I’ve always had a thing for the decorative potential of arrangements of holes, and today in my morning Instagram browse, I looked at the website of a French freeform bobbin lacemaker, Madeline Thoman I fully relate to her artist statement, and her images are beautiful – do look her up and keep an eye on her work. I’ve watched a few bobbin lacemakers at work and it looks far more difficult than any needlework technique I’ve ever done, and it’s quite humbling to think she taught herself how to do all that.

A few years ago, I wrote here that holes were the defining characteristic of lace, not the material around the holes themselves. Last week I listened to a fascinating episode of the Haptic and Hue podcast on the story of lace, “The Long and Wiinding Road of Lace” – Series 4, “Threads of Survival”, episode #31. I didn’t realise the story of lace only began in the 1400s, though I did know some of the stories of this expensive luxury textile, how it was a social marker, and so valuable that people risked their lives to smuggle it. If you’re a textile or fibre artist of any kind, or interested in the history of textiles, I fully recommend you look up Jo Andrews’ wonderful podcast in which every episode is packed with the interesting and colourful history of textiles within the history of Mankind.

Which brings me to the light bulb moment with this piece, mounted on what is technically a minimlist freeform ‘lace’ construction made to present this small 3D work, and it’s only just struck me that there is great potential here to present some other 3D forms in this way.

“Growth 3” was a delight to make, with some important learning along the way. The first piece with this title consists of a lot of glass+ textile for the 3rd Glass+Textile Salon in February, so I won’t show it here yet, as we’ve been asked to not publish entries before the juried exhibition, fingers X.

I’ll put a loop or two on the back of Growth 3 so that if someone wants to place it on a wall just as it is, that will be very easy, and carefully chosen framing could suit it too, although I designed it as a tabletop piece. There will be more ‘stuffed puffs’ coming soon, but I’ll pack the stuffing less firmly in them, so they are easier to ‘nestle’ up against each other and stitch into place.

With such firm stuffing, sewing it together was both finicky and required a bit of muscle power at times. In this next image I’ve covered over some of the gathering points and stitching over with fine, soft grey felt, which tidies it up a bit. And though I never mind showing ‘the artist’s hand’, covering those more extreme textured areas in my opinion elevates the level of craftsmanship a little – and good craftsmanship never goes out of style IMHO. It’s signed in tiny permanent ink letters on the back of one of the metallic puffs.

“Growth 2” was a small ~13m diameter piece, gifted to a fellow fibre artist :

Apart from making some cloth bags for this and other small 3D pieces to protect the beaded and sequined surfaces as the pieces are moved about, yesterday I decided I liked the trial, experimental way I had mounted this little piece inspired by a 2020 Clarissa Callesen workshop, so signed it in very small letters on the front, put the title on the back, and now it’s quite ready for my exhibition, too.

I think there are issues to be clarified with SAQA and probably all groups who run juried fibre and textile exhibitions, regarding AI generated design ideas developed from an image of the artist’s own work the algorithm is supplied with.

Here I’m considering possibilities of further development of one of my own works, the full image of which I gave to ChatGPT and posted about a few weeks ago – that post includes its responses. As I think to use one of those would be technically a collaboration, I’m not using any of them.

Here’s a detail from that same quilt diptych, “Sweat Of The Sun: Tears Of The Moon” 2018.

This morning, true to form, I captured my own thought in this quick diagram using ballpoint on some scrap paper. Diagrams are my shorthand – and this one has captured enough of an idea to go forward with a work for the SAQA Oceania Region exhibition with the theme of ‘Opposites’. The end result will probably look nothing like what this suggests to you, but I can start from this point 🙂

And now I need to consider colours and techniques I could use for this small work, 50cm x 70cm in portrait orientation. I drew it up this way, and in editing I rotated it 180 degrees, but interestingly it looked really wrong that way. Black and white’s a bit obvious, a cliche perhaps, but we’ll see… but it’s time to take a walk and return to my puffs and glass beads.

I recently corresponded a couple of times with a fellow artist member of SAQA who was clearly frustated with things she felt were expected of her as a well known teacher of textile techniques and long term blogger about all that. Reading some of her blog posts it was obvious this almost 80 year-old is struggling to keep up to a high standard she set herself decades ago when she was younger, but which she’s clearly now finding quite a burden, as in every post I read she dwelt on the need to reduce her stash of fabric and scraps, with instructions for samples and photos of them in every post. She still has one foot firmly in the traditional quiltmaking world where the ethic of sharing and showing others how to do something is a strong characteristic of the craft. She’s thinking it might be time to think more about where she wants her creative journey to go from here, and I hope she does that.

Her options are

(a) continue writing her frequent detailed blog postings (essentially step by step tutorials) as she has for a long time: “My real desire was always to encourage people to try non-traditional techniques… (sic) In my blog, I’m trying to let it be known that figuring things out, trying different techniques, learning new techniques, indecision, even failure and angst are all part of the creative process. Not to fear it, but embrace it as growth.” Of course this is true, but as I commented previously, the creative process itself alone doesn’t render any object a piece of art.

