Believe by Laura Kimpton and Jeff Schomberg

I returned from the Burning Man Festival one week ago. Someone asked me yesterday why I go. It’s a hard question to answer. It’s hard to explain to someone who’s never been and, if you have been, you most likely have your own answer.

The Man and base

a view of The Man from inside the base

another view of The Man from an art piece nearby

The biggest draw for me is the art. The dry lake bed of the Black Rock Desert, called the Playa, provides the ultimate blank canvas on a grand scale. It is completely dry, completely flat, neutral cracked earth surrounded on all sides by arid mountains. It is the harshest art festival on the planet, with blazing sun, strong winds, and dust storms. The fact that any artist team can mount work under these conditions is amazing. The fact that they create work on such a huge scale with intricate craftsmanship and interactivity is astonishing. The art isn’t juried, at least not for quality or content, so you see work at all levels. I like that. I like that people are inspired to create and are supported by the event organizers.

Another pull for me is the community. The 10 Principals of Burning Man have created a structure for an event where strangers really are just friends you haven’t met yet. Where people look into your eyes, introduce themselves with a hug, offer you a their hand, a drink, an experience, their stories. I laugh a lot there. I cry, too. All my feelings are at the surface and can be expressed safely, not stuffed down until there is a better time, a better place. There is no better place to feel.

inside the Temple of Whollyness which was a 64 foot tall structure created without using nails, glue or any other metal fastener

another view inside the Temple

Then there is the freedom. The freedom to express, to be myself or an alter ego, to wake up at dawn and ride my bike across the hard packed playa wearing zebra-print pajama pants and a fur coat. Then I come back to camp where Lucky Eric serves me hot French Press coffee at the Hedgehog Repair Shop and Sizzle has a plate of bacon at the ready, all gifts given from the heart.

a sunset ride to the Trash Fence

Drifts by Michael Christian

Ichthyosaur Puppet Project by Jerry Snyder

Gifting is one of the most important of the 10 Principals. Gifts given freely, without expectation of return, without barter, without money. We gift to our camp by cooking, washing dishes, contributing our time and our resources to make it all possible. We have our Rumor Camp coffee stand in the afternoon, calling out “Iced Coffee” to passers who do a “Playa U-turn” to enjoy a cup of cold-press coffee and a home-made biscotti and perhaps stay and talk for a while.

Mens Amplio by Don Cain–at night the lights were controlled through an EEG headset

The Cradle of “Mir” by a group of Russian artists

The Cradle of “Mir”

Going to Burning Man shakes the cobwebs out of my head. It gives me the confidence to push myself further and harder in my work. It’s a great break from being a mom, managing schedules and making sure everyone gets fed and their homework done. It’s a recharge for my relationship with my husband. It’s fun, and crazy, and sometimes it’s hard.

Coyote by Bryan Tedrick

the burning of The Man

And the beauty is, my Burning Man is completely different and also the same as the other 60,000 attendee’s experience.

Here are a few photos to enjoy. I’ve cited the artist and title of the piece where I’ve been able to find it.

a detail of Truth is Beauty by Marco Cochrane

Truth is Beauty by Marco Cochrane being filmed by a balloon drone

my Burning Woman banner at Rumor Camp

Church Trap by Rebekah Waites

Truth is Beauty can be seen at night behind a double helix light sculpture

Photo Chapel by Mike Garlington

Barbara’s big design wall and work tables

Barbara’s industrial sewing machine and some of her bookshelves

A few weeks ago I took a trip South on I-5 to visit Barbara Lee Smith in her studio in Gig Harbor. We have met several times over the years and I’ve always admired her work. She recently spoke at CQA about Journeys. She posited that journeys not only inspire us to make art but also that the journey we take to the studio itself is the first step in making. Because her work is so steeped in a sense of place, I really wanted to see where she works. She graciously extended an invitation to me to visit.

Wow, did I develop a strong case of studio envy! Her space is large and bright with lots of windows that bring the natural beauty inside. There are high ceilings, a design wall about 18 feet wide and space to get back to look at the work from a distance. The storage is well thought out, there is very little visual clutter, and there are big bookshelves loaded with inspiration.

a small selection of Barbara’s books

And, oh, that view. The studio is set into the hillside with high clerestory windows letting in the green of the surrounding trees in the back and opening onto a spectacular view of the water and their gorgeous modern home in the front. Unfortunately, you’ll just have to imagine it because I didn’t get any good pictures.

