writings - carlyn yandle

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)

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

Gritty beauty seen in foundations of this pretty city

2/28/2017

It feels like the Internet has killed the fun of taking snapshots of beautiful cities and people. So many times over the last four months in Mexico I've raised my camera (phone) to capture an impressive bronze sculpture or some baroque church facade then thought: This is pointless. A Google-image search with a few key words (Guanajuato, musicians, Don Quixote, Pipila) would produce hundreds of better-quality stock photos. We're saturated in instagrammable images. I miss those old pocket travel photo albums.

This might explain all the selfie sticks threatening to take your eye out in the crowded plazas on any given night here; putting yourself in the picture with all the famous stuff behind will guarantee a unique photo.

So I have very little in terms of a photographic record for my time here. Every view of the strolling musicians in the plazas, or the teenage girls decked in ballgowns for their quinceanera (debut) parties, the food vendors, the street singers dressed in Renaissance-style hose and puffed velvet jackets are already done. So done.

Then last week I finally started to see that the one signature-Guanajuato element that I've been captivated by is actually a worthy photo subject: the retaining walls that barely seem to be holding back the jumble of colourful, cubic houses clinging to the surrounding hills.

There's a compelling visual story in those layers of peeling paint on crumbling plaster on adobe bricks stacked on crudely cut limestone foundations. The traces of human activity in one section of wall speaks to the human habitation in this city that has its roots in the 1500s. It's quite a study in social history and handwork, an unplanned, almost invisible beauty, especially to a tourist whose port town of Vancouver has been replaced by a gleaming, pristine city of glass.

I'm seeing them as found abstracts, images of unintentional collages and mixed-media works by generations of people who work with their hands.

Urban design lesson for Vancouver: Life in full colour blooms in car-free streets

12/10/2016

The steps of the Teatro Juarez transform by day and night for the benefit of the walking public. (Carlyn Yandle photo)

A month after I landed in Guanajuato, Mexico it finally dawned on me: there are no traffic lights in this bustling city. You'd think that would be obvious from the outset but those kinds of details are not readily apparent when you're gawking at a guy hoofing it down the narrow city streets with a side of raw beef on his shoulders, or a teenage girl unfurling her frothy pink ballgown from a truck parked at the end of the pedestrian zone.

Not only are there no traffic lights, there are no pedestrian crossing signals or any restrictions on the walking public. The downtown is teeming with people but with such narrow, winding vehicle thoroughfares, topas (speed bumps) and gloriettas (large versions of Vancouver's "traffic-calming circles") you learn quickly to go with the slow flow. Pedestrians zig-zag with ease across streets, almost brushing the rear of a slow-passing car so the vehicle behind doesn't have to shift down to super-slow. This is not a town to venture into if you're a driver in a hurry. Cruising speed is such that you could start a conversation with people on the sidewalk. Road rage is inconceivable.

So how are all the goods and services delivered? Most of that happens under the plazas and winding streets in old floodwater-diverting tunnels. Parking lots are also mostly situated under or outside the city centre and on-street parking is a rarity. There are no filthy downtown back alleys dedicated to dumpsters and delivery trucks. No urban blight of parked cars flanking both sides of every street.

A narrow 'calle' is transformed into a weekend-long wine-tasting venue. (Carlyn Yandle photo)

As a result, the major calles (streets) are in constant transformation, a jumble of bakeries, cafes and newsstands in the morning, market stalls in the afternoon, and music-filled evenings and special events like a recent wine-tasting weekend along a red carpet through to the historical centre. The previous weekend saw a chalk-mural draw-in where local art students were down on their knees, working their ideas into the surface near that morning's bike race finish line.

These are the possibilities for streets where pedestrians come first.

Art students take to the (permanent) car-free streets. (Carlyn Yandle and photo)

Narrow spaces invite humane activity. (Carlyn Yandle photo)

Street musicians head down to the outdoor restaurants. (Carlyn Yandle photo)

I fail to see the downside in squeezing out cars in heavily populated areas. In contrast, pricey Vancouver's sketchy, rat-infested downtown alleys and acres of meter parking look like a colossal waste of potential commercial and cultural space. How impossible would it be to conceal dumpsters in locked building bays and restrict garbage pickup to, say, 2 a.m., and then entice tiendas (street vendors) and the mom-and-pop shops that have been all but banished to the fringes due to high rents?

The more I wander and wade through all this colourful human activity the more I resent the privileged position of the private motor vehicle in North American urban "planning." Cities in their relative infancy like Vancouver could learn a lot from organic urban centres like Guanajuato that came into their own before there were cars.

My hometown is already teetering on the edge of becoming a boring luxury resort city; a bold directive towards people and away from the private motor vehicle could pull us back from that precipice.