Keeping one foot in both traditional quilting and innovative textile art fields requires a lot of effort to maintain a teacher’s profile and place on the Quilting Industry foodchain. This includes includes blogging and/or newsletters to subscribers with taster-demos for major workshops – which is time consuming to do well. Other publicity comes from writing magazine articles and perhaps publishing a successful book, with projects that appear to be based on something new in techniques, linked to your popular workshops. Plus it’s very important to have your latest quilts seen in the big international quilt exhibitions in USA, Europe and Australia; and even better to be engaged to teach even a half day workshop at, say, Houston. I’m in a similar age group to this artist and I can no longer keep up with all that and make my art, too., so it’s some years since I applied to teach anywhere that I’ve had to travel to – I miss the interaction with students, though, and that’s part of the reason I mentor with SAQA.

(b) Or this artist/teacher could concentrate on creating her own art while thinking more deeply and personally about what inspires and motivates her, which she admitted she rarely does. She wrote to me “I have done exhibits with what I consider my real artwork, and it’s a whole different world than my “anyone can do it” teaching style….(sic) In my blog, I’m trying to let it be known that figuring things out, trying different techniques, learning new techniques, indecision, even failure and angst are all part of the creative process. Not to fear it, but embrace it as growth.” 

While my motivations and inspirations are very important to me, as set out in my in my artist statement, and I will be a maker as long as I possibly can; but I’ve found as time moves on that I’ve needed to periodically review and let go some stuff that I can no longer handle, or no longer want to spend time and energy on. Obviously aging and some medical issues have been influential in that process. I’m more interested in making smaller works, including 3D tabletop installations, but even if I do find myself in a large lengthy project, all I need is an absorbing good recorded book, my favourite podcasts and regular breaks to keep me going through the long stretches that I need to reach the end I have in mind 🙂

This topic popped up a couple of times this week.

First, I had the pleasure of meeting Doreen Bayley of Colonia UY. who came for a studio visit early in the week. Hers was one of the works I most loved in the “Enmascaradas” exhibition currently showing here in Montevideo, and we both had works selected for the first two glass+textile exhibitons, but we hadn’t met at either of those openings, and both missed the Enmascaradas opening. My own entry for the III Salon ArteVidrioTextil, opening February 4th next (Maldonado) is ready, and Doreen said she’s making one but has struck a snag, however there’s bags of time to finish her 25cm x 25cm piece before entries close on December 1st.

While she viewed my recent 2D works we had an interesting discussion about how we each approach making our art. Doreen said she doesn’t draw her ideas for her basketry creations out first, but assembles her materials and they then take her on the path to producing what she has in mind – to which I’d add guided by artistic ability and experience. She told me how angry and offended she’d been when some Big Name teacher or professor who proclaimed the importance or virtue of drawing, had really berated her in a public discussion when she revealed she didn’t draw anything, period. I don’t blame her – that was either his arrogance or ignorance, because as artists it is our own decision on how we design and produce our art. As the saying goes, there’s more than one way to swing a cat!

My regular readers know my own process is something similar, and that I very often arrange my design in grids. I showed my visitor a pair of 20cm pieces that are very diagrammatic, in a grid design, commenting how years as a geography student left me with the useful habit of quickly capturing ideas in brief, clear diagrams, as shown below –

I began making fibreart in the form of creative embroidery up to 1988, when having relocated to the USA I spent a year or so learning about and really enjoying making traditional American geometric patchwork and quilting. In the english speaking world particularly, modern quiltmaking is descended from both geometric patchwork and appliqued quilted bed coverings, though quilted textiles for practical purposes are found in most other cultures too. In the USA in the 70s, Art Quilts emerged as an art form using the traditional needlework techniques employed in that history. In the last fifty years the whole notion of ‘art quilt’ has been added to by new technologies that artists encountered and embraced. Some of these have become familiar to many of us, including digitally designed pattern printed on demand to fabric for the artist/designer to use in his art; the application of paints and dyes to produce surface design in the studio; machines that cut out fabrics and other materials to computer aided designs, and of course commercial fabrics have been changed with new technology, too.

Without going into detail on my opinion of how the word ‘quilt’ is really a negative factor in this artform’s struggle to be accepted as ‘art’, let me say that just like many other places, in Uruguay only painting, drawing and sculpture are regarded as ‘art’. Everything else, including all fibre related activities such as weaving, all kinds of embroidery, basketry, leatherwork, any form of knitting, knotting or crochet, and of course quilting, plus the many forms of glass work, ceramics, woodwork and the many iterations of metalwork – all lie somewhere on the busywork-handcraft scale. They’re certainly widely admired when featuring original designs and being well made, but nevertheless all that stuff is crafts, artesanías or ‘manualidades’.

My time in the traditional quiltmaking world was very brief, and I found it perfectly easy to abandon the concept of making a pattern to follow, but plenty of prominent art quilt makers do design and make their own patterns to follow, either by drawing out to scale, or projecting a line drawing to sheet of paper on the wall which they then number and label before cutting up. What is important is the final result, not how you got there.

In my next post I’ll go into the second time this subject popped up on my radar.