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Pretty, and pretty toxic denim inspires new work

7/6/2018

There ought to be an international law against the dirty business of jeans manufacturing.

It poisons waterways, mainly in China, prompting environmental groups to raise the alarm against the devastation to communities and local ecosystems, yet consumers around the world continue to cycle through jeans, for work and in slavish loyalty to fashion trends.

Even on the small off-the-grid Gulf island of Lasqueti where I do much of my work, there is a constant oversupply of denim at the local Free Store. Too ugly or thrashed to be snapped up for the price of zero, they are destined for the landfill where the toxic dyes are left to leach into the ground.

Jeans reflect the West Coast palette. Carlyn Yandle photo

But, honestly, if they weren't so pretty, I wouldn't be saving them from the dump. It's that very West Coast denim palette that compels me to rescue these ripped, stained or just outdated jeans, skirts, jackets and dresses and mess with them.

For the past few years I've been cutting them into usable pieces and sewing up utility items — bags, oven mitts, hot-pot mats, lumbar cushions — and before long I fell into my own tiny cottage industry stitching up utility aprons.

Lately I've been working them up in quilts of high-contrast hues with frayed exposed seams or muted reverse greys, all in conversation with the coastal views just beyond my sewing table.

So for environmental reasons and the pretty, durable nature of old denim, I keep innovating new uses, but my explorations into non-utility pieces (the stuff we call Art) is more about the culture embedded in all those jeans: the worn knees, the rips, the stains that all speak to the physical work people do on this off-the-grid island community to sustain them.

I dabbled with undulating appliquéd fields inspired by the coastal climate and vistas but lately I've been more interested in exploiting the sculptural possibilities of this weighty, stiff fabric.

Enter my latest exploration: large-scale macrame.

Knotting seemed like a natural way to enhance dimension, and it's relevant to this island community where knowing a few useful knots is an essential skill and in wide evidence. It also speaks to the late-'60s/early '70s back-to-the-land counterculture that defines Lasqueti. I liked the idea of creating a large-scale fringe for this place on the fringes of urban life. (Fun fact: The 13th-century Arabic weavers' word for "fringe" is "migramah", which eventually became known as "macrame".)

I gave myself some rules of engagement (like I do) to create a pattern. 1) The strands would be all three-inch strips. 2) The overall length would be largely determined by the number of strips I could squeeze out of an average size of jeans. 3) I would work from dark jeans to light to dark fabrics, to create a highlight in the centre of the piece. 4) The overall width of this super-fringe would be determined by the piece of driftwood I selected.

Fifty-five hours of knotty work later I completed 28 Jeans: Denim Ombré, a wall-mounted macrame work that continues to inspire more ideas and more questions: How can I achieve a more sculptural effect? How can I find that beautiful place between pattern and collapse? And most importantly: Why did I throw away my old macrame magazines??

28 Jeans: Denim Ombré, 2018 by Carlyn Yandle. Found jeans, driftwood, 60" x 45"

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Materials matter, and Those of loved ones gone can live on

5/26/2018

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Clockwise from top left: Great-Grandfather Quilt; Dad's Throw; Tie Cushion. (Carlyn Yandle photos)

Materialistic. People say it like it's a bad thing.
But there's not necessarily anything selfish or hoardy or wasteful about feeling deeply connected to materials. If we all started being a little more materialistic we might not be now contending with the Great Pacific Garbage Patch or space junk. I want no part with parting so quickly from one-use-life materials when a meaningful second life is possible.

So when a couple of people dear to my heart were clearly torn about parting with some favourite clothes of their loved ones who recently passed away — one within this year, the other within 18 months — I felt it too.

These bits of cloth are interwoven with the memory of the wearer, his style, the special occasions and the everyday. Just looking at them hanging in the back closet brought the son, the wife, to tears. Some of that emotion is also about feeling at odds with what to do with it all. Yet holding onto useless things, especially in this town where we're so squeezed for space we have to go outside our living spaces just to change our mind, can even bring on some shame or panic that we can't let go, move on.