I wonder how my work would be different if I worked in a studio like Barbara’s. In my younger days I house sat for friends when they were out of town. A couple of these houses had amazing views. I know that my life had a larger feeling of expansiveness when I spent time looking out at the horizon every day. I rarely watched tv or even read, just sat and watched the light change and the clouds move across the sky. I love living in the city, I’m really am an urban creature, but I’m also drawn to nature and specifically, the water.

some small items for inspiration

An old friend of Barbara’s, Sue Pierce, is living in Seattle part-time and she rode down with me. I prowled around the studio while they caught up on old times. Barbara showed us some of her newest work and asked for our opinions on format, color, and composition. She seemed thirsty for feedback. I guess the downside of all that space is the lack of an artistic community and the dialogue that artists share about our work.

another view of the studio

paper storage

Although I am definitely jealous of Barbara’s space and beautiful location, I think I would get lonely living out there. I keep my schedule busy meeting friends, going to shows, working with my interns, and lunch with my studio-mates, and of course my family life. We all have to find our right situation to create. Mine depends on the inspiration I find in nature but also community and the pace of city life.

I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about studios and spaces and it was delightful to get an inside look at Barbara’s. My only wish is that we had more time to talk “art talk.” Barbara has a much wider experience of the fiber art world than I do. I’d love to “pick her brain” and hear more about her views. I sincerely hope this is just the beginning of a long friendship with a conversation that is measured in years, not hours.

It’s Summer. Aaah!

It’s festival season and my studio work has slowed way down. I’m still puttering away but not working on any big projects. I am working on the dyeing for an installation in Bellevue but I don’t have an install date, yet. As soon as I get a date I’ll light the burner, but for now, I’m enjoying the sunshine and time with my kids.

We head off to the Oregon Country Fair tomorrow. We’ve been going for many years as part of the Ambiance Crew. I love the Fair and it’s my great pleasure to care take a park there. It’s not a park in any traditional sense. It’s more of an outdoor living room filled with art. It’s a spot where people can relax and take a break, even a snooze, before heading back onto the path for shows, delicious food, and beautiful crafts for sale.

The Solstice Parade was the start of our festival Summer. Country Fair is next and we’ll be at Burning Man over Labor Day weekend. Throw in a camping trip to Orcas Island and a family trip to the Pennisula and it’s a full Summer.

I’ll find a little studio time here and there before September but there may only a few posts here.

Until then, enjoy the sunshine!

Don’t Forget The Alamo

Just one more post about the SDA Conference in San Antonio before I get back to updates about my studio work. Although the Conference schedule was very full, I did manage to get out of the hotel to explore San Antonio a little. Of course, I had to go to The Alamo and, no, PeeWee’s bicycle was nowhere to be seen.

Along the Riverwalk, San Antonio

The Riverwalk was just half a block from the hotel. Near us it was a lovely, quiet place for a walk but closer to downtown it was hopping. It was artificial, but not in an unpleasant way, and reminded me of something you’d see in Disneyland. The Texas-flavored Art Deco architecture was a treat to see and I actually enjoyed the heat and humidity. I’m finally getting old enough that it feels good to my middle-aged bones.

Of course, the biggest reason I attend conferences is for the face-to-face networking. Networking doesn’t have to be a bad word. Where else can I be in a crowd of 250 people who speak the same language? I love to meet other people who are as excited about working in fibers as I am. It’s the unplanned moments: the spur of the moment dinner invitations, hearing artists talking informally about their work, and the late nights in the hotel bar that break down borders and create friendships.

And the best part was my roomies, Marci and Amanda. There was a lot of laughing going on late into the night in room 1627.

The next SDA Conference will be June 15-21, 2015 in Tulsa, Oklahoma and, even though Oklahoma is a tough sell, I know where I’ll be.

