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

Playing with mud -- and new/old ideas

5/22/2015

Where it all began: The Mud Girls retreat that sowed the seed for new/old building modes.

Playing with mainly found materials, and whenever possible with other people, offers me the chance to learn about properties and potential of those throw-away materials as well as about collaborative problem-solving and new/old modes of social interaction. I try not to overthink that link between materials and the inherent social nature of our species but just go with the urge to make the connections.

Working with cob – natural concrete that uses clay, sand and straw – provides a glimpse of an alternative to the inevitable glass-tower existence, the reliance on fossil fuels and the hazardous extraction and distribution process.

There’s nothing like bunker fuel hitting the local beaches or the growing Pacific trash vortex not so far away from those freighters to inspire alternatives. The solutions to these problems require alternative thinking, which depends on playing with ideas.

Excavating as exercise: Digging out a 60-inch diameter, 18-inch-deep hole. (Carlyn Yandle photo)

I got that first glimpse in a two-week cob-house-building workshop in the forest atop a Gulf Island, just days after I closed the door on my office job at a city newspaper. It was a tough adjustment, moving from a hierarchical corporate media culture to a loose, collaborative course-movement.

By day I hauled boulders and danced the sand into the clay with the Mud Girls, the kind of people I had never cross paths with in a Vancouver editorial department. By night I slept alone in a tent on a mossy outcrop.

Drainage is essential for natural clay-building on the Wet Coast. (Carlyn Yandle photo)

How was it? my friends asked after I returned. "Wild" was the only way I could describe this foreign experience.

Ten years later, I’ve been aching to dig my hands back into that feeling of the possibility of building something out of nothing, with others, testing our physical strength and forging connections with others who have a line on a local source for our materials.

The project is a cob oven, on a Gulf Island. The goal is to bake a pizza by the end of the summer.

Phase 1 is complete: creating a solid foundation for the oven. This is essential for protecting the cob from the Wet Coast climate.

Teach your children well: Hands-on learning that building materials are as close as under foot. (Carlyn Yandle photo)

The first two days were all about excavation. I hacked through thick salal root and hauled out bucket after bucket of compressed silt aggregate. The kids were eager to get into the act of shoveling the dirt onto the screen, then pouring water through the screen until just the rocks remained. I laid down some found French drain then back-filled with the gravel and stones until the site was pretty much level.

Next up: Building a dry-stack stone foundation – with a little help from my friends. Stay tuned.

Embedded labour: A solid foundation for the next phase. (Carlyn Yandle photo)

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.

Winter storms lead to brainstorms

1/2/2015

A Christmas Day king tide served up some thick snarls of bull kelp and I seized on an idea.

Kelp Skein, in progress. (Carlyn Yandle photo)

Actually, I had no particular idea in mind; only quite a bit of wonder at the quantity of the stuff. After dragging great hunks of it back to the deck, I started to play. I organized the stuff into visual categories, and soon I was winding the tendrils into a skein, and slicing the bulbs into vessels. Some experiments were left in the elements and others brought indoors to desiccate (and hopefully not moulder and go rank).
Will my 20-pound giant ball shrivel up and break apart? Will the vessels turn into leathery cups? Time will tell and failure will be a teacher.

In the meantime, I turn to the research portion of this playing with materials which leads to playing with ideas.

Material test #2: Drying bulbs on a windowsill (Carlyn Yandle photo)

Kelp bags helped preserve harvests of shorebirds.

No surprise this high-tensile, miraculously durable, bouncy stuff has had many practical uses since ancient times.

The first nations of New Zealand called it Rimurapa, and cut into the honey-comb-like walls of the blades to create bags — Poha — to preserve and cook their harvests of muttonbird, an oily shorebird. Or they cut slits in the bags, filled them with shellfish, starfish and abalone, then tossed them in the water to seed coastal areas. Or they attached two inflated pohas and used them as water-wings in strong currents. Or lined woven reed hulls to make super-buoyant Zodiac-type vessels. The first nations in these parts transported oolichan oil.