A religious procession is part of the passing cultural parade. (Carlyn Yandle photo)

Vehicle thoroughfares and parking areas are mostly on the fringes and below the city. (Carlyn Yandle photo)

Hope springs forth from lush, haunting images

6/12/2015

I really want to believe our Prime Minister’s — what, pledge? Hope? Prediction? — that we will be a fossil-fuel-free nation by the year 2100, as he told the rest of the Gang of 7 at their Bavarian get-together last week.

But any hope I have for a truly green-fueled nation is drying up like a California swimming hole. My bet is not on political will but epic disaster as the catalyst for truly altering our course — a perfect storm of events that will push us thisclose to the collapse of the very (and varied) ecosystems that spawned our species.

But I still find faith in the forces of nature, which may be why I am attracted to any images of the natural takeover of our failed or abandoned constructions.

The sparkle of that emerald gem of hope lies in this now-famous image of the executive offices of the Henry Ford executive offices at the Model T headquarters in Detroit.

I first saw this image by American artist Andrew Moore in a New York Times Magazine photo essay following the economic collapse of Detroit’s all-consuming auto industry. Where once business titans swaggered now was a thick carpet of moss.

The entire industrial complex may have caved in but as long as the moss still grows, well, I guess we have a chance. (Detroit is now shrinking, with derelict houses returning to forest.)

I was reminded of that image again this week when big-league newspapers such as the Independent and the UK Mirror picked up on the social-trending images of an abandoned fishing village being reclaimed by nature, by Shanghai photographer Jane Qing.

I could find nothing in those Google pages of links that would explain what happened to the inhabitants of this island community, part of a large archipelago at the mouth of the Yangtze river. The particular circumstances are shrouded in vines, absorbed back into the lush island hillside, but local economic collapse is likely the culprit.

It is the moss, the vines in these images that reveal human folly and frailty.

They are the green shoots of hope that cool the creeping drought — and doubt.

Abandoned car in Dordogne, France

Time is ripe for Occupy Neighbourhood movement

4/24/2015

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)

One bit, two bits, green bits, black bits

3/13/2015

Toybits (green) - made from broken toys (Carlyn Yandle photo)

This may be the third or fourth column/post I've written that could come under the headline, 'Overthinking will be the death of me.' There is definitely a book in there somewhere about the power of overthinking to sabotage the creative process.

My latest overthinking sabotage occurred as I was experimenting with binding up broken toy bits (consciously not overthinking why).

I was taking care of my sister's kids while idly binding one green toy remnant to another. At some point, the curious object appeared to be done. And it was good.

It's an intriguing object but when photographed is also a visually absorbing abstract. It has richness in its ability to conflate the second and third dimensions. It is heavy with cultural reference yet lightly humorous.

I was onto something.

Toybits (black) - final version (Carlyn Yandle photo)

After a couple of hours I quit because it clearly would have no logical endpoint. But if there's one thing I've learned about the creative process it's to let the failures hang around and stink up the joint for a while. In my experience, the only way to get to the source of the stench is to keep it in the periphery. And a couple of days later it came to me: I was so hell-bent on the outcome I had completely negated the making, which, when referring back to the green toy-bits cluster, was the essence of the thing: play.

I took it all apart, then started over, finding the fit between one bit to another bit, then adding one bit where it fit. (Maybe the book should be in Dr. Seuss language).

It had a beginning and an end, and the entire process was an adventure without a map. The result is a sculptural object with implied power that appears as part engine, part vehicle, part robot. It has composition, balance, architecture, intriguing sight lines and varying perspectives. It has something to tell me: Your instincts are good, keep going.

From the junk of life emerges new life.

You can see it in the above photo; it's a mess. Even as I was binding it I thought, This is not working, this is not working. Why is this not working? It has no balance, no composition. it is artless. And it was a chore from the get-go.

Toybits (black): first attempt (Carlyn Yandle photo)

So, like every creative I know, the ol' mental processor starting whirring away in the background, rolling over this concept. Friends and I talk about this slightly obsessive stage when developing a new work. You're still functional in your daily routine but that whirring puts you in a slightly distracted state. It's sort of like falling in love; there's always something there to remind you of that growing passion. And when I fall in love with an idea, I fall hard. I'm consumed by the topic like the Paul Rudd character in The 40-Year-Old Virgin who can't stop talking about Amy or The Big Lebowski's John Goodman character who links any conversation to his days in 'Nam.

I've been seeing toy-bits inspiration everywhere, including in a car column in the morning newspaper. The picture of an engine reminded me of the toy-bits clusters and suddenly I was shoving aside breakfast dishes and breakfasting people and dumping my hoard of broken toys onto the table.

I will make that engine-y thing, I said. And therein lies the fatal flaw.

Everything I know about design I learned in newspapers

2/6/2015

One of the biggest lessons learned from a career in newspaper journalism was, surprisingly, the difference between decoration and design. It began when I built up basic layout skills using paper dummies, reduction wheel, metal pica-pole (also good for gouging into office drywall when it was all Just. Not. Working), non-repo pen and something my favourite production foreman coined 'The Yandleometer' — a sort of parallax-viewfinder deal I improvised.

