Category: Knotting

Weaving through weighty material

11/16/2012

I needed to shed my years of sewing and knitting and general crafting so I went to art school. No more crochet hooks and embroidery hoops; I wanted to do Real Important Art.

But it was only after I could finally separate out all the crocheted pot-holders and felted figurines from the lump of Fibre Arts that I could see that this is a medium that offers endless innovation beyond what I wanted to do in paint or metal or wood.

Fibre arts has a global and historical connectedness but it's the culture embedded in those fibres that really carries weight. A doily is not just knotted cotton thread but a slightly-disdained symbol of women of a certain generation; a cheap polyester shirt can refer to class or sweatshops. Fibre is rarely neutral, but hot with connotations. It can be at once attractive and repulsive, modest and monumental. It can reveal the artist's intimate passion for the material or method and evoke ideas of global exploitation or environmental degradation — often in the same piece.

Vancouver sculptor and educator Liz Magor capitalizes on the cultural weight of fibre in her new show at the Catriona Jeffries gallery in Vancouver (through Dec. 22). It's impossible to feel nothing when confronted with revealed box after box of familiar yet altered, oddly-accessorized garments. They almost demand the viewer to connect the gaudy contents, construct a narrative, create a character. There's a lot of chatter in that quiet space.

Yet even the most abstracted, distilled fibre arts works have a lot to say. A recent tour of the World of Threads international festival (continuing in Toronto to Dec. 2) revealed conceptual artworks fabricated from everything from brocade to pig intestine. A felted cloth full of gaping holes hangs heavy with dark emotion. An expansive, torqued mandala-like piece of dirt brown sisal and burlap is surprisingly uplifting.

Or maybe it was just being in this gallery, in the company of some engaging examples of fibre artwork, just one of the many venues celebrating conceptual fibre arts during the fest.

It was quite a contrast to the art scene back home; Magor's show is an exception in this photo-conceptual-branded town.

One of Liz Magor's many boxes of garments in the I is Being This show.

Toronto artist Lorena Santin-Andrade's Warm, felted wool

Lisa DiQuinzio's Good Morning, Midnight, 91" diameter

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Makers get respect they deserve at Mini Maker Faire

6/26/2012

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Artist friend and Maker Faire participant Rachael Ashe

In his speech to graduates of Toronto’s York University this month, one of my favourite journalists, CBC Radio’s Michael Enright, advised the next working generation to “learn how to fix something. Or make something using your hands.” Three years earlier, in his inaugural address, U.S. President Obama noted that it’s “the doers, the makers of things” who have contributed to a functional society, not “those that prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame.”

It’s a refreshing, recurring theme, after decades of popular thought that “making” lives in the shadow of that all-important exception of making money, or is relegated to the realm of hobby.

We life-long makers often find we have to defend the attention we spend on learning our craft, acquiring our skills. These things take time, and in the absence of any formal training we will carve out space wherever we can. For me, it was about escaping the classroom to papier-mache a bottle (or cut out giant tissue-paper flowers or silkscreen T-shirts or turn clay bowls) then escaping the office to stitch bed quilts (or build chests or reupholster furniture or braid rugs) until I finally allowed myself to make space for full-time making.

This is why I was in my element as part of Vancouver’s second annual Mini Maker Faire last weekend, a convergence of maker-geeks at the Forum building in Hastings Park in East Van. From weaving to robotics, this is my kind of place. Part market, part installation, part classroom, the real value is in what you know or can learn, not what you have or can buy.

This was the perfect spot to install our Network, a chaotic, collaborative, ongoing public artwork that is simple enough for anyone to add to it. For two days, people tied/braided/knotted/wove/wound strips of synthetic fabrics to the web/maze/forest/snarl, and in the process got the opportunity to connect with others who are naturally drawn to working with their hands. Little boys escaped into imaginary worlds under the sculpture. Bigger girls braided and chatted in groups of twos and threes. We thought we would be spending the two days coaxing visitors to participate by explaining the purpose and function of this random, ongoing fibre sculpture, but it clearly wasn’t necessary. Making is quite enough for anyone drawn to an event like this.

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'70s crafts inspire public artwork

5/26/2011

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Who knew those old patterns for plant-hangers and belts (and whatever that 'practical' getup is) would one day inform an art practice?

I had a Moment yesterday when I saw the front page of the Richmond Review newspaper, announcing that my design has been chosen for a proposed crosswalk in the heritage fishing village of Steveston.

The Moment was less about the win — although that was a nice bit of validation — and more about the physical proof that domestic crafts belongs in public art.

The design is a crosswalk that appears as fishnetting, in tribute to the historical importance of a booming salmon-fishing port village that was at one time branded 'Salmonopolis.'

It took some mining into my crafty background to problem-solve specific aspects of my idea, like how to elegantly join four net sections in the middle of what will be B.C.'s first 'scramble' crosswalk. My research involved digging through my old macrame magazines and re-learning some knotting I haven't done since my obsession with that craze ended in Grade 9.

Conceptualizing the crosswalk design required physically recalling the same activity as the Chinese, Japanese, First Nations and European residents who created the nets that filled the lofts that are now galleries, restaurants and museums. It also reminds me of the importance of literally 'playing with ideas.'

It's a subtle design, experienced chiefly by walking. Motor vehicles will miss it. But the real subtlety to me is the handiwork that informed it.

According to the newspaper article, this network will be catching pedestrians by October.

Design elements from macrame

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Weaving through weighty material

Makers get respect they deserve at Mini Maker Faire

'70s crafts inspire public artwork

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