Antelope Canyon

My family and I just got back from a Spring Break trip to Northern Arizona and Southern Utah. We hiked, ate sandwiches, and had lots of time in the car since we visited the Grand Canyon, Antelope Canyon, Zion National Park, Bryce Canyon, and The Grand Staircase of the Escalante all in eight days.

The absolute highlight for me was Antelope Canyon. It is located just outside Page, Arizona. You need to have a Navajo “guide” to explore the canyon which means you basically have to pay an entrance fee. I don’t mind giving the folks on the Res some money, they’ve have it tough, but if you go, don’t bother going into town and paying for a guided tour. You can drive right up to the site outside town and pay at the entrance. There are two sections, Upper Antelope and Lower Antelope. We went to Lower Antelope, it’s longer and narrower.

I’ve never experienced anything like it. We entered it through an crack in the ground and as we went along it got deeper, enveloping us in undulating walls of coral colored stone. Eroded by water, the stone echoes its curves and eddies. It was created over millenia by flash floods (11 people died during a flash flood in 1997) but the violence of that water is nowhere to be seen. It is serene and opulent, a natural cathedral in the Earth.

Skeletons

I’m in that place where the new ideas feel just out of reach and you can almost catch them out of the corner of your eye. It’s a time to let them be, let them simmer until they’re ready to come out to play. If you try to grab them before they’re formed they’ll just disappear.

I’ve had glimpses of a new format. I want to work with sheers, holes, and transparency. I’m thinking about the toner transfers that Larry showed during our class and working with imagery and scale. I keep thinking about ghosts.

So I’ve been thinking about transparency, and my daughter comes home from school with this skeleton of a jack o’ lantern flower she found on her walk home. The sun was shining brightly through the window (for a change!) and I took a series of photos. I love the interplay between the object and the shadow. The next day a skeletonized leaf was stuck in my car door. Thoughts are powerful. You have to be careful about what you manifest around here.

A Great Night!

What a fabulous opening reception last night! The weather cooperated with a lovely, mild Spring evening and lots of people came out for First Thursday. Many friends came by, people ooh and aahed, and I even sold a piece to new collectors. It was a whirlwind and a very satisfactory evening.

Soft Earth, Artist Statement

Cameron Mason 6x9 1-11_8291 copy Foster/White Gallery
April 7-30, 2011

Our lightest touch affects the land, and the land in turn inhabits us. Soil under our fingernails and rain in our hair, we reach our faces up to the sun when it breaks through the clouds. The cycles of sowing and reaping sustain us as we work in balance with the Earth.

My artwork interprets natural forms and textures through the lens of culture, a culture that is built on our agrarian past. In my new series, Blades and Cotyledons, I delve deeper into shape and surface, finding richness in a narrow groove.

The Blades series explores shape as a metaphor for human interaction with the natural world. Obsidian, fractured into faceted shards from solid stone, creates a sharp, cutting edge. Hoes till and reap. We can focus on a single blade of grass in the expanse of a field for just a moment before it is lost among the many.

The Cotyledons series examines the energy of growth as it bursts forth from the stasis of the contained seed. Shaken from a packet and pushed into damp soil by a child’s finger or planted by the million by an industrial agribusiness, the seed is an essential building block of culture. A fragile miracle of nature, the seed sprouts and feeds the hungry.

Three practices come together to form my work: Sculpting, surface design, and stitch. Drawings become maquettes become patterns. Fabric is dyed, over-dyed, discharged, resisted, printed. Panels are free-motion embroidered by machine and hand-stitched into their final shapes. I am invested in process: Exploring, teaching, documenting, writing, and making.

C Mason web 3-11_0232 copy

Surface, Form and Structure

Larry at the sewing machine

I’ve been a big admirer of Larry Calkins‘ work for a long time. We’re both instructors at Pratt and whenever we have run into each other there we’ve always had great conversations. He’s like a mad scientist/artist. I’d always wanted to take one of his classes but it had just never worked out. Last Spring one of my students, Linda, who had taken classes from both of us suggested that we teach together. We both thought it was a great idea. Thus was Surface, Form and Structure born and we taught for the first time this last weekend.

Marianne using soy wax resist

Larry could put the “multi” in multi-media. He uses encaustic, found objects, fabric, and photography among other things. My practice is more focused on surface design and sculpture. We have pretty different working styles, too, but we share a love of science and experimentation in our work and in our teaching.

Our focus for this class was working with fabric, starting with the surface and then covering multiple ways provide structure for three-dimensions. I covered low-water immersion dyeing and physical resists, soy wax resist, discharge, and metal leaf embellishment.

