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.
These little pod-like pieces were stitched separately and glued or stitched onto the painted canvas.
Lines of simple stitches freely wander, some knots and threads hang in a slightly messy, unfinished manner, and raw fabric edges abound – just like some of nature’ssoft, unclear boundaries.
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.
Hanging patches of cloth and paper with stitched elements.
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’.
The exhibition announcement poster features Virginia D’Alto’s piece, “Ortesis”
Vicky D’Alto UY “Ortesis” (in english “Orthosis”) The correction of disorders of the limbs or spine by use of braces and other devices to correct alignment or provide support.
Detail, Vicky D’Also, “Ortesis” in contrast to the elegant, luxurious exterior details, the inside surface of the corset expresses unseen physical and mental pain experienced by the wearer.
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 !!
Felipe Macqueira UY “Obsessive Femininity”, one of several works juxtaposing the concepts of bodily beauty with the pain endured beneath or within the corset.
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:
Gladys T.De Souza UY “Doloroso Pasion” A symbol of female beauty as an instrument of oppression and control.
Romina Ulloa CH “Zoiros” (in Greek ‘vibrant’) the artist statement outlines how the undergarment became a garment which publicly demonstrates that the beating heart inside nourishes and vibrates with life.
Jose Gomez Rifas UY “Un Corse Para Trinidad Guevara”Prints from a C19 painting by iconic Uruguayan artist Juan Manuel Blanes, featuring the reclining nude figure of wildly popular Uruguayan actress of that era, Trinidad Guevara. Her popularity was not dinted by remaining unmarried despite having produced six children by different fathers. (sorry the figure on the right side is so poorly lit, mea culpa)
Mariela Gotuzzo UY “Cerca Del Corazon” A wordless personal expression of some heartfelt painful feelings.
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” –
Pablo Auliso UY “Barroquismo Bucolico” A voluptuous tribute to the landscapes painted by Renaissance artists and the many striking sunsets viewed in Montevideo, using all upcycled materials.
…. and Mercedes Fernandez’s “Torso Nativo”
Mercedes Fernandez UY “Torso Nativo” One of the oldest natural fibres known to man, wool, was used to make this shaping garment that originated in antiquity, c. 1000BC.
When I was about four, my grandmother took me to church to begin attending Sunday School, and the Bible stories I began learning so often included Egypt, meaning that from that young age I had a concept of a hot, dry, deserty country with a very different way of life from the one I was living in 1950s Tasmania. Located at the south eastern corner of the Mediterranean Sea , Egypt produced one of the most important and influential civilisations of the ancient world. It was therefore quite thrilling to travel to that country in 2007 and marvel at everything in hot, dusty, crowded, noisy cities and visit a few of the ancient pyramids, temples and other monuments I’d known of and read about all my life.
A very special feature of our time in Cairo was being taken on studio visits to various artisans by well known fellow Australian textile artist, Jenny Bowker, who was living there at the time. Over several days she made sure we visited and saw the work of several expert spinners and weavers, a glassblower, a book binder, stone masons and several of the now well known tentmakers. On these studio visits we always found something wonderful to buy to take home, and perhaps the most dramatic of these was the work of the Egyptian tentmakers.
These men applique intricate Islamic motif designs from cut fabric pieces onto canvas fabric backing to produce panels which traditionally lined the tents of the nomadic desert dwelling Bedouins and provide windbreaks around campsites. The same timeless designs are still produced, by hand, from fabric cut with giant tailors’ scissors, and unlike most decorative arts among peoples who’ve mixed with and traded other cultures, few non-Islamic motifs and influences have crept into their art. But in other ways in modern times the market has changed: mass produced printed fabrics of these designs can be bought by the metre for use in street displays and home decoration; plus today many smaller pieces than tent liners are produced for the tourists who want to take home things like pillow covers, small wall panels or table runners. While we did buy a few table runners and cushion covers for gifts for family, we also bought ourselves two large, 2m x 2m sized wall hangings or bedcovers, and then had to buy two extra suitcases to get our treasures home! One of those pieces we hung in our bedroom to enjoy its brilliant colours every day. We learned that such elaborate pieces as these would take a man at least month to complete.
Tentmaker wall hanging 2m x 2m, an elaborate pattern of appliqued pieces in glorious colours.
These are superbly well stitched pieces – we were fortunate to be taken to studios where high quality work was being done.
This elegantly patterned 2m x 2m hanging we bought we use as a bed cover for the guest room. The colour scheme would fit in any decor, but goes perfectly in this room. It’s too heavy to sleep under, so we warn our guests to roll it back and place on a chair when they want to settle for the night.
Tentmaker Ashraf at work, seated in the typical cross legged position on a bench in his shop. The shapes he’s applying are what we’d term needle-turned applique so the folded edge rests on the outline of his design.
