writings - carlyn yandle

We're taking on capitalist forces, one stitch at a time

8/30/2019

Back when I was still transitioning from workaday newspaper editor to mainly work-for-free artist I applied for a Nexus card.
"Whaddaya you do for a living?" asks the clerk in her American drawl, without looking at me.
When I get this question I always wish there was an easy answer, some simple keystroke like in the relationship status options on Facebook.

"It's complicated," I say. She sighs.

I start in about how I was a journalist but then quit to go into full-time Fine Arts studies, then after graduation I got a studio and am now developing an art practice and doing work for upcoming projects... and stop as her eyes fall to half-mast. We go back and forth for a while like this when she announces: "I'm gonna put you down as housewife."

Even though I've always been self-supporting I decide not to waste my breath defending my non-conforming life choices. But really, I'm using the best skills I have to be a contributing member of society and I'm grateful to be a part of the ever-expanding, borderless community of crafters, craftivists and visual artists, all connected beyond language by hand-making for peace of mind and social, political connection.

Craft creates wellness, it brings humanity during turbulent times, it breaks down hierarchies and is the connecting thread between those who make for personal, tactile pleasure or for use and those who make art for art's sake. Craft is as at home in the home as it is on Etsy or in the white-cube gallery. It has footholds in ancient practices and the avant-garde. It complicates categorization and won't be fenced in (or out).

One of my pieces is currently at home among the works of 20 spinners, weavers, felters, quilters, garment designers, knitters, rug-hookers and others in a current Gulf Island fibre-arts show. Some of those sharing their work self-identify as artists and some as specific kind of makers but all of our pieces hang together in conversation, sparking more conversation and more ideas among visitors.

This exhibition is another reminder that craft is embedded in deeply-personal making activity, the tactility of the culturally-rich materials and the creative communities we live in.

Making and their makers form an essential humanizing force more encompassing and enduring than even advanced capitalism but there's no way to show that value on a Nexus form.
I reject that line of questioning. And I am not married to a house.

'Foundlings': Kids' works of terrible beauty

7/2/2019

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

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

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

My needling starts with a need to build community

11/10/2018

The other day I did this because it really needed to happen. All that gleaming new-campus architecture, surrounded by other gleaming buildings and gleaming buildings yet-to-come was begging for a little fuzzying up.

I did my undergrad at the old Emily Carr University of Art and Design campus which was decidedly less smooth and metallic and more crafty, situated as it was in the Granville Island artisan mecca on the ocean's edge. I liked running my hand along the old wooden posts carved with decades of scrawled text, and all the wiring and ductwork that in the last few years looked like a set out of Brazil. I miss the giant murals on the cement factory silos next door and the funky houseboats and the food stalls in the public market and Opus Art Supplies 30 feet away from the front entrance.

The new serene, clean Emily Carr building is surrounded by new and planned condos that most students could never afford, high-tech companies and, soon, an elevated rapid transit rail line. As much as I wanted to return for graduate studies, I was not convinced that I would be a good fit here, so asking for permission and access to the sign was a bit of a trial balloon for me. I got quick and full support for the idea and its installation, and now see this new white space as a blank canvas, ready for the next era of student artistic expression.

This is my first solo yarn-bombing foray. A bunch of us attacked the old school back in the day for a textile-themed student show but I have yet to meet my people here. So the Emily Carr Cozy is not just a balloon, it's a flare. Is there anybody out there?

As I busied my freezing fingers with the stringy stuff (in hard hat, on the Skyjack operated by design tech services maestro Brian) I kept an ear out for reaction. And it was good. Sharing the fuzzy intervention on social media (#craftivism, #subversivestitch etc.) reminds me that I am not alone in my need for needling authority. Indeed, this public performance includes behind-the-scenes connecting with my community of makers to collect their leftover yarn and thrift-store finds even before the main act. (You know who you are.)

Textile interventions in the public sphere have a way of provoking polarizing responses. Some love the often-chaotic hand-wrapping of colourful fiber; others view the crafty messing with architecture with disdain of all things cozy and crafty and engendered female. I liked the idea of having to wear a hard hat and working for four hours in a Skyjack, in the mode of construction workers in the immediate vicinity of my rapidly changing hometown, to complete my knitting job.

