jiffy move

We are in the process of getting ready to move. Second time in less than a year. But oh, it will be worth it! Our current apartment in Charlottetown is just too darn small for us. If we both did all of our work on computers and weren't artists who made things and needed equipment for making, our current living space would be sufficient. But we do make things, and therefore, our space is not enough.

Spontaneously two weeks ago, Damien and I went to look at a duplex for rent two blocks away. Two stories, with a great third floor attic for Damien's painting studio, our own backyard, lots of storage, washer/dryer, room for both my looms (including my mammoth Cranbrook)...it is a rental that will satisfy all our house-living desires until we can save more money for buying our own home. And at pretty much the same price rent as we've already been paying.

The catch was that it was available March 1st and we hadn't given a month's notice on our own place....but, it all worked out and with the work of our great property manager, a new tenant was found for our place and we are moving in three days. The duplex is only two blocks away, so this move feels very different from our past three moves in the past four years, each move bringing us and our lives hundreds and hundreds of kilometres away (Charlottetown to Corner Brook, Corner Brook to Halifax, Halifax to Charlottetown).

In anticipation of the move, I worked last week to finish weaving my receding shoreline piece and get it off the loom so that my studio could be packed up. I'm really happy with my depiction of the extended stretch of coast and I'm looking forward to the next steps of embroidery and finishing which will be worked on in my new studio in our new home.....

All the inlay used for the land is my own 1-ply hand spun wool. The colours of the shore itself are, for the most part, natural dyed, while the green of the land was dyed in the fleece various shades of green by Belfast Mini Mills, which I spun with natural grey and then over-dyed in natural dyes (onion skins, alkynet roots) to vary the shades further. The brown/burgandy warp and the black weft used for the water area are 2/8 cotton.

Not sure if the piece will be hung vertically or horizontally yet...more time needs to be spent with it off the loom.

receding shore

I've been thinking about weaving a new piece for a while now, in between embroidery, spinning and dyeing. A long horizontal piece, depicting a stretch of shoreline that is vulnerable to erosion. After the piece is off the loom, I plan on embroidering the coastal profiles of the shore in previous years, to demonstrate the impact of erosion.

Nice to be weaving again, even if it is on my small loom instead of my big one (the big one is dismantled in my parent's basement until I have the space for it). I do notice I need to take lots of breaks - my smaller loom is great for production, but is more physically demanding for this kind of inlay that involves a lot of hand work.

I am basing my weaving on this drawing, which is loosely based on the photograph below of eroded shoreline on the north shore of New Brunswick.

prep

Textiles take time. Preparation of materials (spinning, warping, dyeing, counting, threading) takes time.

But in that preparation, there's space to further flesh out my idea in my head. As the weft gets dyed and the ikat ties are removed, as I wind my small skeins of hand-spun and over-dyed wool into balls for my inlay palette, the potential of all these separate elements combining becomes more concrete.

And so does a vision of how the piece will come together and make sense through being made.

spinning out

For the last few days, I've spent parts of my days spinning wool. Finishing up my stash of dyed merino fleece from Belfast Mini Mills and combining it with a grey wool fleece into one ply. Also using up white wool fleece from New Brunswick that I was given for Christmas. Next I will over-dye all these mini-skeins of hand-spun yarn in different combos of natural dye.

I've been lucky enough to have been given a fantastic selection of natural dyestuff over the years: madder root, cochineal, alkanet, saffron, lac, and even indigo (I've only attempted the indigo twice so far), and my own collection of onion skins.

The thing is, I don't really have a dye kitchen in our apartment in Charlottetown. In the winter, the kitchen must be cleaned and taken over for a day of dyeing, and then cleaned again. In the summer, I can dye out on our back deck in the fresh air (though no outdoor sink is a bit tricky). I'm really missing our basement we had in our Halifax apartment: two giant porcelain sinks below a window with lots of afternoon light - perfect for the time-consuming process of natural dyeing and the necessity of letting things sit for days and not be in the way.

All this to say that the hand-spun one ply that I will dye (making due the my kitchen and living space as it is) will be used to continue my Islands project that was started last winter. The colours of wool will be my palette for crocheting my islands, matching the sand, cliffs, dunes, grass, forests, and bogs.

art cloth text

I was just taking a break from spinning wool for my Islands project, and checked facebook. There on my homepage was a link from Mackenzie Frere to his blog, Art Cloth Text, and a wonderful post about my recent work, specifically my map of Charlottetown.

It's so insightful to read other people's (especially other artists) impressions of my work...two sentences of Mackenzie's in particular really resonate for me:

"The embroidered emphasis of a small city’s vulnerability on the edge of the water give this woven map a compelling emotional depth."

"While both weaving and embroidery offer the artist a degree of control over pattern and image, her subject is total loss of control to unpredictable, natural forces."

I met Mackenzie in my last year of my BFA at NSCAD University in Halifax, circa 2003. He was doing his MFA and I was very taken with his work, particularly his exploration of ikat natural dyeing - a beautiful simplicity and dedication to material and process. I've held him up in my mind's eye of weaving mentors ever since. He is now an instructor in the Fibres Department at the Alberta College of Art and Design.

dreams of Sweden

Since Monday, I've been working diligently on an application for the W. B. Brucebo Art Foundation Travel Scholarship. The Brucebo Foundation offers two scholarships (or fellowships) a year: one is a residency on the Swedish island of Gotland, and the other is a European fine art travel scholarship. The travel scholarship can encompass fine art research anywhere in Europe, but I've chosen to focus on Sweden.

Since being exposed to scandinavian textiles at NSCAD University, I have had a desire to travel to Sweden and study and learn about their textile traditions. The integration of art, design and craft is well known as being a real strength of Sweden's culture. Textile artists, and tapestry artists in particular, are very celebrated. Needless to say, I need to visit this country!

My research proposal centers around the intersection where Swedish textile traditions and contemporary culture come together. Focusing on hand-weaving and folk art traditions, I'll explore the influence of cultural textiles on Sweden's art and design practices through my travels.

I hope to visit a folk school (a very strong tradition in Scandinavia), university textile departments, galleries and museums, as well as commercial production businesses and textile mills. I'm really interested in the powerful role material culture plays in shaping our sense of history and community, and how material traditions are re-interpreted to determine their continuity into the future.




Fingers and toes crossed!!

re-visiting

With the embroidery of my woven map of Charlottetown's vulnerable waterfront, I have started to re-visit other woven works I've completed in the past two years. I feel the embroidery of the handwoven image and cloth brings a whole other depth and strength to the pieces. The map of Charlottetown is finished for now: all the streets of downtown have been overlaid, the perimeters of the flood zone have been re-emphasized and the motion of the sea onto the land has been indicated with vertical blue arrows.

After washing the map last night (this always brings the cloth together, making it something whole as opposed to various elements forced together), I took a look at a piece I wove in Halifax almost two years ago. It is a depiction of Bottle Cove, a magical piece of coast on the west coast of Newfoundland. When I wove the piece, I emphasized the parts of the shore where I had visited and/or thought of as particularly magical in yellows.

So last night, while perched cross-legged on the couch with an embroidery hoop, I used a chain stitch to draw a a line along the coast where the water meets the land. I have never been satisfied with the piece and am excited at my start at embellishing the coastal abstraction with embroidered mapping.