that goes into their tiny filigree patterns. Following a complex pattern is a highly meditative exercise in concentration, patience and commitment. Their circular designs reflect the mathematical patterns of coral, brain, bibb lettuce.

But the real power of those little doilies for me is their symbolism. Each one represents its maker, invariably an older woman who has clearly worked this way with her hands for many, many years, who probably learned from her mother, who learned from her mother. When I spot them in heaps in a plastic basket on a thrift store shelf, 50 cents each, I am quietly horrified. How can all these humble labours of love, these overlooked objects of household protection, be reduced to almost no value? And am I still talking about the handmade items or their makers? I've been tangling up the two for a long time — for too long, some might say.

Flo (I), acrylic on canvas, 60" x 60"

For three years I've been pushing the doily into new dimensions, trying to make the invisible visible. Mixing them up with industrial materials like mortar and Tyvek. Using patterns from the back of 1950s Ladies Home Journals to turn eight-inch-wide doilies into eight-foot-wide doilies. Messing with the macho painting conventions of Abstract Expressionism from the same era.

The show went up at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre lobby last week. I don't know what the concert-ticket-holders will think of giant doilies hanging from railings, the small sculptures of unfathomable petrified doilies or painted fields of doily patterns, with names like Flo (after my grandmother with skilled hands and a bold spirit) and Persistent Grey.

Ravages (I), found cotton doilies, mortar, dimensions variable

I'm sort of resigned to the idea that many will find it all weirdly decorative. Maybe Magor would say that now I really need to find another object to love. But for me it's a mission accomplished. I've somehow managed to fool everyone with the promise of Art and filled the pristine, privileged gallery space with doilies.

Is my love affair over? I'm trying not to think about it too much. Over-thinking has never helped me.

Unlaced continues at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre until Sept. 23, 2013. Gallery Hours: during QET performances or by appointment. Contact: Connie Sabo, gallery curator, 604-505-4297

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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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Keeping Our Eyes on our work while cranes Swing overhead

More strange bedfellows: quilts and graffiti

Discarded doilies demand attention

Put down that Blackberry and go get some blackberries

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