Category: Material Exploration

When going back is good

11/23/2024

Past failures are invaluable teaching tools

This is my picking-up-the-pieces post, which is literally what I’m doing these days (and late nights).

With the outlook looking very dark indeed I turned to my colourful stash of fabrics that I keep at eye level in a wine crate on the wall. The ‘BACK’ and ‘NEXT’ sign plates — evoking the buttons on the bottom of every online form — are courtesy of an artist friend, so I texted him for his opinion on how to proceed in these times of need:

Turns out things are going back politically, now that the majority of Americans have voted in villains to run the show. I’m going back too, but only to revisit those failures for the lessons they hold for moving forward.

Exhibit A: Here I spent a good portion of one day heating a tapestry needle with a Bic lighter and poking it through a piece of stiff synthetic paper. Over and over. I loved the subtractive mark-making (also known as ‘burning holes’) and the increase in density that culminated in a large negative space. I was working as an artist-research assistant with astrophysicists and other big brains at the time so I think I was trying to get a grip on the concept of black holes or negative energy (not so much). Learning outcome: Breathing in melting synthetic paper fumes creates a whopper of a headache. Not an indoor sport.

Exhibit A

My father was a lifelong painter of mostly landscapes but I knew he was losing his mind when he looked at the last work-in-progress on his easel and declared, “Well I don’t know what’s going on here!” This is how I feel when I look at Exhibit B: A four-panel collage painting of lacy construction-crane patterns topped with bits of Tyvek building wrap and strips of acrylic skins. Learning outcome: I need to add a letter to my will requesting that all weird artwork be destroyed upon my demise.

Exhibit B

Moving on to Exhibit C: some jeans with all fabric removed and re-configured as a net or scaffolding. Maybe a more clever artist could write a profound statement about this that could land it in an Important Art Exhibit, perhaps something about togetherness or workers united, or maybe the hollowing out of union labour. It said nothing to me but the materials and technique were eventually incorporated into two distinct large-scale artworks. Learning outcome: Even dead-end projects contain something to build on.

Exhibit C

Exhibit D is a collection of coffee-bean sacks attached to a wall with sewing pins. I was exploring the sculptural possibilities of burlap, the shadow effects and warm tones, the varying weaves and the fonts of the silk-screened labels. But tacking bunched-up bags wasn’t enough.

Exhibit D

I doubled down, stitching one bag after another to a rusty concrete-forming tie, then pulling out most of the weft from the weave, macramé-ing them, then coating them with ready-use concrete mix. Meh. I knotted up the deconstructed sacks following designs of specific architecture, including a cathedral. I lashed the steel ties together and suspended the lot of them in an overly ambitious arrangement that called for a dozen more of these time-sucking labours from hell. I was stuck in that encrusted, fibrous rabbit hole for most of 2021. Learning outcome: Going bigger isn’t the answer when it’s not working and it’s okay to drop the project despite the large investment in time. Also, turns out my lungs don’t react well to the burlap-fibre dust bunnies floating around the studio.

Detail of concretized burlap macramé experiments

I finally received a sign to restart a couple of weeks ago when another artist gave me a collection of silky striped fabric swatches. They reminded me of some finicky, slippery satin quilt blocks I started a decade ago. I pulled out the fraying, wonky squares that had defeated me but decided to work with them. This will be a queen-sized memory quilt of my perfectly imperfect past. Learning outcome: Failures may need time for new energy, ideas and skill to arrive. This is that time.

Work in progress: Piecing together an abandoned project with new energy.

Dancing on the edge

11/3/2024

This craftiest time of year is laced with pain

When you’ve recently lost a loved one, certain annual occasions are rough: Christmas, birthdays, anniversaries. For me, it’s Halloween. That’s when my brother was a full-steam-ahead creative force and crafty collaborator.
Right about now I’m missing his super-charged energy. I need the distraction from the dead-heat US election campaign. Whenever I’m in near fetal position watching the news of the latest misogynist spew, I wish he would walk through the front door and shatter that chatter with his usual greeting, Hey. What’s goin’ on?