When I finally got the gist of that, we were required to give up the physical tools and wrestle with clumsy emerging computer design programs. But this wasn't the big lesson part; that came when I truly understood that laying out a compelling page of stories and photos was function first, form second. And if that form included a bunch of clip-art snowflakes or needless drop shadows, those had to go. The scanning eye needs white space over decoration.

Good design requires a good editor, but too much editing can kill the soul of the visual field, whether that's a newspaper double-spread (I'm dusting off all the ol' industry relic terms here) or a building.

The staircase at Les Haras in Strasbourg is functional sculpture. (Photo from sncf.com)

The editor likes her windows clean of pouffy valances and floors free of scatter-rug litter, but she doesn't want her voice to echo in her interior space, either. There's a fine line between the functional beauty of the spare Bauhaus-based International Style and objects that are designed primarily to optimize mass-production.

The residual of a near-dead layout skill is that I'm constantly second-guessing structures and spaces with a specific line of questions: Too much? Too little? How much is design and how much is decoration?

I see this image of the astonishing staircase at the Les Haras brasserie in Strasbourg, designed by Jouin Manku Studios, and I wonder, is all that strapping structural? If not, what would it look like with the superfluous strapping removed?

The new arts centre on Lasqueti Island, shingling in progress. (Photo by Carlyn Yandle)

But, in the end, is less really more?

At first glance this Gulf Island community building is something out of a Bavarian folktale, more in line with the Volkisch movement that celebrates the hand of the craftsperson.

Yet that decorative shingling is sound design in the rainforest vicinity, and uses locally-sourced renewable materials. The two planks flanking the window are structural components, too. Above all, the design of the shingling hold the function of reflecting the mountainous region rising out of the sea, and the kind of creative activity that will take place at this new arts centre, while the planks are twin silhouettes of the tree trunk they came from.

The 19th Century English artist/designer/social activist William Morris would have loved it. He would have appreciated this collaborative work that integrates architecture with art and in so doing eliminates any boundary between form and function.

It's a happy, slightly chaotic dwelling-object, quite the opposite of the Bauhaus "minimal dwelling" ideal, but would it benefit from an editing?

No freakin' way.

Shab-fab granny squares cover it all

1/16/2015

Maybe it's the chilly monochromatic climate at work here, but I'm suddenly wrapping myself up granny squares. The more I think about them, the more potential I see.

There's a lot of culture woven into those fuzzy little colour grids. They're there in the background of popular culture, infusing irony and cozy home-yness, nostalgia and disdain. One graces the couches of neuroscientist Amy Farrah Fowler's nerdy apartment and Roseanne's working-class house. Jemaine sleeps under one (badly).

Sure, they achieve that soupçon of shabbiness or tastelessness essential to the story but those set decorators are no idiots; granny squares inject hits of high colour and pattern to the visual field. They are trippy, decorative non-decor objects. Their form is used because of their assumed function over form.

They are the throws that are thrown around, their colourful geometry reflected and refracted so that they radiate western domestic culture, love it or hate it.

Cate Blanchett adorned a designer version on the red carpet, to a chorus of derision by the fashion police, which secured the actress more publicity.

There's something delicious in the mix between haute couture and the easy, scrappy crochet method that results in over 13,000 Etsy items under the search term, "granny squares".

I've loved/hated granny squares ever since my cousin and I were given matching shrink vests at age 10, from our moms. I would have been wearing that single, large purple granny square at a time when the Italian dads in the neighbourhood were setting up that granny-square pattern in concrete breeze walls around their brand new Vancouver Specials.

One breeze wall in a photo essay by the author of joy-n-wonder.blogspot.ca

Like the blankets, the breeze walls evoke utility and thrift but are visually interesting enough to warrant new consideration. The modularity of granny squares and breeze-wall blocks ooze with potential, especially as a mash-up.

Granny squares command attention. The Los Angeles Craft and Folk Art Museum took on new dimensions when it was covered in thousands of donated granny squares as part of its CAFAM Granny Squared installation a couple of years ago.

Suddenly, a city that is generally at odds with notions of the handmade, the domestic and the artisanal was attracting mainstream media attention for its collaborative crocheted culture jam.

A couple of years before that, in 2011, members of many Finnish women's organizations and the craft teachers' union blanketed Helsinki Cathedral's steps in 3,800 granny square tilkkupeitosta (Finnish for 'quilt').

The modular motif marries beautifully to existing architecture, as the granny squares take on a Tetris effect, cascading down to the giant public square in this domestic intervention.

But what about the granny square as a building block itself? What if a building appeared to rise out of a giant crocheted coverlet? How could concretized crocheted granny squares be utilized as sculpture?

It's a fuzzy concept worth building on.