That's all before listing all the nutritional attributes, and there was plenty of play in that bull kelp too. The high concentration of alginate makes the material a natural rubber ball.

A high concentration of the chemical alginate creates elasticity — perfect for a ball.

California maker Geri Swanson's kelp rattles are part of her nature-crafty product line.

If you image-search "use for kelp" you're hit with a barrage of ideas for thick rings of pickle recipes and a lot of crafty ways with kelp.

Among the fascinating findings are the Seattle area sound performance artist Suzie Kozawa, who makes wind instruments from bull kelp; and Everett, Washington fiber artist Jan Hopkins who combines bull kelp with sturgeon skin and other materials in her conceptual vessels.

When a craft belies its materials the inherent beauty of that material is lost.

Whistler, BC maker Cheryl Massey celebrates the reducing diameter of the entire length of one bull kelp stem.

But the beauty of the google-search is finding what you're not looking for, the unintended learning. That happened when I came across American artist/designer/maker Scott Constable and his manifesto-in-the-making of ‘exuberant frugality’ (fine video in that link) that defines what he calls Deep Craft, based on the principles of deep ecology. Like Constable, I am intrigued by the inherent qualities of bull kelp and am still playing with how to make the most of those characteristics. He is thinking about bronze-casting the bulb and thick stem portions as furniture legs. I will stick to the meditative motions that will grow the kelp skein while keeping me thinking.

Art student's off-grid heater would make quite the gift

12/19/2014

Dear Santa,

I know I haven't written since I was a kid, and when it comes to wants, I'm pretty much good. Unlike a lot of my neighbours who rent homes that are slated for demolition in the coming year or who have to hit the food bank at the end of every month when the money runs out, I'm safe and secure — for now.

You see, I'm a bit of a prepper. I worry about the security of all our food and the hikes in cost of living in the era of climate change so I've been doing workarounds for a lot of that. I have a kitchen garden and my main way of getting around is by bike. My work- and social life surrounds making, mostly with materials that have already served their primary purpose. If the power grid or the banks fail, I can at least charge up my bike lights and headlamps with my Biolite camp stove, using bits of cardboard and twigs so I can get out there and be of some use. My one weak spot, though, is heat. Condos with wood-burning fireplaces being a rarity in these parts, I would have no choice but to go outdoors and hang by the bonfires in the streets.

But now I see there is the Egloo, a table-top terracotta dome-thing that can throw off 70C degrees of radiant heat using just a few votive candles. Pant! Pant!

It's the brainchild of Marco Zagaria, a student at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome. Trouble is, it's not quite available yet. Zagaria has been hand-making the prototypes on a potter's wheel (promo video below) and is currently crowd-sourcing funding — already surpassing his goal by 15 per cent at the time of this writing — to have them mass-produced. So here's where you come in, Santa. I don't know if I can wait, what with us all teetering on this edge of the Ring of Fire and seismologists referring to the imminent major earthquake as The Big One. I figure if you can squeeze your girth into a gas fireplace exhaust vent you can put an Egloo under my tree pronto.

However, as is my nature, I am prepped for the disaster of that not happening as well, so I've sourced some of Zagaria's own research and have latched onto a snippet of his virtual collaboration that he tagged as one of his YouTube 'favorites', a simple arrangement of one clay plot bolted inside another, resting on some thin cinderblocks. (See YouTube clip, at bottom.) It ain't pretty, but it will do the job in a pinch and uses stuff in my immediate vicinity.

Just goes to show, it takes a creative like that Italian art student to arrive at that balance between form and function that marks brilliant industrial design, which begets attraction which begets demand which begets profit motive which begets financial backing which begets wide-scale production which begets marketing to preppers like me.

What am I saying? — you're Santa. Surely you know all about the value of artists in economics and sustainability innovations.

Wishfully,
Carlyn

Packing it all in for the Toronto design fest

12/5/2014

It's getting close to a decade since I packed it all in: my needles and wool, my sewing machine and fabrics, my mid-level-management career. There was more to explore.