My brother has been my biggest backer, my major motivator. His material explorations, unlike my mincing attempts, were bold. He took keen notice of my flirtations with trendy crafty products over the years and turned them up to 11, sponge-painting, glue-gunning, Mod-Podging and needle-felting the ridiculous and the outsized. One Halloween, in the days (weeks?) before, he and his two sons papier-maché’d two gigantic skulls that he illuminated and suspended at their front door to create all the charm of Colonel Kurtz’ camp in Apocalypse Now. He did it for the kids — all the kids.

He designed craft beer labels and websites, hand-built playhouses and kitchen cabinetry from scratch and baked up a scale-model gingerbread house of his own house. He decorated birthday cakes with panache and had a penchant for dinner plating. His Instagram account is (still) full of irreverent, self-deprecating and appreciative posts of various craftiness.

Nothing I made was too weird for his liking. Sometimes our unsolicited viewpoints clashed, which I liked because there was good takeaway there. He wasn’t shy about serving up some meaty feedback about my work-in-progress but scoffed at the notion that he was an artist himself. He often ran his well-rendered hand-drawn or Illustrator sketches by me. I would tell him that they were overly complex. He would give me the screw-you look and eventually edit his design.

My brother never saw himself as an artist.

Two years ago, as summer turned to Fall he was couch-bound and riding waves of excruciating pain. I would text him stoopid videos of us synchro-dancing at a house party or bloopers from our teenage nephews’ film projects.

A couple of days before that Halloween my brother was on a fentanyl drip in the palliative care ward when the younger teenage son showed up for his dad’s creative input, in an almost-finished Semi-Pro costume. He spent the evening bedside, drawing the logo with felt pens on the singlet fashioned from an old T-shirt. Meanwhile our niece, 12, had asked for my assistance in transforming her into a strip of bacon. I received the required hand-rendering of her idea and figured it out. She cut and sewed up red and brown strips of felt to a body-height casing of white felt. It was as hasty as her drawing. I took a photo and sent it to my brother.

The day before Halloween he critiqued it. “Needs some ‘distressed’ coloring around the edges,” he texted from his hospital bed. “Maybe some of that bacon scent spray that I always see in dollar stores… what about a sash or banner that says ‘Maple Leaf’ on it?” But basic bacon was all I could muster and when I forwarded him our sister’s Halloween-night reveal photo of three girls in character of butcher, pig and bacon he texted back: “You nailed it!” Liar. But I lived for his praise.

Three days before he left this world on Christmas Day I texted him a video of our crotch-rock front-porch lip-sync from Halloween the year before.

He replied with a heart emoji.

Leader of the pack

Fleeting thoughts of granny squares

10/25/2024

The Wet Coast is no place for this fuzzy fantasy

The trees are sun-kissed radiant red and gold as I hunker down to write this, in that little sliver of crisp and dry days between the months of dumb-dumb flipflops and the damn rain boots. Not that I’m complaining about life-giving precipitation in these drying times but by the time this is published we on the Wet Coast will most likely be entering the seven months of sog. So just for today, I’m loving this:

I don’t actually own an outdoorsy sweater. I have various rain-repelling jackets and coats and pants and some base layers spun from plastic pop bottles: ‘outdoorky’ gear, mostly in sensible black. Yet it occurs to me that since I have competent needleworking skills I could design something completely unique and unsensible: a vibrant visual statement! A colourful conversation-starter!

I’ve knit several sweaters in my time while commuting by bus and SkyTrain across four municipalities during four years as a reporter at a suburban newspaper. They were mostly derivative of the ‘Doctor Huxtable’ sweaters, more not-bad than bad-ass, for my man at the time. They were not keepers.

I have just one of my own: Logo Sweater, made in the months before the 2010 Winter Olympics here, to test the extents of corporate copyright and appropriation of the traditional Cowichan sweater design.

‘Logo Sweater’, 2010, made with the assistance of my mother, a truly competent life-long knitter, and modelled by my brother.

What I’ve decided after those years of increasingly complex sweater-making is that knitting, as a creative action, suuuuuucks.

