October is a busy month

October 1, 2018

October is one of my favorite months. And this one is no exception. I can open my studio windows to get an occasional breeze. The gingko trees are about to turn into yellow clouds. And the studio is awash in preparations. It’s a month of anticipation and excitement.

I’m preparing class materials for two workshops at Arrowmont this month. A powerpoint show, class notes, exercise materials and a few surprises. First I’ll be attending a workshop by Beatrice Coron on MASKING AND REVEALING: THE WILD SIDE OF PAPER CUTTING for a week and then I teach my FOLLOW THE THREAD workshop the week after that. Two full weeks in the mountains playing at art. What could be better than that?

The workshops at Arrowmont allow for everyone to spread out and stretch their creative minds.

While I am at Arrowmont The World of Threads Festival, a contemporary fibre and textile art exhibit opens in Canada. It features 303 artworks by 65 artists from Canada, Denmark, England, Hungary, Netherlands, Northern Ireland, Norway, Russia and the USA. I was chosen as one of the artists with a solo show in the corridor galleries. I won’t be able to attend the opening but I will see the show in November.

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Everything I know about this show makes it a must see event. If you are anywhere near Oakville (a short drive from Toronto) please plan on attending. Click here to learn more about it.

Or choose this link to download a complete brochure.

Opening day: Sat. Oct. 20, 2018 1:00 – 3:30 pm.

World of Threads Festival

Queen Elizabeth Park Community & Cultural Centre
2302 Bridge Road Oakville, Ontario, Canada.

Dates: Sat. Oct. 13 - Sun. Nov. 25, 2018
Hours: Mon. – Sat. 10:00 am – 6:00 pm. Sun. 12:00 – 5:00 pm
Admission: FREE

On Collaboration

September 26, 2018

I went to an artist talk last night that reinforced my ideas about collaboration. He said that if you put a professional engineer and artist in the same room to solve a problem the outcome won’t be the same as having an artist with a pretty good knowledge of engineering figure it out herself.

Each time I have been involved in a team approach to a design solution I am energized by the discussions, motivated by the goal and hopeful about the outcome. Yet, there are challenges. Every step along the way brings a set of compromises and a new way of looking at those goals and outcomes. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.

What have I learned? I prefer doing it all myself.

I can take the blame, find the alternatives and be responsible for the outcome. I can throw it under the table when it doesn’t work out. I can meet my own timetable. I can re-evaluate without stepping on toes. Not so easy when others are involved.

But this process of locking my doors to others is self-limiting. Pushing away my expectations while entertaining alternative ideas broadens my vision of the end product.

So I will continue to find ways to play well with others. And collaborate. In events, in art, in thought. Even if it makes my nerves nervier.

cloudy with a chance of fog

September 14, 2018

I woke up with a bad attitude.

It hasn’t gone away yet.

Normally I have more than one thing to work on at a time. But not now. They are all done. Mostly.

I am blocking spontaneity, avoiding intuition, and embellishing emotion.

Time to duck my head into a cold stream.

I think I’ll take a look at those scraps again.

or take a walk.

or a nap.

The tale of the crankie

August 30, 2018

It was fate--the day I learned about crankies. Ever since seeing a Red Grooms exhibit at the Brooks Museum in Memphis I have been haunted by the idea of a moving quilt. For those of you who have no idea what I am talking about go to this website for a fun trip through crankie land. So here's the tale of the tape for my crankie, I watch too much tv news.

I watch too much tv news

It started with a box of white cloth scraps. I assembled them roughly into a 16 foot scroll.

I added focus points to the scroll by sandwiching colored scraps between the outer layer and the cotton batting. I admit that it was quite random at this stage. I really didn’t know what my story was going to be.

Next step was to stabilize the layers. I stitched along each seam in white or black thread. If the seam was horizontal I added a black thread line that highlighted it to add a sense of action to the piece. There were a lot of seams.

At this stage I decided that the piece was going to be about my anxieties regarding our government and how the media hypes up my anxiety. This initial stitching was about the pussy hat march.

Sometimes the drawings seemed too literal so I tore them out. Goodbye pussy hats. Don’t get me wrong, I am a strong supporter of the womens march. The drawings just seemed too specific.

Eventually the scroll filled up with monsters, money, vultures, disasters, boulders and tv heads. It took about 3 weeks of stitching to get to this point. Catharctic.

I’m not comfortable if I don’t have a project going so when we were preparing for a road trip that would last a few weeks I rolled up the scroll and put it into a bag and carried it with me. Each night I would add more hand stitching.

Details added depth.

With the scroll finished I enlisted my son to do a video of it. We taped it to the hallway wall, mounted a camera to a skateboard and recorded a non-stop video. It gave me an idea of what the scroll would look like in motion.

We even tried it outside with his drone. That’s me ducking as the drone came over the scroll. Crazy.

I started thinking about the housing of the scroll and decided that, of course, it should look like a tv.

My friend, Yvonne Bobo, came up with this brilliant way to configure the scroll in a housing that could be mechanized.

Here is our test quilt in the contraption she created.

My brother, Charles Havelka, refined the set up and built a beautiful cabinet for the piece. He is a master woodworker.

I couldn’t be more proud of the final product. And, I couldn’t have done it without their help. There were times of despair and times of hope and challenge. It’s a folly, I know. But it was worth the journey.

Here's a video of the scroll in its entirety. Enjoy!

Beastie Boy and His Pals

August 14, 2018

Sometimes pieces emerge out of my subconscious without warning. My task is to allow that to happen. That is what happened with Beastie Boy and His Pals.

I am appalled by the way our government is being run. The creatures that inhabit the power centers have changed the way I think about threats. As a citizen I vote in and pay attention to local, regional and federal issues. I read articles that discuss both sides of issues. I listen to the news from other countries. I try to sift out the skewed, embellished and outright outrageous to come to an understanding. And I feel helpless.

Solace comes in the work.

Beastie Boy and His Pals started with this scrappy composition. I have learned that scraps can talk.

The composition had two sides. A cool side and a warm side with static in between. Similar to the dialog being broadcast to us each day without rest. Like the two parties playing their he said he said game.

As mammals we are predisposed to see faces in inanimate objects. The instinct is a way to protect ourselves from potential threats. So as I added sections to the composition I started seeing beasts -- beasts with eyes, beasts with tails, beasts with goggles. I liked how the three beastie figures outlined in the pic at the right started to create a nest of a composition.