Larry welding

Larry showed us toner transfers, bending and joining steel for structure, and adding wax to the cloth as a final step. We learned from each other, too. Larry hadn’t used wax as a resist or softscrub as discharge. I hadn’t successfully used toner transfers or used bent steel or wax as a way to form fabric.

When we introduced form and structure to the class we each brought our backgrounds and sensibilities. My favorite part of the weekend was our “two on ones” where we met individually with the students to talk through their ideas of how to go from 2-d to 3-d. There was an easy sense of back and forth between us, bouncing ideas off each other. As teachers I think we share the ability to listen deeply to our students, both supporting them and pushing them when they need it.

Hadijah working on her sculpture

We all had a grand time, made a big mess, and wished for another day to play/work. It was gratifying to me that each of the student’s projects were very different from each others. There were no Cameron or Larry “clones”, just each student using the methods and materials we taught to speak with their own voice.

I’m looking forward to teaching this class again in July. We’ll streamline it a little, and no doubt want to add to it, and look forward to spending another weekend creating a mad scientist’s art lab together. And our star pupil, Linda, has come up with another class idea for us to team teach at Pratt called Finish It! Maybe you’ll see it in the Pratt catalog.

Larry's waxed dresses

Linda's sculpture stitching panels to a steel form

Sarah's poppies

Ethel's wall hanging

Becky's fish

A Great Time for Fiber Art

Soundsuit performers waiting to go on

I’m playing a bit of catch up here on the blog. Who would think that some of my busiest time would be after I’ve finished and delivered the art? I’ve been working on a tuneup of the website, taught an intensive this last weekend at Pratt with Larry Calkins, sending out notices for Thursday’s opening, and working on my presentation for Saturday’s Artist Talk at the gallery.

I did take a day off last Wednesday and saw some art. This is an amazing time for fiber art in Seattle. Local galleries are showing more fiber in the last few months: Rachel Brumer’s show last month at Grover/Thurston, a show of surface design by Amy Johnson at Fetherston, Catherine Person has been showing fiber sculpture and will be showing embroidery by Maura Donegan in April, and then there’s my show at Foster/White opening this week. And two of the major museums currently have big fiber exhibits. I went to both the Seattle Art Museum to see the Nick Cave exhibit and to the Frye Art Museum to see the Degenerate Art Ensemble show. Wow! Both shows were really great.

Click the links here to find out more about the exhibits.

Nick Cave, Meet Me at the Center of the Earth at the Seattle Art Museum through June 5, 2011

Degenerate Art Ensemble at the Frye Art Museum through June 19, 2011

Pam McClusky, curator of African Art and Textiles at SAM, has done a great job curating and displaying Nick Cave’s show, Meet Me at the Center of the Earth. I’m a big fan of Cave’s work, Nick Cave the artist not the Australian pop-star. I have a copy of the catalog, Meet Me at the Center of the Earth, from when the show was originally mounted at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. I also got to meet the artist last year when he was here in advance of the show to talk about ways to engage the community during the SAM show. A lot of what we all brainstormed didn’t happen, budget woes is my guess, but the Museum has been working with Cornish College and Spectrum Dance Company to stage “Invasions” of dancers performing in some of the suits. I got a chance to see one of the Invasions at the Museum performing along with Orkestar Zirconium the week the show opened. Even after seeing a lot of video footage of the suits it was amazing to see them moving in real life/real time/three feet away. It was incredibly exciting. My cheeks hurt from smiling and my chest felt full from joy. When I talked about it later the word that came to me was “ecstatic”. I took some video with my trusty little Canon PowerShot but so far, I haven’t been able to figure out how to upload it here. So in the meantime, here are a couple links to some professional Nick Cave footage.

Nick Cave-Art in Motion

Nick Cave-Perspective

I like the exhibit quite a bit and I have been hearing from people not familiar with his work that it has blown quite a few minds. It is a large exhibit and very inpressive in both the large scale of the figures and the amount of detail in each one. My only complaint is that the figures are so static. They are made to move and although it’s more alive than seeing them on the pages of a book, it feels as though you’re only seeing half of the picture. There is a room with very nice video projections that gives a sense of their dynamic possibilities but in the time I was there I didn’t see any video I hadn’t seen before on the web. I wanted to see video of every suit so that you could look at it still then press a button and see a small video screen of that suit moving. That would have been amazing. Still, half the picture is much better than nothing and the suits have a presence that fills the room, five rooms actually. So get down there if you have the chance. There’s nothing like seeing it in person.