The reverse side of the Emily Carr Cozy, seen only from the interior of the school, is like the work behind the scenes in my making: chaotic, improvisational and maybe more interesting than the public side. (Carlyn Yandle photo)

A visual of the process, below. (All photos by Caitlin Eakins)

Pretty, and pretty toxic denim inspires new work

7/6/2018

There ought to be an international law against the dirty business of jeans manufacturing.

It poisons waterways, mainly in China, prompting environmental groups to raise the alarm against the devastation to communities and local ecosystems, yet consumers around the world continue to cycle through jeans, for work and in slavish loyalty to fashion trends.

Even on the small off-the-grid Gulf island of Lasqueti where I do much of my work, there is a constant oversupply of denim at the local Free Store. Too ugly or thrashed to be snapped up for the price of zero, they are destined for the landfill where the toxic dyes are left to leach into the ground.

Jeans reflect the West Coast palette. Carlyn Yandle photo

But, honestly, if they weren't so pretty, I wouldn't be saving them from the dump. It's that very West Coast denim palette that compels me to rescue these ripped, stained or just outdated jeans, skirts, jackets and dresses and mess with them.

For the past few years I've been cutting them into usable pieces and sewing up utility items — bags, oven mitts, hot-pot mats, lumbar cushions — and before long I fell into my own tiny cottage industry stitching up utility aprons.

Lately I've been working them up in quilts of high-contrast hues with frayed exposed seams or muted reverse greys, all in conversation with the coastal views just beyond my sewing table.

So for environmental reasons and the pretty, durable nature of old denim, I keep innovating new uses, but my explorations into non-utility pieces (the stuff we call Art) is more about the culture embedded in all those jeans: the worn knees, the rips, the stains that all speak to the physical work people do on this off-the-grid island community to sustain them.

I dabbled with undulating appliquéd fields inspired by the coastal climate and vistas but lately I've been more interested in exploiting the sculptural possibilities of this weighty, stiff fabric.

Enter my latest exploration: large-scale macrame.

Knotting seemed like a natural way to enhance dimension, and it's relevant to this island community where knowing a few useful knots is an essential skill and in wide evidence. It also speaks to the late-'60s/early '70s back-to-the-land counterculture that defines Lasqueti. I liked the idea of creating a large-scale fringe for this place on the fringes of urban life. (Fun fact: The 13th-century Arabic weavers' word for "fringe" is "migramah", which eventually became known as "macrame".)

I gave myself some rules of engagement (like I do) to create a pattern. 1) The strands would be all three-inch strips. 2) The overall length would be largely determined by the number of strips I could squeeze out of an average size of jeans. 3) I would work from dark jeans to light to dark fabrics, to create a highlight in the centre of the piece. 4) The overall width of this super-fringe would be determined by the piece of driftwood I selected.

Fifty-five hours of knotty work later I completed 28 Jeans: Denim Ombré, a wall-mounted macrame work that continues to inspire more ideas and more questions: How can I achieve a more sculptural effect? How can I find that beautiful place between pattern and collapse? And most importantly: Why did I throw away my old macrame magazines??

28 Jeans: Denim Ombré, 2018 by Carlyn Yandle. Found jeans, driftwood, 60" x 45"

Materials matter, and Those of loved ones gone can live on

5/26/2018

Clockwise from top left: Great-Grandfather Quilt; Dad's Throw; Tie Cushion. (Carlyn Yandle photos)

Materialistic. People say it like it's a bad thing.
But there's not necessarily anything selfish or hoardy or wasteful about feeling deeply connected to materials. If we all started being a little more materialistic we might not be now contending with the Great Pacific Garbage Patch or space junk. I want no part with parting so quickly from one-use-life materials when a meaningful second life is possible.

So when a couple of people dear to my heart were clearly torn about parting with some favourite clothes of their loved ones who recently passed away — one within this year, the other within 18 months — I felt it too.