I felt the potency of the pieces too, and suggested selecting a few items to be repurposed into something that would bring comfort, and in remembrance.

The first project this spring was the Great-Grandfather Quilt, for the first of the next generation who missed meeting his great-grandfather by 9 months. The second was Dad's Blanket, which lives on one of the two matching sofas where father and son watched the baseball in his last three years. The third is a lumbar-support cushion made from silk ties that's parked on his wife's favourite reading chair.

It takes a bit of faith to allow those blazers and sweaters, ties and dress shirts to leave their dark cupboards and be subjected to my fibre-art experiments but I'm grateful they did. It was a little unnerving, plunging wool blazers into a hot-water-wash and tumble-dry, or severing several silk neckties in one swipe of the rotary cutter, but that's the deal with making and innovating: sometimes you have to take a deep breath and boldly go, risking failure.

And there is definitely failure in all of this making. Design changes happen on the fly, dictated by odd dimensions of the pieces and unpredictable fabric behaviour. (It's a thing.) Trying to wrestle slippery bias-cut silk, unstable cashmere knit and coat-heavy woven wool into submission enough to lie flat together is a test of one's patience. The trick is to embrace imperfection and keep the big picture in mind. I think about the Gees Bend quilters I saw a few years ago at Granville Island and the gospel spiritual song two of them sang at the start of their talk, and I say a little prayer myself: God I hope this works.

The other challenge is creating works that resonate with the spirit of the original wearer, so it's not just a matter of chopping up the clothing into tiny unidentifiable pieces to be re-fabricated in a generic quilt. You don't want to be too literal either, appliquéing ties into a Ties Quilt or (creepier) using every last button and pocket or (horrors) just sewing all the clothes together into a blanket or something.

Binding the one blanket with necktie fabric and appliquéing the suit labels in one corner of an army blanket backing (for the man who served in the US Army) felt like the right balance.

I post each Remembrance Pieces project on Facebook to inspire other material girls and guys, and to pay my respects to the stuff of life and to those of this life no longer.

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QR button blanket: Epic fail or a larger reading?

3/21/2014

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After three months of sewing one donated button after another into a giant QR code, the big moment arrived this week: time to stand back and scan that baby with a reader app, translating this quilt-thing to read, "The devil is in the details."

Except it didn't read. Don't panic!, I thought, then spent the entire next day working with a photo image of the QR Button Blanket, Photoshopping in more buttons and darker buttons and bigger buttons, trying to add the minimum amount of density for the software program to register the pattern and work its magic to produce the punchline. No luck; even a sliver of white in one button cluster puts a wrench in the wholecloth works. I filed this one under the category of Epic Fail, not worth finishing it as intended, framing it in black bias binding. I do not want to create something that is 'still' good; I want the thing to be good, full stop.

Failure demands confronting the why. Why conceive such a laborious, risky project in the first place? Why endure the painstaking process when half-way through it was becoming abundantly clear that this was not going to 'read'?

But there is another power here, and that's tied to the process beyond the product. The achievement may lie in the endurance (in an increasingly A.D.D. world) that is not necessarily attached to the product after all. It may be in seeing it through, without the promise of a sure result. The power may lie in the humble, everyday materials and the community of women who contributed all those bits of plastic saved from the waste stream. (There should really be a global ban on production of billions of plastic buttons. Plant-based plastic, bone, wood, and leather- or fabric-wrapped tin buttons eventually return to the earth.)

But what's really starting to click in for me is the cultural reference of this button-grid design. A decade ago, it might have been viewed as an oddly arranged colour field or an abstracted grid but we're so acclimatized to codes that the pattern begs to be 'read.' The fact that this is irresolvable might be annoying. And that's interesting.

Wavy Gravy, marker on synthetic velvet, 58" x 43"

The possible multiple references could be more engaging than the one answer provided by a QR reader app. There's something to be learned in the discomfort of the open-endedness.

