My regular readers know I love a bit of glitter! Last weekend I went to a big store here in Montevideo that stocks all kinds of things for the craftsperson and upholsterer including leather, batting, threads, zippers, crochet and macrame supplies. Strangely enough they don’t stock the needles and embroidery thread I was hoping for… but there’s another merceria nearby that will be open when I’m in that zone later in the week. Even without those things though, Centro Tapicero is a veritable Alladin’s Cave for people like me. Just when I thought I was ready to go to the cashier, I spotted this fabric – and just had to buy the minimum 0.5m x 1.5m cut to try it out for, um, something.
It’s a metallic finish on a very fine black jersey knit base – the surface looks a little like sharkskin satin perhaps – anyway quite irresistable. Once I got home of course I did some sample making to see how it handles. It’s a lot easier to handle than leather, and as I’m in the middle of another project just at the moment, I have time to think about how I’m going to use it.
Here’s what did and found with this material
Far left – using a long stitch using pewter coloured thread, it was easy enough to machine sew down BUT wrinkling and stretching occurred when I sped up.
Wavy bit – hand tacked into place and stitched over with a sewing machine red thread and a perle #8 in the pewter colour…. hmmm – I don’t care for the stitching showing underneath, but potentially useful to know.
Like fine leather, it can be more easily pinned and hand sewn, but marks show if it is unpicked.
The squares -were stitched with, from L-R: perle #8, neon red machine embroidery thread, black perle #12, metalic silver, but the effect of this thread was blah – not significant enough to bother with.
the wavy bit from lower left corner diagonally up is glued down – there’s no apparent damage from the glue on the surface of this material, so full marks of approval for that – sometimes the glue causes wrinking and distortion on similar fabrics.
Ironing: at even a medium heat the iron caught on the surface of the hotplate; but turned over and ironed from the back at top heat all survived just fine; and ironing with top heat and using a teflon sheet there seemed to damage either. This augurs well!
The question now is –should I return this week and buy some more?
There were about 20 artists on yesterday’s SAQA JAMs YAK zoom call, and we discussed a number of topics, including the pros and cons of larger and smaller sized works, and different views on presenting or displaying our fibre art, including the thorny old one of whether to mount and frame textile works, under glass or not. There are so many acceptable options these days, which can appeal or not, depending on what field you’re coming from, and where you’re showing your work is a factor, too.
In the context of this discussion, I mentioned a juried fibre art exhibition held in the late 90s, I think by WAFTA (West Australian Fibre Textile Artists) in Perth, Western Australia – at least I think they put it on. I will never forget one piece in that show I found quite astonishing to see it hung it using several grommets along the top edge which were looped over a few nails in the gallery wall. They were positioned so that it buckled a bit, deliberately not sitting flat against the wall. In addition the edges of the canvas were just cut and left raw, bereft of any kind of finishing off that I recall. Looking back it was a bit innovative, maybe ground breaking at the time, and although I can’t remember the surface design, I’m sure that it probably was entirely appropriate, as I now see I myself was more focused on technique rather than its message, because that was where my own art was.
In the late 90s I was 100% into freehand cut, machine pieced quilted works with bound or faced edges. With top quality workmanship all my threads were skillfully, neatly and carefully finished off as I diligently buried all knots between layers – they didn’t even show on the back of a work, and still don’t on any of my backs. After all, I learned taught good sewing and embroidery skills by my mother, grandmother and domestic science teachers at school; and as a teen I often successfully sewed myself outfits using the more demanding Vogue Designer patterns. In the late 80s my earliest contact with quilted textiles had been with the exacting requirements of traditional pieced geometric patchwork. Much of that changed when I met freehand or improvisational piecing. in an art quilt workshop by Nancy Crow – after which whatever I made was less precisely structured but still neatly finished off.
Considering some of my own recent work, and images in my Pinterest collection, an informal, unfinished look is something I have been working towards for some time…. and it isn’t always easy to carry out on purpose. But it does fit with me seeing any kind of Life as a continuum between start and finish points without any set length or pattern. A life can be long or short, and it can be a smooth continuum, but it is more likely to be untidy in places, occasionally punctuated by upheavals or mistakes at some points along the way. Fabric marked by stitches is a statement or an exploration of something on the artist’s mind, and, just like a life, a stitchery can have messy stops, starts and changes of directions, stitches or threads along the way.