In my hands, the knitting needles are tools trying to perfectly emulate what a machine can — and does — do: create perfect loops upon perfect loops on rows upon rows, stuck in a matrix, so mindless you can do it blindfolded or watch movies at the same time, which I guess is the appeal. It’s a laborious endurance; you can binge every Grey’s Anatomy episode and you still might not get that baby blanket done.

I’m with the hookers. Could knitting needles have created the hyperbolic-crocheted Spore from a 24-foot-by-28-foot deteriorating plastic tarp I dragged out of the forest? Or this other version in found fibre-optic cable? I’d like to see knitting needles try working up these tight mathematical models of hyperbolic growth.

Two crocheted objects in the “Fuzzy Logic” series. (Carlyn Yandle)

Just one agile hook is all it takes to create fast, improvisational and three-dimensional objects. It can be a meandering journey through rows of neat little stitches that erupt into large saggy loops before settling down the side in thick ribbing then circling back to the beginning. How about a curly lettuce frill here? How about stitching up a rose?

How about a few Roses Against Violence? Since that fun little project was introduced by an Austrian artist in 2018, crocheters have been tagging street infrastructure all over the world with purple roses with a message to stop gender-based violence.

Collage of Instagram posts from around the world (@rosesagainstviolence; #rosesagainstviolence). Austrian artist Claudia Grünzweig’s started the crochet-tagging in 2018 to call for the end of gender-based violence.

How about hooking up an alternative to the bland Barbie universe?

Work by Xenobia Bailey: “Her Royal Flyness”, part of an overlooked “Funktional Design” movement, “Poke In The Eye: Art of the West Coast Counterculture”, Seattle Art Museum, August 2024

Or a human-sized frock of funk fantasy?

(Garment, 1990s. Single-stitch crochet: acrylic and cotton four-ply yarn, “Xenobia Bailey: A Childhood Dreamscape In the Aesthetic of Funk Almost Deferred”, part of the “Poke In The Eye: Art of the West Coast Counterculture” exhibit, Seattle Art Museum, August 2024)

I am inspired by this outrageous aesthetic overlooked in the West Coast crafty counter-culture of the late last century. It has me mining my own memories of a fuzzy milieu of crocheted granny squares and afghans.
I googled “duster” and “granny squares” and there it is:

So much inspo: u/Birdfin on the r/crochet sub-Reddit; dreamcrochets.com

Not a word of a lie: As I type this last sentence, a loud crack of thunder rattles the place. I unplug the laptop.

Wait — is this grandmacore? Comes a time when the specialness of the old-lady look is lost when it’s worn by an old(er) lady. Any attempt at personal flair might read more ‘picked out of my seniors’ centre lost-and-found.’

So grandmacore is to be avoided. Also cottagecore, a baffling combo of simplicity and clutter. And definitely not the froufrou fairycore as there is no occasion when I will be attaching little wings to gauzy day dresses. Apparently (according to a handy online quiz) I relate mostly to the earthy goblincore. I do appreciate swamps and lichen and tree-trunk hidey-holes. But mushrooms have the feel of phlegm on my tongue so I will not be adorning my clothes or livingspace with any manner of those.

I was still visualizing a calf-length duster of earth-toned granny squares when the rain started firing against the windows like birdshot. So much for sweater weather.

No use fretting over earthquakes

10/2/2024

Hand-makers will be the change when or if 'The Big One' hits

Of all the things I fret over — a neighbourhood arsonist, identity theft, Trump burning it all down, an all-out war in the Middle East — ‘earthquake’ is not one of them. But it may seem like I’m tempting the fates, living on the west coast of Canada. True, it’s one of the few areas in the world where three tectonic plates are sliding around and occasionally crashing into one another to the tune of 1,000 earthquakes a year. And in what seems like a death wish, my travel is mostly within the Pacific Ring of Fire. I’ve experienced minor earthquakes in Vancouver, Kyoto and Oaxaca. I arrived in Mexico City two months after the 7.1-magnitude 2017 Puebla earthquake when excavators were still clawing at the rubble of mangled apartment buildings.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_of_Fire

Compounding this, I’ve always lived in older wood-framed places, the kind that tremble when someone slams a door or takes a run at the stairs, even next door. I understand that it’s just a matter of time before The Big One hits this region but this information doesn’t keep me up at night. When the bedroom walls shuddered at 4:05 a.m. this past Thursday I recognized it was an earthquake and when there was no follow-up seismic activity I turned over to get some sleep. I would have got some were it not for the guy outside calling out for an escaped pet (though I’m really hoping “Michael” is not the name of that hefty Burmese python that hangs around the neck and waist of a guy in the neighbourhood.)