One piece of a commissioned group made in a workshop we visited, showing black appliqued to the front, and in places showing the stitches on the back of the canvas.
Tentmaker panels used as windbreaks at our rest stop.
I’ve already said we had to buy a couple of large suitcases to bring our fibreart souvenirs back to Montevideo. (and for some reason I had felt the need to buy and bring back about 1/2 a supermarket shopping bag of very heavy hand blown chunky glass beads 🙂 In the next post in this series I’ll write about some of the others.
My quilt in the SAQA Benefit Auction, Spirogyra, sold in the middle of last week, and today I received notification that the buyer is a maker herself and a well known Californian collector, so I’m very pleased to have a piece in her collection at last. In thanking her for her support of SAQA, I wanted to give her some insight to the thinking and processes that led me to make the 12″ auction piece, way back in early February this year. (That’s a time I often find it convenient to do a couple of small projects while working in front of a cooling fan) That’s quite a while ago now, so I needed to look up a few blog posts and after thinking about it for a while, my email to her included the following comments:
Since I began freehand cutting and piecing in the early 90s, inserted strips or wandering lines, as I think of them, have long been part of my work. These strips began signifying bits of memory, as a way of adding important colours into essentially landscape backgrounds, as I frequently associate places we’ve lived or travelled with particular colours. My textile art background from waaaay back is interpretive or creative embroidery, and I have long felt that the most expressive stitch of all is that most basic one – the glorious straight stitch including the stemmed versions of other stitches like french knots and fly stitch. These elements came together in 2020 with Pandemic Pattern With plenty of time at home to follow ideas, and having always been a keen sample maker, I joined some scraps of fabric in earthy colours and trimmed them to segmented strips which I then couched/hand appliqued with gold thread, a work that became Bush Colours It is really a landmark quilt, because many works featuring segmented lines have followed. I love the whole process of piecing and raw edge stitching/couching of those lines. Experimentation and sample making early this year led to making Spirogyra. Green is my favourite colour, and from that section of the colour wheel I have heaps of scraps and offcuts after making a bedspread several years ago. As these particular techniques are incredibly economical in fabric usage, I have enough to continue producing works featuring these colours for quite a while yet! The links in this paragraph go to specific blog posts dealing with these works in detail.
Quite often small works such as those in SAQA’s annual Spotlight and Benefit Auctions or the Ozquilt biennial Australia Wide calls (40cm sq.) lead on to larger pieces, such as the one I’m now working on, with a working title of Spirogyra 2 –
Being larger gives scope for much more complexity and exploration of the depth created by weaving the strips over and under.
Quilting has started, and at the moment is fine traditional quilting along both edges of the segmented and the machine+hand sewn strips. The blank empty gaps will need to be quilted by something that retreats to the background. ie is less visible, in a darker colour and a fine texture, suggesting the watery medium of a pond or very slow river, in which strands of Spirogyra float.
In addition to my belief in the value of making samples, I also believe that in writing about my work and thinking a little deeper about certain aspects of it helps me understand the role of textile art in my creative life.
Last week I posted about how my thinking of how memory underlies all my own art. In my earliest fibre art which I referred to what I was doing then as ‘creative embroidery‘, and exhibited in my first solo show “Sunburnt Textures”. In thee works I was absorbed with textures of the earth’s surface and representing these in stitch. Then came man-made markings and patterns Ancient Expressions, different environments Colour Memories and the processes of natural forces on all surfaces Timetracks. In my previous post I wrote of the influences that led to my group of Ebb&Flow quilts
In our long married life together, Mike and I have frequently moved from one place to another following the opportunities and demands associated with his profession of exploration geology. I became engaged creating original art quilts shortly after moving to the USA in 1988 for a couple of years, at the same time becoming very aware of the different colours of everything in our new environment – cars, fabrics, house and interior decorator colours, furniture, and particularly the vegetation! As we arrived in the Fall, even the forests (a mix of evergreen and the deciduous Aspens in CO) were showing their autumn leaves, which was new for us; most natural Australian vegetation is non-deciduous and does not change colour with the seasons. I realised that I associate particular places we’ve lived with different groups of colours, and as my work developed I found myself using colours that fellow (American) art quilters were not using; and people began commenting on my different colour sense which I attribute to ingrained memory heightened by being in a foreign environment. From 1990 – 2004 my work includes my Colour Memory Quilts, which developed at the same time as my intrigue with the role of line in my designs; and I named them after places and my experiences in those places that their colours evoked in my memory. Here are some examples:
Ora Banda, 1992, 127cm x 150cm
Mission Beach, 1995, 122cm x 126cm. (irregular shape photographed against a black background)
Kimberley 2, 2002 70cmh x 110cmw (Phptographed against a black background)
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