4TOLD: My Work

It seems that a show in November is becoming a tradition for me. Check in the archives for Triple Thread from last year, and Beneath the Surface from 2020. I shared the space with three wonderful artists, and will show their work in separate posts.

entre deux (2022) 2 panels, each 36"x 70", handcut wool felt inlay, silk thread

Here is another in the series of large handcut felt inlay pieces. I lay two pieces of felt on top of each other, and cut my design through both layers with an X-Acto knife. Then I switch out the pieces and stitch them together by hand. Yes! A lot of work - over 14,000 stitches by my estimation. I stitched over the summer, setting up the large stretcher frame on the deck of my studio, under the maple trees.

I had been considering the word "correspondence", while listening to John Coltrane playing "Blue In Green". I remember being told by my high school sewing teacher, when planning to sew a dress with blue and green panels, that "only crazy people and the Irish" would wear blue and green together! But I think she was wrong. Feeling a little bit rebellious, even after all these years, I chose lovely sky blue and forest green felt to work with. In my first sketches I misspelled the word with an "a" instead of an "e", but loved the idea of dance being part of the two elements being in relationship with each other. So, when I checked and saw that the French way of spelling the word used the "a", I very happily went with that, as Canada is a bilingual country!

I also dyed the silk 20/2 weaving yarn to a very specific peach-y pink, that zings with life as the complementary colour to the blue and green.

entre deux, detail

And here is a new addition to the Material Thoughts series that I showed two years ago. I had read an op/ed piece article in the Guardian by Bruno Latour, the influential French thinker, and this line jumped out at me. (Latour was talking about our planet.) I taped a printout of the words to my refrigerator door, which I like to do when I am considering a quote to use, as a way of encountering the words spontaneously, catching them out of the corner of my eye, to see if they "work".

Material Thoughts (Latour) 2022, 30" diameter, hand stitched wool felt appliqué on wool cloth

I had the words up for a couple of months, they passed the test, and then Bruno Latour died. I was spurred to create the piece right away, using wool felt as the appliqué material and a wool Japanese kasuri fabric as the backing. I auditioned several fabrics but the shimmering weblike design was the clear winner. As with the previous pieces, I mounted the stitched cloth on a padded plywood circle.

Mrs. Miller's Nine-Patch, (1995) 28" square, cross stitch on cotton, hand cut linoleum,
found Melmac teacups, acrylic paint

The above piece is an old one, but I felt it very appropriate to the show. I had given it to my Mom after it was made, and it had never been shown publicly. While living in Regina, Saskatchewan, I had been asked by the Dunlop Art Gallery to create new work in response to a quilt in their permanent collection. As part of my research I went to the little town of Tantallon, where the quilt had been made by the members of the Women's Institute. I was able to meet and interview Freida Miller, the last surviving member of the group. She described the experience of living in a small prairie town as being "like you are one with them." After I created a large gallery installation about the quilt, Mrs. Miller's words stayed with me, and I made this small piece as an experiment. It is the first time I used embroidery in an art piece, having previously worked more with sculpture and installation.

Robert Oppenheimer's Doily (Trinity) 2022, hand embroidery, cotton on found linen doily

I can't remember where I found this quote from Robert Oppenheimer, the director of the Manhattan Project that produced the nuclear bomb. I know I started it on July 16, the day of the anniversary of the Trinity nuclear test, and finished it on August 6. The words are what Oppenheimer said after the test, before the more famous part of the quote: "I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."

Robert Oppenheimer's Doily,(Trinity), detail

I combined three separate skeins of embroidery floss for this piece - using one thread each of three slightly different reds to suggest flames.

Installation shot

Next up, rounding the corner, the work of Alice Mansell!