The other exhibit I saw that day was the Degenerate Art Ensemble. Wow again! This show rocked my socks even more than the Cave exhibit, mostly because I was unfamiliar with their work. They are a collaborative performing group combining dance, theater, innovative costumes/sculpture, and music. The exhibit is sparse but impressive, showing set pieces and costumes in combination with video projection and audio. I found it beautiful and eerie and the DAE will be mounting a performance of the Red Shoes in conjunction with the exhibit. A nice thing about the Frye is that admission is free!

A Big Day

Today was a big day. Today I took the last stitches in the last piece for Soft Earth, my April Foster/White show. It’s been five months of concentrated work: planning, forming, dyeing, stitching. I’ve been pretty hard on myself (and my family, too) but now I’ve got twenty-one new pieces, thirteen Blades and eight Cotyledons. That averages out to about a piece per week! A good bit of work I’d say.

The other big thing that happened today was a studio visit from Marci McDade, the editor of Fiberarts. We’ve been in touch recently because I’m going to write an article about the workshop I’m teaching next week with Larry Calkins. I was really excited about her coming because, well, she’s the editor of Fiberarts! And because I feel really good about my work and in a good place to share it.

Marci was like a curious honeybee visiting every flower in the studio. She was drawn to my stash of fabrics, petting the velvets and full of questions about technique and concept. We talked about the magazine and staying relevant in the changing world of fiber. We talked about process and journaling and maybe putting together an article for the magazine on blogging. We talked about balancing parenting with work. We talked about good places to eat while she’s in Seattle. And all the while she was taking photos of everything, arranging them in still lifes, standing on a stool so she could get a better shot, and having me hold up drawings and fabric.

It’s really great when someone who holds a place of power in the art world is so accessible. Curators, gallery owners, magazine editors, they’re all people like you and me. They have knowledge, for sure, and they have influence but there’s no point in being afraid to talk to them. You might make a new friend.

Spring!

Spring is in the air, I can tell through my watery, itchy eyes, and I just couldn’t stand sitting at my sewing machine another minute today. I went for a long, lovely walk and of course I was drawn to the trees. I loved the contrast of this small bud emerging right from the gnarly bark. I loved the texture and depth of the bark on the trees in the picture below, too. They are like layers of documents pasted one on top of each other, each marking the passing of another year.

Finding My Faith

Cotyledon 5 in progress

I’m not a religious person so when I’m talking about faith, it’s faith in my creativity and ability. Sometimes faith requires taking big steps at the edge of a cliff and sometimes it’s only baby steps along a stitched line. Sometimes taking even those baby steps can require a giant amount of bravery. I have to trust my intuition, have faith in that undefinable place where the ideas come from when I’m making all those big and small decisions that lead up to a finished piece of art.

These last few weeks have required more than the usual amount of bravery. My daughter has been my studio companion lately as she has been recovering from a really difficult period of persistent headaches. She is finally feeling better and at school for the first time in two weeks. It’s been difficult to watch my little one deal with chronic pain and not be able to fix it.

I guess that’s where we have to lean on faith. And sometimes I wish I was a religious person because it seems it would give a focus to that feeling of giving up one’s trust to something or someone that is invisible and undefinable. It would be reassuring that while I’m doing my part here, there is a higher power looking out; to have faith be Faith.

If you haven’t seen Elizabeth Gilbert’s TED talk, Nurturing Creativity, it’s really worth watching. She posits that there is a creative energy, a “genius” that comes from outside of ourselves when we are in the act of creating. That our job as artists, is to show up and consistently do our work, so that we are available to funnel this genius when it comes through us.

This idea of the “genius” is the closest thing I can think of to describing the way it feels when I work. That if I keep doing my part, the showing up and putting in the hours, I can trust that all of those decisions are leading somewhere. Somewhere in my head there is a vision of the finished piece and all I have to do is find the path to its completion.

Sometimes that faith is harder to find than others and I have to remember, baby steps.

Cotyledon 5 detail

Crisis of Faith

bacon?

There is always a time in my work when I have a crisis of faith. I think everything is shit and wonder why I’m doing this. I’m going through that now.

These are uncertain times. My daughter still has headaches and hasn’t gone to school in almost two weeks. Is the radiation from Japan making its way toward us?

I put up some in process photos of my work on Facebook yesterday and a couple of people commented that the piece looks like bacon. Yes, I know it’s just insensitive people trying to be funny. But it made me cry because, of course, they’re right. Fuck! Can I ever think of this piece any other way? Should I even finish it? Is the whole body of work any good? I really don’t need this right now.

I know that the answer is just to keep working, that the decisions I make as I go along are good ones, and that my vision is true. It’s always worked out in the past, it will work out this time. The other work is coming along, it looks good. I just need to get out of my funk and get back to work. Enough of this pity party, right?

Cotyledon 8 in process

inside stitching on Cotyledon 8