I thought about the Go Bag that I put together (radio, batteries, Biolite stove/USB port, cash, plastic trash bags, emergency blanket, Leatherman, painkillers, protein bars, Life Straw) in the bedroom closet and the footwear beside the bed, because chances are that’s where we’ll all be if we’re at home when it hits.
If/when the neighbourhood is reduced to rubble, a lot of folks will be standing around in the debris-filled street pointing their dead phones to the sky, wailing at the lack of even one bar and praying that their saviour Elon Musk is doing something. Meanwhile, I will be gathering up scraps of tarps and shower curtains and Luxury Homes Coming Soon vinyl banners to rip into strips to braid into covers and bedding. I will be collecting armloads of scrap wood, loops of downed wiring, mangled metal gutters and tree limbs to bind into building blocks. I’ll be gathering people immobilized by shock to join in on these simple projects, or just regroup around my litter-fuelled stove for tea in the warmth of my makeshift shelter.

Scaffolds I, Carlyn Yandle, 2018: The design of the city’s clutter of construction cranes inspired makeshift structural units composed of construction-site scraps — piping, cardboard, conduit cable, building wrap, hazard tape, jeans, framing wood. The panels, lashed into triangular building blocks, are explorations of shear strength and diagonal tension of units built without tools or hardware.

Maybe my lack of fear comes from seeing The Big One as the ultimate test of an art practice motivated by a something-out-of-nothing sensibility. Engaging in repetitive, tactile activity also brings a sense of calm in the face of fear: emotional survival.

Seismic Rug, 2011: petroleum-derived fabric, thread. 60”OD x 8”H (Carlyn Yandle)

Seismic Rug emerged in the hours, days and weeks following the Japan earthquake and tsunami of 2011. The rote action of braiding quelled the hand-wringing as the disaster unfolded, often in horrific real time. Undulations created by increasing and decreasing tension reflected my own moments of tension as well as the concentric waves from the undersea earthquake that led to the devastating tsunami. It was woven from a desire for quietude, reflection and meditation but it also functions as an artifact of humane activity in a worst-case scenario.

Rest assured that in the event of a West Coast version, while you digital-nomadic gamers and Cybertruck-owning marketing executives stand in puddles moaning over your lack of connectivity, I’ll be grappling with the physical world. I’ll be the busy lady in the barbecue-cover poncho.

From mind-numbing to mindful

9/30/2024

Dropping out is easy. This art practice is about tuning in

Flat on my back in the chair last week, the dentist had just plunged the second needle into my eroded molar area and her assistant was now affixing the rubber dam. This is when my go-to flight response kicked in: I'm not really here! I'm not really here! I'm not really here!

Full disassociation is appropriate when two dental professionals are bearing down on you with drill and suction tube and you are required to relax your gag reflex. But checking out of reality to avoid the pain of the Divided States of America’s Presidential election campaign is not the answer.

In this Disinformation Industrial Complex age it’s tempting to drop out and go on a bed-date with the vape pen to binge Love Is Blind. But we need to stay engaged — yes, even Canadians. We need to tune in to reliable sources of news,* turn on our own brains and hearts so we can discern the rational from the irrational and the hopeful from the hateful. And when the time comes (in any public election), we need to turn to voting our own conscience and not what others expect from us.

