Category: Appropriation

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)

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Wild, brilliant colour is rocking my concrete-grey foundations

11/17/2017

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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

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A beautiful craftivism in a flowery part of the world

11/8/2017

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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.

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Time is ripe for Occupy Neighbourhood movement

4/24/2015

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One of a handful of Vancouver's 'country lanes' from a 2002 pilot projects. (Photo: Ben Nelms for National Post)

And yet.

And yet there is nothing like an untenable situation to spark a creative response. There is evidence of it in the spaces between, beyond, behind, or otherwise outside the scope of authority. You see it in neighbourhood back alleys and in the gaps between buildings all over the world: small, bold, personal gestures. It may start with a graffiti tag (I was here, The Man can stuff it) and evolve into jaw-dropping unauthorized artworks. It may start with that one condo-dweller with no outdoor space who drags a chair down to the street to do some sketching or practise guitar. Last year some folks down the block put out a table at the corner park and had a sit-down neighbours’ potluck dinner. Down another block is a Country Lane, one of just a handful of alleys transformed into a garden-like thoroughfare in a pilot project with the City back in 2002.

Day after destruction: Giant doily on the bulldozed community gardens in Kitsilano (Carlyn Yandle photo)

And so it has come to pass. Where bloom-perfumed weeknight evenings in spring normally draw out elderly food-growers, young adults on after-class dog walks, tots trying out their new walking legs and commuter-runners with backpacks now there is barely a soul. “It’s so futile,” a neighbour said, hands on hips and gazing around at the remnant plant-bits fighting for traction in the bulldozer tracks. “This is just big male egos at work.”

My community, like all Vancouver communities increasingly hemmed in by one glassy, luxury edifice after another, is under threat of becoming no place in particular.

Living directly across the street from a swath of rubble, I think about the Field of Dreams line, “If you build it they will come.” Except in the case of the formerly thriving community gardens obliterated by CP Rail last month, it’s more, “If you destroy it, they will vamoose.”

Vancouver's downtown alleys are typically sketchy, soulless spaces. (Photo: Jonathan Hayward , Canadian Press)

These small acts are claims on our community. There’s nothing like an obliterated cherished social space to make us rethink this expectation that city planners or developers or Translink or the provincial government will make our corners of the world livable. That’s up to us. It requires a little courage and some questioning of authority. It may involve a little risk and the understanding that it’s easier to get forgiveness than permission.

Livable Laneways has taken on the west alley on Main Street north of Broadway, with various temporary installations and community events.

This is how I came to move a couple of wrought iron chairs from my deck to the acres of dead dirt across the street. I wanted to see if they would be confiscated or destroyed. Instead, they’re being used, to rest for a spell, to soak up the rays, to down a beer. It’s a small act but even two empty chairs are an invitation, a potential conversation.

I’ve been researching creative ways to carve out social spaces in the face of the residential-investment spree that’s taken over Vancouver. Even in the tightest spaces -- or especially in the tightest spaces – humanity can grow and thrive. From the thinnest walkway container gardens in Kyoto to a laneway festival in one of our city’s dumpster-blighted back alley, there is potential in occupying a lost space.

Don’t just say something; sit there.

A laneway in Melbourne, Australia (Photo by Corbis via traveller.com.au)

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My needling starts with a need to build community

Wild, brilliant colour is rocking my concrete-grey foundations

A beautiful craftivism in a flowery part of the world

Time is ripe for Occupy Neighbourhood movement

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