My favourite artists whose medium is stitch include Roberta Wagner (“Much of my recent work has a feeling of age reminiscent of memories and buried treasure”), Shelley Rhodes , Rieko Koga (“She expresses her universe through threads and needles, working spontaneously.”) , Anitta Romano (“It is above all a question of inscribing time in matter, of transforming time into matter”) Carolyn Nelson (“…by hand, torn, layered, stitched, embedded…” To this list I’d add Cristina Llambi, the artist whose exhibition I recently loved. All of them stitch their ideas free of any sign of tradition or technical rules, and that freedom brings an air of spontaneity and sensitive response of the stitcher to his/her environment.
It’s no secret to my readers that I love hand stitching, and as I move along I do so rhythmically with a result that the marks tend to come out in a pretty regular way:
There are times when I have delighted in stitching a regular kind of pattern leaving out anything that disturbs it. I’ve written before on primal shapes – squares and triangles in particular, and how grid layouts represent systems of order, like societies, or a body of knowledge, or a record of the passage of time. A couple of my recent works have this theme –
On saturday last Mike and I attended a book launch “Arboles de Montevideo” written by Eloisa Figueredo and beautifully illustrated by Javier Lage. The morning promised a talk by the author Eloisa Figueredo (who has loved ‘trees’ all her life) to be followed by a tour of the garden, and then a tour of the 1918 house itself, a small museum we hadn’t ever heard of, Museo Quinta in calle Vaz de Ferreira in the Atahualpa barrio of Montevideo, adjacent to the historic Prado.
The 11am talk began at about 11.10, and every few minutes someone else shuffled in trying to not be noisy but nevertheless disruptive to both speaker and audience. The last stragglers wandered in at 11.35, requiring chairs to be moved across the wooden floor or lifted over heads to accomodate them….pretty typical in a country of people who have a fairly laid back approach to the concept of a starting time 🙂 We bought a copy of the beautiful book and then instead of traipsing around with the guided tour, took our time to wander through the large urban block that from the beginning has always been allowed to grow completely naturally as a forest would.
Though Mike’s the one with the green thumb, we both love leafy green environments, wild or manicured, that are so good for our sense of well being. We love gardens generally, and once bought a fairly ordinary house in a Mt. Isa suburb of hundreds of others like it, purely for that particular house’s wonderful, slightly overgrown garden sporting magnificent fruit trees – mango, grapefruit, lemons, custard apples, pawpaws, bananas and more including a lovelywhite bauhinia tree.
Apart from the gravel path from the gate up to the house and around it’s base, all the other garden paths took us through the rich green foliage, around the tree trunks and over the roots, and they were simple bush tracks of composted fallen leaf matter, soft and quiet to walk on. Gorgeous.
As we wandered, every now and then we came close to a wall topped by coils of razor wire – a bit jarring, but so necessary for security these days around such a historic house that is no longer actually lived in.
These days the museum is only open for private events, but once per year it’s open to the public on the annual weekend of Dia del Patrimonio. However, speaking with one of the members of the board that controls the museum, I learned it can be booked for a special group tour, and put my name down to be notified by email of upcoming events there, because we will go back.
The other day Mike and I visited the nearby Cuidad de la Costa Cultural Centre (behind the north side of the shopping centre) to see a fibreart exhibition I’d been reading about – “Dark Green” by Cristina Llambi. (Gallery information below)
It was exciting to see how the artist has used paint and stitch in many ways to express her passionate concern about the threats to the world we live in, where Nature is impacted by extreme climate events and the spread of human activity, straining the relationship between our environment and all the the living things within it. Her message is that we need to find new ways of restoring the balance between human activity and all the other living things sharing our home on Planet Earth.
Llambi’s statements about this strained relationship are presented in fabric and thread on landscape paintings, and also in small sculptures featuring objects gathered in nature – namely small rocks and branches.
Several of her exciting works are painted canvases, of shapes and lines unmistakably suggesting landscapes populated by forms suggesting plants, their foliage and flowers. These are not of particular scenes or actual gardens, rather they are a slighly fantastical gardeny-foresty kind of background into which she has then stitched directly into…
… or glued on patches of fabric including painted recycled curtains, lace edgings or household linens featuring stitched elements, adding hand drawn patches of tiny marks of detailed patterns and textures.
Each work feels to be a celebration of the diversity of life within a landscape, and each is a case of the more you look the more you see. To stitch directly onto a decent sized canvas could be difficult without her method of stitching onto some fabric, cutting that piece out and gluing or stitching to the canvas, and this really opened my eyes – I might consider this for some of my digital prints some time…
Other objects on show included applied patches of fibre constructions and stitchery displayed on torn strips of heavy brown and other kinds of paper displayed hanging from tree branches on torn strips of heavy brown and other kinds of paper, and some of these swayed as people nearby moved, suggesting living things. Other small lichen-like tiny elements were displayed attached to smooth river rocks.