The trick is to do it all without risking mental instability, starting with the premise that we are not all going to Hell in a handcart. We need to believe in ourselves as part of the greater good. Adding to ‘believing’ is the need for time away from the too-many screens. True, a growing number of US adults (58 per cent) say they prefer to get their news on their digital devices but we can choose which news sources and the conditions for absorbing it.
This is how I approach any artwork: through belief and time. I believe that a large-scale or complex project can and will emerge through small, individual actions. I give myself the gift of time to focus on one stitch, one paint layer, one quilt-block, one knot, one row. Or, for the purpose of this weekly writing, one sentence at a time.
The following meandering, improvisational stitching-painting hybrid (linen on wood stretcher) was started this past spring, growing in complexity over the summer:

Cotton floss, monoprint on paper, 10” x 14”I’m not sure if what I’m making these days reflects what I’m listening to, or if I’ve devised this improvisational way of working to allow my brain to fully concentrate on the information. I do know that this voyage of discovery is a symbiotic relationship, a positive-feedback loop that drives me to continue developing this emerging work in the studio while reaching a deeper understanding of the world beyond.
In another example, this recent exploration into redwork embroidery could have been influenced by tuning into news features on Vancouver’s global investment-induced construction boom, housing shortage, “renovictions” and homelessness.

Cotton floss, monoprint on paper, 10” x 14”

At the time of this publishing there are 42 days of increasingly outrageous tactics before a new US president is elected. However we get there, a resting heart rate is required to see fear-mongering for what it is: just a desperate power grab.
***
*For those looking online in Canada for news that means looking elsewhere besides Facebook and Instagram, since parent company Meta chose to block their users from quality and local news instead of paying those news sources. (Google is exempt from the Online News Act after it agreed to pay Canadian news publishers $100 million a year.)

End of an era for Vancouver makers

9/7/2024

The one great store that fuels textile dreams is closing due to small-business struggles

Judging by the early deluge of reactions on Reddit last week, we Vancouver makers are stunned to learn that our mecca for material and more is selling off its inventory and properties and closing for good. And I’m dealing with it like the full-grown woman I am.

Damn you! Damn you all to Hell!

Vancouver has never had the big shmata (cloth trade) districts like Montreal or Toronto. In these parts, we have Dressew Supply, a sort of rough-around-the-edges department store almost bursting with bolts of liquidation fabrics, sparkly applique patches, headbanger wigs, thousands of buttons, zippers, feather boas, skeins of yarn, rolls of ribbon and every sewing notion imaginable to satisfy the city’s crafty counter-culture vibe.

Vancouver never had the garment district of Toronto, where “Uniform Measure/Stack" (1997), designed by Stephen Cruise (stephencruise.ca), monumentalizes objects of the trade, originally with painted path of yellow measuring tape.

I am with my people here: the grandmothers who sew Christmas-gift pajamas, the goths, the quilters, the film and theatre set designers, the dance-gymnastics girls, the fashion-school students, and more recently, Pride paraders, Halloween costumers and cosplayers. Moving through those jammed aisles of colour and pattern revitalizes the brain, especially in our soggy, dark mid-winters.

I have a long history of ruining homemade garments made from my purchases at Dressew. I blame this on the tedious, mandatory Grade 8 girls’ sewing class designed to turn us into skilled workers or housewives. So when my community-college-student budget demanded I make my own nightclubbing “look” and wedding-guest frocks, I took an improv approach, using the cheapest $2/yard “100% unknown fibers” fabrics that smelled as flammable as they looked. I was lured by the big books of “Make it tonight!” Butterick, Style and Simplicity patterns and when this timeline proved unlikely, I’d game the instructions by swapping, say, a long back zipper with self-adhesive Velcro, or cramming in some thick shoulder pads to try to give shape to my latest sagging acetate atrocity. I don’t have photographic evidence of the voluminous emerald taffeta dress with the watermelon-sized sleeves that I wore to a cousin’s wedding but I can see in the snapshot of the baby-blue Cinderella-style dress at another wedding that I didn’t see ‘fit’ as an area of concern.

Nevertheless I persisted! I dreamed big, undeterred by minimal skill and patience or my wonky sewing machine that I dropped on the floor more than once. These projects were doomed to fail, like the grey pin-striped double-breasted suit for my university boyfriend who actually wore the blazer for a while but who was also likely relieved that the trousers never materialized. And I’d like to take this opportunity to apologize to all those unwilling children in my life who endured the double humiliation of being gifted one of my hand-sewn polar-fleece hats and posing for a photo in it for their mother’s thank-you note.

