Tomorrow night is the Inliquid benefit at the Crane building 7-10 pm (ticketed event). See if you can find and buy my embroidery! All participating artists created a 10x10 inch work of art.
The object was to write a task that could be completed using whatever materials were available without causing damage to property or persons, place it in the TASK box and retrieve a task for yourself to complete. After accomplishing the task you were to write a new task to add to the box and start a new one. This could go on ad finitum. The photo above was near the beginning of the evening while there were still pristine piles of materials- like going into ACMoore and being allowed to use whatever you found to make art on site!
Things started getting a little crazier. Above you can see the pillars wrapped in saran wrap- someone actually was able to use it as a hammock! It eventually became a volleyball net with a blown-up plastic bag as ball.
I turned around and suddenly there was a life-size unicorn behind me! I should have gotten a side view- the whole thing was quite anatomically accurate (don't think dirty, now).
Next thing you know there's an iceberg island in the corner. Or maybe a boat...
The best part was when my usually non-participating husband FINALLY added a task to the box ("Draw a Mermaid") which not one minute later was pulled out of the box by a 5-year-old boy who drew the image above. His mother tore the image off the roll of paper and kept the task paper to take home as a souvenir, creating some magic for my love.
Throughout the evening I created a pipe cleaner car, drew a hopscotch board, ruffled someone's hair, helped build a fairy house, created an invisible dog leash, had my feet traced, and had my legs hugged.
Thanks to Oliver Herring and the people of Fluxspace for creating an unforgettable experience!
Playing with compositions of objects found on my daily travels- picking things up magpie-like. I'd like to do an abstract slow-cloth using these as beads/shisha. Mapping the area in a way. Not sure if I should do lots of small ones or one big one. Crit tomorrow!!!
I love art school- you get to see some crazy stuff. Yesterday these urban trash monsters greeted us in the main hall at Tyler. I'm not sure what class is doing it, possibly a 3D foundations class, or maybe a public sculpture class. The week before were various kinds of habitats in the hallway. These remind me of "Where the Wild Things Are" -speaking of which, I really want to go see the movie!
Here are 2 installation shots. My work is in the center of the first one.
Here's a closer view of my work next to my classmate Charlene Melhorn's. I was very pleased to see our work together as we were following similar themes of beauty in decay in the urban environment.
Charlene's piece above is a collection of stacked, burnt, and shellacked paper with a texture that reminded me of matchbooks and the detritus of the streets. Accompanying her assemblage were a pencil drawing of a stand-alone rowhome with electrical or telephone wire and small stacks of burnt and shellacked paper with text.
I also really like the sparse cityscape below by Liza Dolmetsch, my extremely helpful department grad assistant/advisor (I don't really know her exact title).
The show comes down on Monday unfortunately, but I'm sure there will be more interesting things to share in the future.
I'm fascinated by grafitti. I can barely read any of it, and so the bit I can't read is endlessly intriguing...
I like the mix of texture and how in these 2 there are arrows- what are they pointing to?
So, I'm thinking of having these enlarged and printed on fabric, and then embroidering over the graffiti. Maybe then I'll figure it out.
I was thinking about city life being in a neighborhood that seemingly never changes and yet is always changing. People moving in an out, celebrating, fires, trash, vacant lots, etc. I might make a zootrope animation with it.
I also thought I could make a flipbook animation. So here's a storyboard with a swooping flock of starlings. And my stack of paper frames for the flipbook on the corner.
Last but not least there's the map drawing I did today. I'm thinking of returning to the daily travel maps like I was doing for the Litle Berlin Collaboration. This time making a calendar out of them, and stitching over a screenprint, not drawing on mylar!
Here are my ladies at Peters Valley last weekend! There was one more, but she was off in the back studio at the machine when I grabbed these shots. The lady in the pink shirt with the bemused expression is my lovely mother who taught me all I know and graciously lets me teach her back. 