Amanda, me, and Marci at the Fashion Show

Naomi Wanjiku Gakunga talking about her show to Otto von Busch and another conference attendee.

dinner with Seattle pals Sharon and Barbara and new friend Lindsay

Her Secret Is Patience, Janet Echelman, Phoenix, Arizona

I returned from the SDA Conference in San Antonio over a week ago and I’m still synthesizing the information. No wonder, over the course of four days I attended presentations from fifteen artists and educators. I was inspired to try new things, to think deeply about why I make, and challenged to expand the scope of my work.

Janet Echelman’s talk, Taking Imagination Seriously, started the conference with her personal story of not only following inspiration, but the persistence and collaboration necessary to create her large-scale public art. (You can watch her TED talk of the same name here.) She emphasized how important it has been for her to treat each step of creating these enormous sculptures as a problem to be solved and not to back down when those problems seemed overwhelming. From mechanizing knotting techniques she learned from Indian fishermen, to developing software that can model how her sculpture will respond in a hurricane winds, to working with a conflicted City Council in Phoenix, she worked through each problem by asking questions and keeping at it until it was resolved. The audience was responsive to both the textile sensibility of her work and her lack of pretension, jumping to their feet at the end of her talk in a standing ovation. I get goose bumps even now thinking of the last words of her talk. When showing images of a project that is currently in process she said, “You can’t see this yet, it’s only an idea. But you will.”

I relate to this need for clarity and focus in my own work, to the state of holding an image in my mind until it is realized in its physical form. Making art is an act of faith. By holding tightly to the image of a finished piece, it can manifest into a physical object through persistence and hard work.

The most dynamic speaker at the conference was Otto von Busch. (Watch a you tube video called Hacking Design here.) His presentation, Interfaces of Fashion Activism, was a call to “Hacktivism,” rethinking the fashion industry through social activism. He proposes that fashion kills personality by proscribing what we wear and turning consumers into commodities. His work with students and designers uses craft as a tool for change through recycling and refashioning what we wear as an element of self-expression and as a way to create social bonds.

In a rush of words, Von Busch told of his many compelling projects including: Old is the New Black, in which people used black paint to transform stained garments at an event called Paint It Black; Neighborhoodies, a project in which students created garments in response to where they live and then were photographed while wearing them in their neighborhoods; and Community Repair, in which students bartered with others in their neighborhood to repair a garment and, in doing so, created a richer social fabric. “Mending is self-reliance,” he said when talking about Refuge in Restoration, a project at California College of the Arts where participants repaired garments by patching over worn places. Each patch was taken from the garment of another participant, thus creating a bond through both giving and receiving, mending both the social and physical fabric of their lives. More information on these and other exciting and inspiring projects can be found on his website, Self Passage.

heart shaped circuit board from Lynne Bruning’s talk

Along with presentations by the Featured Speakers, there were smaller, concurrent sessions. Two talk I enjoyed were by Mo Kelman and Lynne Bruning. Mo Kelman’s talk, Skins and Skeletons: 3-D Textile Constructions, was a interesting and deeply researched survey of textile construction techniques across genres from Japanese kites, through fiber art, and into architecture. Lynne Bruning’s irreverent and approachable style provided a welcome break from the seriousness of many of the presentations as she gave us a tour of circuits and electronics in Welcome to the eTextile Lounge.

Changing Waters, Nathalie Miebach

The conference was closed by Nathalie Miebach‘s talk, Baskets, Graphs, and Numbers: Making Information Tactile. (Watch a TED talk by her here.) Miebach’s work uses basketry to create three-dimensional representations of weather data. I had seen images of her work but have always been distracted by the bright colors and swirling shapes and not sure how to interpret the data they represent. Her talk explained how she begins with a basic grid of reed that represents the 24 hours of the day and then builds the shape, adding different colors and weaves of reed to represent data such as temperature, wind speed, and ocean currents over time. The polymorphic shapes of the baskets are created by the data, not the whims of the sculptor, with sticks and spokes representing the phases of the moon, the height of waves, or the time of sunrise.