Evidence of ill-fitting, over-padded and plain cruel past projects.

The magic of that store is in the endless possibilities and I always left with hope in my heart that this time I will read the directions. I will take breaks. I will use pins. I will find scissors that don’t chew the fabric. I will not view interfacing as optional.
I eventually redeemed myself as the family-and-friends’ Halloween costume-maker, taking the bus downtown with one kid or another while conferring over their concept drawing that I assigned to weed out the uncommitted. They also had to help cut, sew, glue and paint as required, so I wouldn’t take all the blame for shoddy workmanship.

Learning to sew is more fun when it’s a costume.

I also got pretty good at reupholstering because I had the good sense to take some continuing-ed classes on the subject as a young adult (rather than a self-conscious, hormonal 13-year-old) led by a retired skilled professional. Still on a tight budget, I learned to revamp found vintage armchairs with Dressew’s bargain upholstery fabrics but moved over to making crib quilts for all the new babies. Eventually I got serious about fibre art and went to art school. When the pandemic lockdown hit I re-focused my plans for my stash of quilting cotton and sewed up three-layer cotton masks — so many masks — to fill the early gap in the supply chain. Elastic was a scarce commodity and that’s where the owner at Dressew stepped up, delivering yardage of elastic to me from the shuttered store’s back alley door, like a dealer doing a drop.

So many Covid masks, made possible during lockdown by Dressew.

The imminent demise leaves me — us — in the lurch. Shopping by the hand-feel (and smell) of fabrics, yarn, fun fur, trims, felt, wigs, and all the strange liquidation items is an in-person experience in the energizing milieu of other creatives. So now what? Will next year’s Halloween costume missions now take place around the ol’ iPhone peering at fabric images on Amazon, not really knowing what will show up as we hit ‘Add to cart’?
That’s a hard no. Sorry kids.

I'd rather be at craft camp

8/9/2024

Vacationing with extended family or acquaintances at the campground can be awkward for those makers who devote a good portion of our waking hours to making artwork.
Unless you’re cranking out objects for your Etsy shop you will be faced with that one question that could throw you into an existential crisis. You (and by you I mean I) have no problem answering questions like What it’s made of, How did you make it, Where did you get the idea or When did you make it. I am happy to open up my studio to perfect strangers of any age to answer these and any other questions, as there are no stupid ones. But in the context of slightly inebriated or jack-assy folks, it’s best to avoid the Why. Trying to answer that around the old campfire is a trap.

Above: an actual text message from a fellow artist last month.

A weirdo? Or a material-explorer?

At the campground or on the deck or at the picnic, do not take the bait when you’re asked in the nicest, qualifying way why you do what you do. The desire to “engage in the art discourse” is fine for the gallery or classroom or lecture hall but as soon as that phrase leaves your lips, eyes will roll. Phrases like “embodied experience”, “finding flow” and “material exploration” will lead to some head-shaking while peering into their Hey Y’alls. And do not mention art school. On the other hand, if you’re spoiling for a fight or looking for a laugh at any cost, mention your Masters in Fine Arts. That always gets them going.
At the moment when the group has clearly decided you’re a freeloading waste of space I think about Mister Rogers and look for the helpers. It might just be that one other person who isn’t engaged in a general critique of mainstream media, that one head not bobbing along when the talk turns to vaccine-pushers. If I can’t find that safe harbour in these turbulent seas, I make a French exit and go find a kid.

Hanging out with a kid is a chance to transport the self into an exploration of the actual here-and-now world. Little kids at these kinds of events are constantly testing the boundaries of water, earth, air, fire, plants, bugs, and their own physical abilities. If they’re quite young, they’ll happily engage with me and the parents are happy for the break. Tweens may tolerate me but teens, forget it; I don’t need any parents suspicious of an adult artist hanging with teens.