These bits of cloth are interwoven with the memory of the wearer, his style, the special occasions and the everyday. Just looking at them hanging in the back closet brought the son, the wife, to tears. Some of that emotion is also about feeling at odds with what to do with it all. Yet holding onto useless things, especially in this town where we're so squeezed for space we have to go outside our living spaces just to change our mind, can even bring on some shame or panic that we can't let go, move on.

I felt the potency of the pieces too, and suggested selecting a few items to be repurposed into something that would bring comfort, and in remembrance.

The first project this spring was the Great-Grandfather Quilt, for the first of the next generation who missed meeting his great-grandfather by 9 months. The second was Dad's Blanket, which lives on one of the two matching sofas where father and son watched the baseball in his last three years. The third is a lumbar-support cushion made from silk ties that's parked on his wife's favourite reading chair.

It takes a bit of faith to allow those blazers and sweaters, ties and dress shirts to leave their dark cupboards and be subjected to my fibre-art experiments but I'm grateful they did. It was a little unnerving, plunging wool blazers into a hot-water-wash and tumble-dry, or severing several silk neckties in one swipe of the rotary cutter, but that's the deal with making and innovating: sometimes you have to take a deep breath and boldly go, risking failure.

And there is definitely failure in all of this making. Design changes happen on the fly, dictated by odd dimensions of the pieces and unpredictable fabric behaviour. (It's a thing.) Trying to wrestle slippery bias-cut silk, unstable cashmere knit and coat-heavy woven wool into submission enough to lie flat together is a test of one's patience. The trick is to embrace imperfection and keep the big picture in mind. I think about the Gees Bend quilters I saw a few years ago at Granville Island and the gospel spiritual song two of them sang at the start of their talk, and I say a little prayer myself: God I hope this works.

The other challenge is creating works that resonate with the spirit of the original wearer, so it's not just a matter of chopping up the clothing into tiny unidentifiable pieces to be re-fabricated in a generic quilt. You don't want to be too literal either, appliquéing ties into a Ties Quilt or (creepier) using every last button and pocket or (horrors) just sewing all the clothes together into a blanket or something.

Binding the one blanket with necktie fabric and appliquéing the suit labels in one corner of an army blanket backing (for the man who served in the US Army) felt like the right balance.

I post each Remembrance Pieces project on Facebook to inspire other material girls and guys, and to pay my respects to the stuff of life and to those of this life no longer.

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.

Talking to spiders and caressing kettles not so crazy

9/28/2017

Morning dew hangs like pearl strands on spider silk. Carlyn Yandle photo

I have a love-hate relationship with spiders. I will jump out of my skin if I find a big hairy mother in my bedsheets like anyone else but if I come across a particularly elaborate spider web, I have to give them props.

I admit it here and now that when I see one of these architectural marvels glistening in the morning mist, as is their wont at this time of year, I will find myself speaking directly to the maker. Whoa! That’s some wondrous work.

Wondrous how the pearlescent spider silk almost defies capture by the camera eye but dazzles in oily-slick colours at just the right angle. Wondrous how the tensile strength keeps the web intact in the face of a headwind and earns that stronger-than-steel rep (on a per weight basis).

But what really gets me wondering is the amount of time and effort that goes into the making.

A couple of months ago I was given a voluptuous antique copper kettle. It was a bit battered and leaked badly. I took it to a metalworker neighbour to see if it was worth repairing. He noticed what I hadn’t: the painstaking hammering of sheet copper from flat to bulbous, the traditional fabricating method, the careful patch job along one bottom end that extended the life of what was obviously an important domestic object with a long history. He plugged the pinhole leaks with solder.

It still leaks a bit but I put it back into service because now that I’ve noticed the labour, I love it.

My compulsion to talk to spiders or caress the battered belly of an old copper kettle is really about noticing the laborious making of a thing, whether it’s by a spider or a metalsmith. It raises questions of how a thing is made, who made it and under what conditions, and by extension what becomes of it at the end of its life and the value of labour. Big inquiry stuff, all from a little noticing.

This why I hang with the babies and the little kids. Not yet glued to a screen, they look at stuff, they notice and they wonder.