Miebach began her presentation by talking about the importance of play as a means of exploration and learning, citing research on early childhood development as well as her own experience. Play engages the imagination, not only in free-associative story-telling, but also through the proscribed rules of sports and games. I’ve found this to be true in my own work. Often, it is while working within limitations or “rules”, that my imagination is set free. I also related to Miebach’s statement that she “thinks with her hands.” I discovered in design school that I can’t think without a pencil in my hands. Miebach opined that because we now interact so much with computers, we are losing a kind of “tactile intelligence.” For millenia, we have learned through manipulating objects. How much are we losing by embracing the technical and limiting our experience with the physical?

tactile maps from Greenland

Miebach’s baskets are tactile maps of data. She explained how maps are structures for clarifying knowledge. She showed images of two historical tactile maps, one a stick map from the Marshall Islands and the other a map of the coast of Greenland. Both of these were “read” using touch, rather than the eyes. She also showed several maps of contemporary information, including a network of the internet. These new graphs show information interpreted in interwoven networks, rather like baskets. These networks more accurately describe concurrent information than the more traditional hierarchical forms of graphing information like the “family tree.”

Miebach explained that she creates tactile maps because, ultimately, our experience of weather is tactile. We can read the weather report, or watch graphs on the TV news, but our most literal understanding of weather is experiential. Miebach offhandedly pointed out that folklore is all about weather. Our childhood tales tell of desperate attempts to survive long winters, earthquakes, or epic floods. Extreme weather creates a sense of disorientation, of child-like fear of forces outside our control. Miebach’s colorful whirls and fanciful shapes give us information in a reimagined manner, much like the fairy tales of our youth taught us the rules for playing the game of life.

Changing Waters, detail

And as Miebach’s closing statement asks, “Where does the art begin and the science end?” Or conversely, where does the science end and the art begin?

1803 Studios with prayer flags by Sharon Rowley

I just got back from a convention of Surface Design Association in San Antonio, Texas. It was inspiring and exhausting. There were so many new people, so many ideas, and so much art to see in such a short time. I made some wonderful contacts and had a lot of fun. I think I will be synthesizing it for some time to come.

I’m going to break up my impressions of the conference into several blog posts so it’s not too overwhelming. On the first day I attended a Fiber Tour of Jane Dunnewold’s studio, the McNay Museum, and the Witte Museum’s collection of Fiesta dresses.

Jane Dunnewold

gleaming stainless tables and large industrial sinks at Jane’s studio

I really enjoyed seeing Jane’s new teaching space, 1803 Studios. She purchased a Victorian house and has fixed it up as a dry studio and classroom space. She built a new wet studio in the back with a large deck, big sinks, stainless steel tables, washer/dryer, and 20 foot long printing table. I have serious studio envy!

The future ain’t what it used to be, by Lisa Hoke at the McNay Art Museum

The future ain’t what it used to be, detail

Second stop was the McNay Art Museum. I really liked the piece in the Reception Hall by Lisa Hoke, “The future ain’t what it used to be.” It was a huge wall covered with a collage of packaging and other disposable paper products. The work was both a joyous composition of color and pattern and a reminder of the waste that is generated in our consumer culture.

the inner courtyard at the McNay Museum

Vision Catcher, by Lesley Dill

Part of the McNay Art Museum is housed in the original Spanish Colonial Revival house of Mrs. McNay. It’s a beautiful example of that style of architecture. I felt like I was in an old western and Tyrone Power was going to climb in through the window. The collection was interesting, kind of a mish mash like most personal collections, but with some very nice pieces. I enjoyed the exhibition, Majority Rules: A Decade of Contemporary Art Acquisitions, that included pieces by Lesley Dill, Roger Shimomura, Vik Muniz, and Chakaia Booker among others.

The last stop was the Witte Museum to see a collection of Fiesta dresses. It was a room of large-scale, highly embellished dresses celebrating the theme of Patriotism and Pageantry: Honoring the Military. Unfortunately, the plan to take us behind to the scenes to see their large collection of stored dresses was scuttled because of the flooding San Antonio had the week before we all arrived. Too bad because the exhibit was a little weak in my opinion.

I did enjoy the day, though. I got to ride around on the bus with my bud Marci McDade, meet some new people, and see a little of San Antonio, but calling it a fiber tour was a stretch. Although I enjoyed the McNay and they had a few fiber-based pieces in the collection, it was difficult to make a direct connection. A curated tour would have helped. And there just wasn’t enough at the Witte to make the visit worthwhile to me. I don’t regret going, I had fun and saw some interesting stuff, but it was a little disappointing.

Fiesta Dress