I once had this idea of running a kids-type sleep-away camp for adults: bare-bones bunkies, communal mess hall, forest trails, a couple of acres on a lake or oceanfront. The only difference would be a lack of programming. It would be the opposite of corporate team-building or any kind of self-improvement or indoctrination. The whole objective would be fun without — get ready for it — alcohol or any recreational drugs and that includes non-essential electronic devices. But there would be musical instruments, costumes and basic tools for creating stuff. It would be a self-organizing singular or group-directed experience of the immediate environment, with some basic facilitation as required — kind of like art school. There would be no agenda beyond meal-time preparation and dining and a basic structure for communally keeping the place ship-shape. It would be a space to explore, to gather or to enjoy solitude, to sing and dance, go quietly read or walk or nap, or to try on different personas for performance or personal discovery.

I abandoned that plan because I couldn’t bear any questioning of the value-for-money of the camp fees, or the lack of goal-setting or networking opportunities or skill-building programs, while I’m questioning whether wetland mud can create sculpture or if it’s possible to harvest sea salt in an outcrop of sandstone.
So instead over the years I have enjoyed hosting a sort of loose Craft Camp on one of the Gulf Islands, just for the kids in my life and fellow adult artists. We have hammered, power-drilled, sawed, glued, wrapped, woven, drawn, gathered, knotted, painted, whittled, categorized, braided and built a cob oven.

Vancouver-area artists building a cob oven (Connie Sabo photo)

Completed or ongoing projects include beach-glass mosaics, free-store costumes, rusty-metal assemblages, comic zines, braided rugs, seagrass weavings, driftwood sculptures, leaf collages, fabric pillows, cyanotype paintings, papier-mache vessels and pressed seaweed and flower pictures — all without a master plan, or mandatory outcomes.

Kids instinctively know how to get in the flow. (Carlyn Yandle photos)

Kids know how to be in the flow of experiencing the world. My goal is to bush-wack through the trappings of late capitalism to find it.

This is why.

Awkward family moment informs art-making aesthetic

7/14/2024

When I first started out as a suburban-newspaper reporter I had a single original artwork tacked to the wall in my basement suite. It was a life-sized acrylic-on-paper, a nude holding her maybe-pregnant belly against a landscape of spewing factories and techni-coloured streams.

I watched this gaunt, world-weary figure emerge in watery brushstrokes from the hand of the newspaper photographer's girlfriend. This is how she worked, in their basement suite, pulling yardage from a large roll of cheap paper, painting straight from her head and heart, with no plan to keep or show or sell her paintings. She saw that this one resonated with me too — what twenty-something in a committed relationship doesn’t have this weighing on her mind? So she gave it to me.

Hanging it felt like supporting an ally, even if it was only hanging in my dark, featureless space that nobody would see besides the boyfriend on weekends. Then one day some of his family made the trip for a visit. They complimented my hanging flower baskets, my thrifty decor. I didn’t hear until much later that the painting had become a topic of conversation among various relatives, a bit of a joke about that subject and, by extension in my mind, this girlfriend.

I had none of the inner fortitude to see this painting or my choices as acceptable and eventually I rolled it up and hid it in a closet. I married into that family within three years. The boxed wedding dress joined the poster tube containing the offending painting for two more moves until I finally ditched the artwork at the Sally Ann. The dress is another story.

Detail from 'Unbridled,' the artist's handmade silk wedding dress embroidered with significant events. (Carlyn Yandle photo)

'I Dissent,' aesthetic design with a political position marking the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Acrylic on panel, 2020 (Carlyn Yandle)

But I did keep something from that painting: some lessons that have informed an aesthetic that I carry to this day but might not even recognize until after each artwork is completed, or is at least on its trajectory.

The first is the power of attraction. Not to be confused with the pseudoscientific Law of Attraction, this is a drive to create aesthetically-pleasing, familiar domestic objects and fields that upon closer inspection have something else to say besides cozy or pretty. An early example of one of my pretty/pretty disturbing objects is Clutch (2007). Hundreds of sewing pins were pierced into a thrifted clutch purse in a colourful beaded pattern covering the entire surface. The clasp opens to reveal an impenetrable thicket of steely pointy ends.

