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SDA conference – gallery day, part I

Henny Penny (detail), cast handmade paper, wax, and dye. Hand sewn. ©2011 Ann Hall Richards.

Thursday at the Surface Design Association conference was gallery day. We spent the afternoon being shuttled from one great exhibition to another. There were so many, I didn’t get to see all of them, but here are some highlights of the ones I did see.

Esperanza – Carolyn Kallenborn

Gordon Parks Gallery, Metropolitan State University, St. Paul, Minn.
Through July 28, 2011

The works in Esperanza (“hope” in Spanish) come from a melding of prior exhibitions that share a common thread, all based on concepts Kallenborn became familiar with throughout her extensive time spent in Oaxaca, Mexico. Deseos comes from a desire to respond to feelings of hopelessness and fear with a message of healing. Cascada is an interactive installation piece in which viewers are invited to write on a silk rose petal a single word describing an admired characteristic of a person who has passed on, and exchange it for a painted stone from the installation. Ofrendas includes works inspired by the public ofrenda (“offering”), a kind of altar, and the milagro (“miracle”), a small charm left as a prayer for healing. The long banner-like pieces are made from handwoven cloth from the markets in Oaxaca, to which Kallenborn meticulously hand stitches beads, shells, silk flower petals, and other found objects. She says each object “is chosen and placed to reflect the specific emotion or desire expressed within the piece. The time and the attention in deliberately attaching each individual object is itself a meditative process. The finished pieces become the physical visual reminders of my intention.”

Flotsam and Jetsam – Erica Spitzer Rasmussen
Repetition Meditation Revelation – Ann Hall Richards

Concordia Gallery, Concordia University, St. Paul, Minn.
Through July 1, 2011

These two shows, exhibited concurrently in two different rooms of the gallery, were very different in concept but worked beautifully together due to symbiosis achieved through visually similar materials and process.

Ann Hall Richards uses “techniques that transform common objects into contemporary and contemplative works that invite and even challenge the viewer to consider not only the content, but also the process and choice of materials.” The aptly-named exhibition features works in which the artist takes a common object or an unrecognizable yet oddly familiar form, and repeats it until the units together create a new form compelling further consideration and contemplation.

Erica Spitzer Rasmussen’s works also use repetition and familiar objects, but her themes are more personal, based on childhood memories, experiences of family and motherhood, and cultural references. She says, “I sometimes find body-stories or body-experiences to be simultaneously comical and horrifying. It is often these extremes in emotional reactions that drive me to produce the work, in an attempt to better comprehend each situation.”

In the Garden of Earthquakes – Vernal Bogren Swift

AAW Gallery of Wood Art, Landmark Center, St. Paul, Minn.
Through June 26, 2011

Vernal Bogren Swift says she regards making art as a form of questioning. “I think of myself as much as a scientist as an artist. I suppose I would like to replace the word ‘artist’ with another term such as ‘visual thinker.’” Her exhibition consists of 9 batik panels depicting a narrative inspired by the ongoing tectonic plate movements between sea and land. The meticulously rendered drawings are whimsical yet beautiful, fascinating in detail. My only complaint about the installation was that most of the work was hung too high to get a good look at all of it. I would have liked to be able to get a better sense of the story within.

I did have a chance to talk with the artist briefly. She told me that with this work, she has only about a 40% success rate. I asked her what she does with the “failures” (the term would have to be relative, in my opinion), and she says she destroys them. As a quilter who challenges myself to use up everything and try to waste nothing, I was both very surprised and frankly somewhat horrified to hear this. I thought of all the lovely quilts that could be made from what I envision to be piles of lovely fabric. But I certainly respect her integrity in not wishing her work to be used in such a way.

June 11th, 2011|Exhibitions|2 Comments

SDA – India Flint, Part 2

Rose petals, onion skins, various leaves and flowers used for dyeing in class

Near the end of Day 2 of the Traveler’s Notebook workshop, we prepared and simmered more bundles. The difference this time was that the pot was richer in mordanting compounds – both through the accumulation of plant materials from prior dyeing as well as through the addition of odd hunks of scrap iron and other metal. We also left the bundles wrapped overnight so that the dyes could have more time to set. The first thing next morning, we opened our bundles with as much anticipation and excitement as children on Christmas morning. I was a lot happier with my results this time.

While waiting for bundles to come out of the dyepot, we continued to make more sheets collaged with fabrics, papers, and special mementos, held together with stitch. We also did a writing exercise to create a page covered with a texture made of our own handwritten marks. (More on this later.)