I've been mixing it up with a wide range of materials (and makers) ever since but even I'm surprised to find that my latest tools of choice for bushwacking new routes of making are the ol' crochet hooks, knitting needles, rug hooks and embroidery needles.

The line on the paper has always been too limiting to me; I need to pick up that line, play with it in my hands, turn it into area, then volume. I remain entranced by the possibilities of connecting something created by a silkworm or an industrial manufacturing plant to a mathematical model or a wearable with uncomfortable connotations.

The beauty of fiber is in its physical and metaphorical ability to connect the Art side to the Design side (not to mention the science side), weaving the two together until it's clear that playing with ideas cannot be put into separate boxes.

'Spore' (2011) serves as promo visual for the Vancouver design group.

Except if we're talking shipping boxes, for the Toronto Design Offsite (TO DO) Festival next month.

A few object-experiments from my ongoing Fuzzy Logic series will be packed in there, as part of the Vancouver group of makers, selected by the Dear Human creative studio.

It's all part of the ‘Outside the Box’ exhibits featuring works from three selected Canadian cities — Montreal, Calgary and Vancouver — and five from the U.S.: New York, Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles and Seattle.

It's a fine way to mine local design ideas and visions through an unexpected selection of objects that are shared in various locations via specific-sized shipping boxes.

The Vancouver contribution includes nine individuals and teams who live, design and make in the greater Vancouver area. The connecting thread is a pursuit of a design practice through material exploration, according to Dear Human. "Whether through common applications of unusual materials or transcending common materials through unusual applications, exploration is evident in each of the included objects."

Rounding out the Vancouver Outside the Box contingent are: Cathy Terepocki, Dahlhaus, Dina Gonzalez Mascaro, Hinterland Designs, Laura McKibbon, Rachael Ashe, and Studio Bup.

Playing with fiber optics (Photo by Carlyn Yandle)

Vancouver Outside the Box will take over the windows at 1082 Queen Street West, Toronto, from January 19-25, 2015.

TO DO is an annual city-wide not-for-profit week-long festival that celebrates and showcases the nation's design scene, providing exposure and cross-pollination of ideas and techniques. There are too many exhibits, installations, talks, parties and films to list here, so check out the full (and growing) schedule here as well as the fun promo video.

Detail of Fiber Optics (Photo by Carlyn Yandle)

Memorable designs discovered on road trip

8/14/2014

Carlyn Yandle photo

We were a bit of a spectacle, using survivalist technology outside our tent wedged between the humming, air-conditioned RVs, but we were aching to use our car-camping trip to finally test the BioLite.

And it was good. (See 26-second YouTube review, below.)

The Sputnik-esque stove converts the energy of any post-disaster carbon-based material — paper, leaves, cardboard, grass, wood shards — into a USB-port power source while boiling water in minutes. Yes, you can have your coffee and call home too, thanks to an ingenious copper conductor-fan system that kicks in when heated and then turbo-charges the tiny fire into a flame as good as if you're cooking with gas.

The brilliance of this design was not lost on residents of Lower Manhattan who were plunged into cold, damp darkness for days after Hurricane Sandy struck in October 2012.

The young Brooklyn inventors rushed to the rescue with stoves for stranded people who needed a hot drink, social interaction, a way to call family. Emergency services didn't take too kindly to open fires during the chaos and so the BioLites were banned.

We first spotted the gizmo a month after the area was ravaged, in a New York Times article and made it our Christmas present. Good design endures; now Mountain Equipment Co-op carries it.

Carlyn Yandle photo

And bad design disappears, or makes the bad design lists. That's why you don't see lawn darts anymore. But old, ingenious design isn't always readily apparent until you really feel it, like the moment we walked into a century-old log cabin and suddenly forgot about the blistering South Saskatchewan heat. Thick walls of almost petrified dovetailed wood and mortar were doing the same trick as energy-squandering air conditioners back at the campsite, except without the drone that was keeping us awake at night.