Moments like these, I seek out the artists who have embraced what New York artist Polly Apfelbaum calls the 'tough beauty' of visually exciting works that incorporate everyday materials in surprising ways. Apfelbaum, who calls herself a bad crafter, articulates the process of hard work in this video.

"I work all the time," she says, without a schedule and in a highly experimental way. "You make the work and then you hope for the best."

"It's very important to get your fuck-you back."

I'm going with that.

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That's one mother of another need met

6/7/2013

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In case you want to know, this is a picture of what is called beaching gear — at least in Prince Rupert, B.C.

It's the kind of passing sight that makes a city girl demand that the car we're in be stopped and reversed. Now. Because even though I had no idea what I was looking at, I knew that this was another fine example of one of my favourite truisms, "Necessity is the mother of invention." Photos must be snapped so someone who knows about these things could explain.

I found just the guy, a cousin-in-law. He knew the owner of this curious object well. (It's a small town.) "Oh, that's in Seal Cove," he said. His buddy needed to be able to tow his... (I want to say seaplane here, but that might not be right)... out of the harbour, and this Caddy, with its front-wheel drive, was just the jalopy for the job. But how does it stay up, with only two wheels?, I asked (and then again, not quite getting it). It was finally established that some metal bits forged to the front end provide enough counter-weight for the thing to balance on two wheels. An engineering feat!

But what I really liked about this innovation was the extra effort the inventor made to make the beaching gear more, uh, seemly, I guess: the retrofitted tail lights; the back-end paint job that tied it all together. For some reason it reminded me of the stump of a leg; you know some vital working parts are missing but it's heeled over nicely.

Objects like these straddle that satisfying space between utility and art. Here in Seal Cove, it was pretty much overlooked, but plunk it down at MOMA and now we're in a conversation with more legs than this beaching gear's wheels: artist intention, context, use value versus art value, etc.

There is a certain soulfulness in these intriguing/peculiar objects that squeeze into existence between the tight parameters of lack of money or access and a pressing need. This school bus re-purposed as an underground... (tornado shelter? food cellar?) also packs a visual punch.

I'm intrigued by the happy accidents that can turn a necessary invention into an art object or an artwork into a functional object after the fact. On a grand scale it leads to some of the most enduring, visually interesting cities, like the narrow labyrinth of streets of Tokyo that trace terraced rice fields or the watery thoroughfares of Venice. This slow, organic development of an urban landscape is at odds with the speculative profit-driven mega developments currently rapidly changing my city's landscape.

But our need to negotiate these monolithic structures will result, over time, in inventions that contribute to an increasingly vibrant culture. We get glimpses of that with every passing pedaller working for Shift: Urban Cargo Delivery here in Vancouver, or as far as Bangkok's streets teeming with ever-advancing Tuk-tuks.

Innovating out of necessity creates human connections, from one guy's beaching gear in a sleepy cove outside Prince Rupert, B.C. to corporate shifts on the streets of Paris. (Take a video ride-along below:)

Image from vancouverfoundationawards.ca

Image found posted on www.modderpoel.nl

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Waiting to be inspired by hoardy pile of plastic

3/1/2013

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My not-quite-resolved plastic quilty test.

I’ve been left high and dry, marooned by a foul waste stream — a particular category of non-recycled stuff that ends up in Vancouver’s landfill.

This category consists of many boxes of rigid-plastic toy bits that my nephews leave in their wake of play. I nabbed the lot a couple of years back because I loved their indeterminate shapes, their hot colours, their embedded culture. The big plan was to turn these remnants of their childhood into a scrap-quilty, uh, thing. I never really did have a sharp objective for the objects.

But that was before I embarked on my Great Leap Forward Toward More Space campaign in January. Now the toy detritus is the last of my hoardy habit left to face down.

I’ve done the math and have realized that the number of hours required to explore and execute the various art projects that involve all these bits encroaching on my living space probably exceeds my estimated lifespan. But I have another reason for not wanting to part with the toy parts: no one accepts them for recycling in these parts, as dude at the Recycling Hotline (604-732-9253) informed me. All non-numbered rigid plastic junk is just chucked into the landfill where they will stay intact pretty much forever.