This is her first piece from the weekend. It's one of the first times she's ever ventured into abstract imagery, and I was very glad she took my suggestion about putting in the large loopy cable chain element.
The following 3 images were from a series of four that one prolific artist made. She seemed worried at first that she wasn't following my directions, but she seemed to have a clear vision of what she wanted to achieve and she was being wonderfully experimental, so there was no way I was going to stop that!
She was using painted backgrounds, layering them with snippets of fabrics for color and texture, and it made sense for her to use the machine as a tool for incorporating everything.
This one below is my favorite cause she used just a few layers of this very open white netting.
She also produced this great book cover for the stitching handout I gave everyone!
The work below is by a woman who had a trip to England and Wales over the summer. She brought a postcard of an etching back and really wanted to use it for her piece. An experienced quilter, she was hoping to get away from piecing, but the image really called for it. She tried a watercolor version of her image first and then started the ambitiously large embroidery.
Here is May, my studio assistant! She was a wonderful, helpful companion to have in the class, making it easy for everyone there to use the space and find whatever was needed. She got really into the piecing of her background. While at first I was surprised at the length, really it perfectly portrays the experience of seeing the pine trees across the street from the studio!
The woman who produced the piece below came to her composition after lots of drawing outside. I'm fascinated at how people can witness the same landscape but come away with such different interpretations. Her stitching is exquisite, and I wish I could see the final finished piece!
The last piece here was created by a potter- thus the fascination with texture and the earthy colors perhaps! I enjoyed watching her work, for each piece was thought out and selected for its contribution to the harmony of the whole. We went back and forth quite a bit about the color choices. It's almost too good to change by stitching over!
It was an amazing weekend, but very tiring. I'm not used to 8-hour long classes! However, the students were intensely engaged and produced quite a bit considering our short timeframe. Hopefully they came away with the confidence to continue developing their own imagery in embroidery.
I just finished up the weekend teaching Inspired by Nature: Stitching the Landscape at Peters Valley Craft Center in Layton, NJ in the Delaware Water Gap National Park. Here I am on the road up Thunder Mountain to go see the Fibers Surface Design studios. Had to stop and check out the swamp on the way. It's a 1.5 mile drive up a gravel road to get to the studios, and you really need a car to get around the area. For the most part, though, I stayed near the main campus down the hill where my cottage, the weaving studio, and the dining hall were located.
So in this post I'll just shared the Inspired by Nature aspect. I took lots of photos of the landscape there. The view above is the meadow behind the Structural Fibers studio-- I like the bands of color and texture in this shot.
There was a stump behind the building covered in fungi with salamanders, ants, grasshoppers, and myriad crickets. I'm impressed with my focus trick as my camera wanted to switch focus to the background instead of the foreground.
There's a giant yarn ball on the lawn of the studio, with a sign in the vestibule requesting people add to it. So for our parting activity I had the students bring a piece of thread out, which we knotted into one long strand to wind around the ball.
Here's the view from the studio overlooking Diamond St. I'm fascinated that the left window view looks really urban and the right window view looks more natural....
Yesterday I pulled together the fabrics for the top 3 compositions on the Trenton Ave piece, and today inbetween classes I managed to get the left 2 appliques stitched. One more to go and then it's a flurry of embroidery time. I really need to get this thing finished. It's dragging and has taken too long. But that's what I get for being ambitious.
My presentation of work to the Craft grads went well this afternoon. There are a lot of us dealing with issues of urban life vs natural life. It's in the air, I think. How much of the commonalities in our group are due to the interest areas of the professors? I'm looking forward to some true critique this semester, some challenges, some clarity of thought, some push to a new level. The sleep bit is the hardest cause my brain is buzzing.
So option 1: stretch and frame as is
These two images show my neighborhood circa 1880. My house is on there!
I'm not sure yet what I'll do with these, but something will happen. The piecing I did for the Woodford piece comes to mind.