The rough-hewn angled dovetail joinery, used in various forms in traditional building around the world, succeeds in all aspects of good design. This settler cabin used local, renewable materials, and simple tools and easily-learned methods. The undeniable beauty of those checked cross-sections of silvered lumber, enhanced by age and the elements, is made possible through the collective creative process.

Carlyn Yandle photo

Good design answers a need. And during a heatwave, that need is drinking water. We spent much of our trip looking for a place to fill up our water bottles but it seems that in the rural areas at least, most people still buy the 48-pack of single-use water bottles at the ubiquitous Co-op stores. There oughta be a law to provide ample drinking water in public areas, but I digress.

This beauty (right) in the Saskatoon airport departure lounge does the trick. A motion sensor triggers the water to flow while a counter shows how many plastic bottles were not used in the process.

Carlyn Yandle photo

At least the young trees were getting hydrated; in Moose Jaw, a bagged water system seemed to be winning the war against the elements. The surrounding corten steel framework serves as a rain-friendly grill featuring historically significant images of bison/buffalo, trunk protection as the tree grows, and bike lock-up. What's not to love?

Carlyn Yandle photo

The one deadly design that haunts me still is the private automobile, a lethal projectile from the point of view of the native large grasshoppers, butterflies and dragonflies (and at least one starling and one small rodent). We tried to avoid looking at the critter mash on the grill at the end of each day but we have their blood on our hands. Their little corpses are reminders that the car is not designed with nature in mind. Next time, bike camping, where RVs fear to tread.

deadhead alive with ideas of our watery past, uncertain future

6/27/2014

Like moths to a light, paddleboarders hover around Deadhead. (Carlyn Yandle photo)

On one rambling two-hour bike tour of False Creek Sunday, a friend and I cruised by the Dragonboat festival, the jazz festival and the food truck festival. Granville Island was foody festive. Kits Beach was body-festive. When everything is awesome we found some visual relief in the form of Deadhead, a chaotic sort of pirate ship/treehouse combo straight out of Waterworld.

Except this floating sculpture is not a big-budget flop. In fact, this curious floating object that is currently moored at the Heritage Marina in front of the Vancouver Maritime Museum makes use of wood salvaged by Cedric Bomford, with his retired engineer father Jim Bomford and artist brother Nathan Bomford.

Deadwood under construction. Photo: Maritime Museum

Deadhead is anti-slick, a welcome switch from the Disney and Celebrity Cruise floating cities that are part of the local summer scene.
The mash-up of spiral stairs, lookouts and ramps make this a magnet for curious kids, and a good introduction into what public art can look like.

An open house (or open barge) is slated for next Saturday (July 5), 2-5 p.m. with signal flag workshops running at 2, 2:30, 3, and 3:30 pm
Saturday July 5, in Heritage Harbour and at the Vancouver Maritime Museum, just off the south side of the Burrard Bridge — a good excuse to use the new bike lane).

More photos showing Deadwood in process here.

View from the crowsnest. (Photo from http://deadhead.othersights.ca/)

Just when I was sure every last skilled carpenter has been sucked up north to Kitimat, or further, to Fort McMoney, it's with some relief to see local builders constructing something for the purpose of art.

I love a sculpture that is both playful and foreboding. It speaks of the imagination of kids and the hands of skilled makers with means, but it also evokes our shared history of makeshift dwellings in the watery part of the world, and a climate-changed future we'd rather not imagine.

Granville Island needs an injection of innovation

3/7/2014

Photo of ECUAD's South Building by Stephen Hui/Georgia Straight

When finally — yet suddenly — I graduated from Emily Carr University of Art and Design, I was done, done, done, exhausted after four intense years of input. Now I needed space for four more years of output, to practice and to develop a practice.

But finding a suitable work space in this pricey city is no easy task. Self-(un)employed artists are no match for the slick technology firms and ad agencies that will pay top dollar to set up their cool premises in the port-town-era brick buildings. So we make do, sharing whatever space we can get while keeping an ear open for rumours of where we might be able to jump when the Permit Application billboard springs up in front of our crumbling building.

Intriguing shows at the Charles H. Scott Gallery include the current Hyperflat.