Photo of artist/designer Adrian Draigo from www.draigo.com.

There is another option, he said; I could drive the stuff to a monthly drop-off location in another community set up by Pacific Mobile Depots, pay $7 per big bag to take it all away for use in some plastic-lumber business down the road, or I can pay $30 to arrange a pick-up. It’s a service that is probably used by a tiny minority of households —a tiny drop of effort in the plastic tsunami.

Meanwhile, the quandary is major: Until our governing bodies stop acting like whipping boys to the global petroleum industry and start regulating against the sale of non-recyclable plastic products, we’re all left to either try to make use of the stuff that’s piling up around us or stuff it into the earth.

Many designers have put the glut of a particular waste stream to good use, creating ingenious upcycled products. London-based artist Adrian Draigo, for example, creates lighting using bottle caps — another plastic reject from most recycling programs — and LED lights. The low-energy, ambient 'Glo' light can be hung anywhere, literally highlighting the issue of this ubiquitous waste product.

It’s a new spin on the old ‘necessity is the mother of invention’ axiom, except the need that drives this innovation is not in the resulting use-object but in reducing garbage. The key to this — and every —upcycling project is creating an object that people want, otherwise it’s just waste transformed.

My urge to use the throwaways falls more within the need to visually express short-sighted (at best) and greed-driven (more likely) global production-consumption actions. The motivation to make my scrappy sculpture starts from medium and works toward idea rather than the other way around. This compulsion to dream up an idea in order to make use of the bits feels overly opportunistic, and it's why I remain in option-paralysis over whether to keep it to maybe one day use it or let it all go. That's what happens when you're confronted by this plastic problem.

photo from www.core77.com

UK artist Stuart Haygarth made good use of what showed up in his environment with his iconic “Tide” chandelier. The suspended sphere is fabricated from the plastic that washed up on a particular stretch of the Kent coastline.

The work makes it impossible not to think of the giant garbage patches swirling around the planet.

For more on that staggering reality, hit this Ted Talk:

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Breaking up is hard to do

12/7/2012

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It's the most wonder-what-to-make time of the year — or used to be, for me. It was all tra-la-la-la-la and glue-guns and glitter puff paint back when I had the 9-5 office job. Messing with sparkle and colour was just the thing for fending off the stress of the day and the inky wet nights. My right brain happily buzzed as I explored how to make new kinds of gifties, from jester-style ski toques to mini twig wreaths. I even hosted an annual alcohol-fueled Craft Night for the Craftily Impaired. (Celebrity tangent: One year one of those half-gassed girlfriends ended up showing her little collection of homemade cards to an approving Eric "Will" McCormack at a bar later that night.)

But now I'm discovering that an emerging art practice is a major buzz-kill to what used to be a craft-tastic, shamelessly uncritical seasonal activity, a creative retreat from my daily managerial role. My extensive craft repertoire remains an important foundation for my work now but I have to move on. Learning quilling or book-binding is not moving my work forward, and the ol' right brain now needs a break at the end of the day. Those pure, fun seasonal jollies I used to get from learning to make a thing have now been replaced by regret for the time and effort spent on silly seasonal notions.

It's like I'm breaking up with crafting, but know I'll be seduced into a few more one-night stands before it's all over.
This may be a glimmer of what the struggle looks like.

To get through this transition I've been getting that hit of passion for making by cruising some serious crafters' blogs and online magazines. My primal heart beats, "Me make! Me make!" but my right brain says, "Not tonight; I have a headache."

Some crafty temptations, with seductively-free instructions:

Snowflake gift-topper

Felted slippers made from old wool sweaters. I'm so tempted.

Origami business card holder

Table-top tree made out of cereal boxes (pant! pant!)

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Pretty, and pretty toxic denim inspires new work

Materials matter, and Those of loved ones gone can live on

QR button blanket: Epic fail or a larger reading?

That's one mother of another need met

Waiting to be inspired by hoardy pile of plastic

Breaking up is hard to do

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