Another table top collection was of several really delicate little stitcheries displayed in glass petrie dishes. Llambi’s statement mentions cyanobacteria, but these little pieces spoke to me of the importance of all the scientific study of algae, bacteria and other tiny life forms in furthering the knowledge, understanding and improvement of our environment.
If you live in Montevideo Uruguay, this exhibition is open M-F, 11am-3.30pm, in the new Canelones Cultural Space (behind the north side of the Cuidad de la Costa shopping) For further information phone 26821882 ext. 247
If you’re in or near Montevideo Uruguay, there is still another week to visit it in the Teatro Solis in the Old City, I recommend you make the effort to attend it between 5pm-7pm tuesday-sunday. During the week that is afternoon peak hours, but traffic and parking is easy on the weekends 🙂 This interesting fibreart exhibition is subtitled ‘more than a garment’.
By sheer coincidence, just before visiting this exhibition, I finished reading vol. #3 in a historical fiction series by VL McBeath set in industrial Victorian England, “When Time Runs Out”. One thread running through this series is that all the female characters struggle in various ways to cope with rigid societal expectations about their lives and place in a society, proper and appropriate clothing and behaviour, including where you should live according to your social standing. Central to all these concerns is the issue of education for girls. It was regarded as unnecessary to educate them beyond grade school level because a woman’s role was only to marry well, produce children and run the man’s household. Property ownership and financial affairs were in male hands, and women’s opinions on anything outside household matters were considered unimportant. But by half way through this book the Suffragette movement was in full swing, and towards the end of it an important character, Harriet, who has always strongly rebelled against repressive ideas and controls from all the males in her life, angrily leaves home with nothing but the clothes on her back, slips and falls off a pathway into the canal bellow, and either drowns or floats downstream to emerge and continue on in life in some way… but for the answer to thatI have to wait until I can read vol. #4 🙂
On my fortnightly zoom call with some textile artist friends I mentioned this exhibition, and found several of us were old enough to have experienced the serious body control of what my mother termed ‘good foundation garments‘. These included corsets or girdles, and in my teens panty girdles or ‘iron strides’ became available and popular. None of us even possess any kind of girdle today, though we all still wear bras to gently shape our figures under our clothes. Mum only ever abandoned wearing her own girdle when on holiday at the beach, and she made sure we were properly fitted out early in our teens. The aim was to smoothe the female shape and control any floppy flab to make the clothing of the day look more elegant, but I’m sure in Mum’s mind wearing one added some kind of respectability, somehow, and my contemporaries all accepted this new stage in our lives, until the modern the feminist movement began to influence us in the early 70s. Fashion conscious girls like myself certainly needed a well supported (boned) strapless bra (more properly callked ‘bustiers’) for strapless or near strapless party dresses. We then discussed ‘corsets’, ‘girdles’ and ‘panty girdles’ all of which several of us wore in our youth. Women today still wear foundation garments such as Spanks, one brand of smoothing shaping garments, but they do so voluntarily when they are looking for a well smoothed look in a fitting dress, typically for a special occasion. There are some who wear them all the time, but there is no societal expectation that the modern woman musthave that hourglass figure which in other times and cultures has sybolised perfection of womanhood.
The most extreme of those restricting garments did incredible harm to women’s rib cages and incredibly squashed organs within female abdominal cavity, and thinking about all that, I googled “When did corsets first appear in female clothing?” I was astonished by the answer in this really interesting article on the history of women’s clothing, I’d forgotten the archeological record of painted vessels and figurines of the Minoan civilisation of Crete in the eastern Mediterranean from around 1000BC !!
An important difference between my early Australian BabyBoomer life and women’s experiences in previous centuries though, was that by the 50s in the Western world, all girls automatically received the same basic education as boys did. We were raised understanding that we could choose to do almost anything in life in addition to, or instead of, producing and raising children. Women of my age went out to work once their children went off to school, and nowadays returning to work within weeks or months after childbirth is standard, so there are very few stay-at-home-mothers these days. I’ve always been free to form my own opinion on anything, including how I might vote in local, state and national elections. In a previous life I successfuly stood for a local government election, and Mike’s and my votes have sometimes cancelled out each other’s on certain election issues.
Below are more of my favourites from the show:
Many of the pieces in this exhibition displayed something of the contrast between the effect of looking ‘good’ in society’s terms and some degree of physical and mental discomfort or pain endured by the wearer. Some notable exceptions that I liked were Pablo Ausliso’s “Bucolic Baroquism” –