Another valuable lesson is context, or time and place. Gallery-goers may prepare themselves to be confronted by artwork but I don’t wish that on houseguests. There are none of those Live-Love-Laugh type directives or IKEA Eiffel Towers and tulips on the walls at home, but what is there is selected to engage, not repel. Home is a place to feel safe. The studio is a place to not play it safe, but it’s still a covert operation, playing on that first impression of domestic objects that reveal cracks in the beauty of the everyday.

I’ve also learned that my creative energy comes from joy, not pain. I have no urge to make when I barely have enough hope for the day to put on pants. Heavy realities may be the driving force but the work develops from a position of hope for comfort and social connection, a hunger for nourishment of new ideas and new materials to explore. The joy is in learning while doing, imagining new collective futures.

What first appears as a frilly white textile barely conceals the chaotic armature of conduit casing, hazard tape, metal pipes, and other construction-site debris behind layers of discarded Tyvek building wrap. (Nate Yandle photos)

Finally, my position is not fixed. In my mind I have that 1985 photo portrait of Lily Tomlin in a black T-shirt with white lettering that screams EVOLVE OR DIE. And look at her now. My sensibilities are always shifting and I am growing more at peace with the idea that what other people say about me is none of my business. When an artist friend turned 50 on an artists’ retreat the rest of us toasted her in a welcome to the I Don’t Give a Shit Club. When you’re part of that club you stop second-guessing every decision and tending to other people’s feelings first.

This is how I recently became the owner of Fuckwit. I was attracted by the sweet rosebud fabric appliqued in tiny blanket stitches precise as Letraset on a lacy linen. I like the artist's choice of font and word. It’s an overt, uncomplicated work that hangs near the front door, visible before guests would even have their coat off. If people get offended, blame the artist, not me. I just like the beauty in that crack.

Original artwork by Kathryn Lissack (@kathrynlissack)

Finding new Space in Old Craft of Smocking

9/22/2019

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Material research using found spun polyester fibre, for an artwork resulting from a year's conversation with scientists and scholars. (Carlyn Yandle photos)

About a decade ago I stumbled across Latvian-American mathematician Daina Taimina’s curious crochet abstractions. What's not to love about needlecraft (and needlecrafters) that advances modeling of non-Euclidean geometry?

Hyperbolic crochet, by mathematician Daina Taimina. Pic from rixc.org

I’ve been needling away ever since at the power of domestic materials and methods in making new forms (and new ideas).

Most recently I’ve been fascinated by the sculptural potential of smocking that was once a feature of every little-girl dress before the fantastic elastic plastic age hit.

Smocking expands and contracts rigid material and turns area into volume. Best of all, it’s a slow-craft, inwardly-focused, rote activity that is an essential thinking tool for me: when the hands are busy (with something other than the damn iPhone) then the mind is free to wander. And where I've been wandering around these days is space, from the macrocosm to the microcosm.

For the last year I’ve been meeting regularly with a physicist and an engineer from the particle-accelerator lab at UBC and two scholars in the field of arts, for a project through Emily Carr University that explores the possibilities of 'co-thinking' or 'hybridized thinking’ between artists and scientists.

Circular patterns of the schematics of astrophysics and nuclear medicine are seen in the UBC particle-accelerator building itself.

After I got over the initial shock of being invited to join the dozen research assistants on this project (having barely squeaked through Math 11 and remaining the problem child at my tax accountant's office) I realized that I would not in fact be taxed with fully grasping unfathomable ideas of space-time or the confounding mechanicals inside UBC's cavernous particle-accelerator building. Instead, my role as a facilitating artist includes producing an artwork out of this whole experiment, for a group exhibit later this winter.

So why not smocking?

Material research includes reviewing the history and applications of an ages-old textile technique.

There's something zingy about using the most basic of methods — tying string knots in fabric — as I grapple with concepts like infinity, black holes, space-time, and a contracting universe. As I play with folding 540 square feet of area into volume, making a shape with no beginning nor end, I wonder about the possibility of doing the opposite of Dr. Taimina: making a model that is looking for the math.

The shape that is taking shape is as convoluted as many of our group discussions, and sits in that unsettling space between pattern and chaos, structure and collapse. It's as precarious as Leaning Out of Windows, the name of this four-year co-thinking project, yet tempting enough for the possibility of catching some new views.