With all these raw materials now in progress for our finished books, the next thing to do would be to create a binding structure for the finished books. This was to be based on the Blizzard Book, a structure created by Hedi Kyle during a blizzard.

The folds of the Blizzard Book are called “mountains” (outer folds) and “valleys” (inner folds). Because we would be stitching all of our pages to folds of the Blizzard Book, we added support to the paper by hand-stitching a length of fabric to the center portion. Then we accordion-folded these large sheets of paper and prepared them for dyeing by the same processes as used before.

While waiting for the real binding structures to dry after dyeing, we practiced the Blizzard book folding technique with a dummy sheet. The process is rather paradoxical – it seems simple when you see it demonstrated, but then when you try it, you realize how complex it can be when you can’t remember what to do next. Instructions for making your own Blizzard Book can be found in the Penland Book of Handmade Books. You can also find a PDF with instructions here.

The last step of the bookmaking process was to attach the materials made during the last few days to the folds of the Blizzard Book structure. I didn’t get mine finished, but several people did, and the results were spectacular.

I had one more goal I wanted to accomplish in class. Many artists are packrats, and I’m no exception. I’ve been holding onto a large stack of Rives BFK printmaking paper in thin strips, the remnants of trimming large sheets to a specific size for intaglio prints when I was in school. When the supply list said to bring scraps of paper, I threw these in with my materials. I used the class time to dye these strips. I don’t know yet what I’ll use them for, but I do think they’re quite beautiful.

Rives BFK paper dyed with leaves, rose & iris petals, and onion skins. Peony petals acted as a resist. Drawn lines were made by painting with milk prior to dyeing.

June 9th, 2011|Art|7 Comments

SDA – India Flint, Part I

Silk fabric eco-dyed and hand-stitched by India Flint

This week I’m in Minneapolis, Minn. for the Surface Design Association Conference. This is my second time at SDA, and this time, I decided to give myself a gift: a workshop with an artist whose work I admire greatly. India Flint calls herself a “maker of marks, forest wanderer & tumbleweed, stargazer & stitcher, botanical alchemist & string twiner, working traveller, dreamer, sax player and occasional poet.” She is the author of Eco Colour: Botanical Dyes for Beautiful Textiles, which is a guide to coloring cloth using locally sourced plant materials.

I don’t remember now where I first heard of India, but somehow I found her blog and web site and fell in love with the extraordinary yet delicate beauty of the plant-dyed fabrics she creates. I bought her book last year, not only to find out the details of how to make these magical marks on cloth, but also because the book is just plain beautiful. It contains a wealth of information on the different plants that can be used as well as types of mordants that can be employed to improve the strength of the dye bonds produced. The most compelling thing about the process is that it doesn’t involve harmful chemicals and can be done fairly easily without the need for buying expensive equipment or materials.

India lives on her own farm in Southern Australia, but she travels the world and teaches extensively. This particular workshop is called “Enfoldments – A Traveler’s Notebook.” We’re combining the dyeing techniques with hand stitching and simple bookmaking techniques to “explore ways of recording and describing responses to place and country as a means of making sense of wherever

[we] are in the world.”

India began the class with the opening of a “bundle” she had created the previous day. A bundle is a length of fabric which is rolled up together with leaves and flower petals and other assorted bits and tied tightly around a stick, then submerged into a pot of water and given a gentle simmer for a prescribed amount of time. We would be making many bundles throughout the course of the week, and the the opening of one’s bundles after dyeing to see the lovely gifts granted from nature is a greatly anticipated event.

Fabric eco-dyed by India Flint

We then went outside for a “windfall walk,” the purpose of which is to gather leaves and flower petals that have fallen to the ground. Small bits of rusted metal and odd scraps of paper are also treasures to bring back for our books. Once back to the workshop, we used our harvest to create our own first bundles.

After learning the basic process, the next step was to start making the pages of our book. To that end, we were each given a sheet of heavy drawing/wash paper and given instructions to collage fabric and paper using thread and stitch – no glue. I got rather caught up in doing the stitching – I even took my piece back to my room that night to work on it some more. I do love to stitch on fabric, but I found it to be a lot more difficult on paper. If I’m going to be doing much more of this in future, I’m going to need more protection for my needle-grabbing fingers. My thumb was very sore after a couple of hours of doing this.

The second day, we started to make the books. India showed us a simple way to make a very basic artist’s book from a single sheet of paper with folding and cutting. Then we used the same dyeing principles with our folded books to get color on the pages. Although mine turned out rather pale, some of the others were quite spectacular.