Another art school in another city might play a part in providing studio rental opportunities for its new grads, encouraging a healthy cross-pollination of creative post-school work in industrial design, animation, sculpture, painting, media arts and curatorial services. But Emily Carr University is bursting at the seams and is focused on its campaign to move east to Great Northern Way. It's a grand vision, but what will become of the Granville Island community when the two-building campus vacates? What of the dependable Opus Art Supplies, which depends heavily on the student customer base next door, as well as the other material suppliers on the Island? And the George H. Scott Gallery?

Vancouver Sun reporter Daphne Bramham took on the topic this week. In her story, one of the original designers of Granville Island, architect Norm Hotson, said replacing the school with another educational institution would help modernize the zone. Or it could be re-energized as "an incubator space” for "innovators", he said, or developed into a cultural hub that might include galleries, artist studios, residencies. And he pointed to Paris’s Cité Internationale des Arts as an example.

Toronto's Distillery District was revamped into a cultural hub. (Photo from Artscape website)

It's this kind of forward thinking that could stop the downtown core and Westside from slipping into a blandly privileged area with all the cultural texture of glassy high-end condos.

Granville Island needs a vibrant injection of new ideas and opportunities and Vancouver desperately needs a cultural hub, a multifunctional space with rental studios and residencies for everyone from painters to industrial designers, techies to musicians, performers to writers.

Yes, it's a balancing act. Nobody wants the Island to shut as tight as a tomb at night but the neighbours won't take kindly to the place being mobbed by booze-fueled night-crawlers. Artists and students work all hours, often after a day of slinging Italian coffees or serving Public Market customers. As students we purchase our supplies on the island, we depend on the visitors for our shows and showings. Our work ensures Granville Island is a tourist draw, not a tourist trap, that it is committed to Artisan over Ye Olde, authenticity over Disney.

It may sound like a pipe dream, but Granville Island was part of the inspiration that led the not-for-profit Artscape in Toronto to turn a collection of industrial buildings into a major cultural hub and tourist draw, in a remarkably short time. (See YouTube interview with Tim Jones, president and CEO of CityScape below.)

Bees and bubble tea straws inspire new work

2/28/2014

My mind has been buzzing with thoughts of legendary environmentalist-artist Joseph Beuys as I've been hatching an idea for a public artwork that is not so much intrusive as inclusive, especially if you're a native mason bee.

It is the convergence of my love of patterns of circles within circles and my growing understanding of the immense value of the Blue Orchard (aka Osmia) Mason Bee. This non-stinging little guy gets up early in the season, collects nectar and spreads pollen at the same time, and is a workhouse in the pollination business compared to the introduced honey bee.

Like most of us, Blue Mason Bees live on their own but are gregarious except their preferred condo complexes are holes in wood. It turns out they also live quite nicely in paper straws that are closed at the back end.

Artists/gardeners/environmentalists/industrial designers have been innovating ways to boost the population of mason bees in response to colony collapse of the honey bee.

Condo complexes set up in the Jardin du Luxembourg in Paris (above) and in the Paris Botanical Garden provide real inspiration, as do the smaller mobile homes, like the one below in Copenhagen.

Carlyn Yandle photo

I've been experimenting with making the straws (see video at bottom) with an emphasis on design, found materials (paper bags and coffee cans). Now for a little colour.

My theory is that bubble tea straws could provide just the right waterproof structure for accommodating all those straws the females pack with cocoons. The straws would be easily removed and the cocoons harvested, cleaned and stored in the fridge for the winter, ready to be set out next spring.

I have no idea whether this will work, but the creative process is one of problem-finding and problem-solving.

Carlyn Yandle photo

The plan uses the colourful clusters of the translucent angled straws because they provide built-in overhangs for each condo while allowing for the necessary south light to hit each doorway.

The clusters-within-cluster design of fiber-optic cables (see below) sets the pattern course in a design that moves from pinky-finger width to something on a grand scale that can be seen from a block away by humans.

It's one of those situations where it will take some doing to get to some knowing.

Cross-section of a fiber-optic cable