Category Archives: Workshops

Dyeing with Mandy Greer

On Saturday I was a visiting artist at The Project Room, a multi-disciplinary arts space. Mandy Greer is doing a seven week residency there and invited me to come and do a dye day with her.

mandy Mandy’s an amazing fiber artist using crochet to create site-specific installations. Her work is conceptually rich and deep and yet she uses very simple techniques. I’m really attracted to the way her work is tied in to community. Her materials are all donated to her. Working within a color theme, she uses donated fabrics, yarns and used clothing, tearing it into strips. Mandy also hosts open crochet parties where people can come in off the street and become participants in her process. She can teach people to crochet in 3 minutes or less and the simple strings of stitches they make get combined into multi-dimensional, complex, organic webs. She has worked with the Degenerate Art Ensemble and has done installations at the Bellevue Arts Museum, Museum of Contemporary Craft in Portland, and in outdoor settings including Camp Long.

Bellevue Arts Museum installation

Mandy and I met a few years ago when she was having a crochet party literally in the middle of the street during a block party in my neighborhood. We’ve kept in touch and I often give her my scraps that are too dear to toss and especially the strips that I cut off the edges of my pieces when I’m constructing them.

Mandy is doing the first residency at The Project Room, an arts space that is being curated by Jess Van Nostrand and is a space that is about art making as well as art viewing. The space has just opened but the basic premise is that over a twelve month period artists will be invited to work in or show in the space with an emphasis on an overriding question. This year’s question is “Why Do We Make?”

Mandy is using the space as a way to launch her next project which is being informed by an upcoming residency in Iceland. She is working with literary and folkloric inspirations.

So, why was I there?

Well, the easy answer is that Mandy has a bunch of white fabric that she wanted to turn into shades of gray for her project. The second part of that is that she is using this residency as a structure to bring artists in who she is interested in learning from. It was a pleasure to share my knowledge of dyeing with her and the other folks who came to participate. There’s not much I love better than geeking out over fabric dyeing and they were a very receptive audience. We talked about low-water immersion dyeing, about the chemistry of dyeing cellulose versus protein fibers, about dyeing with mixed colors especially blacks, and simple shibori techniques that give complex patterning all the while looking at and fondling samples. Then we spent some time dyeing. Fun was had.

I can’t wait to go back by and see how our dyeing washed out. I’ll be giving a talk at The Project Room this Thursday evening as part of the Capitol Hill Arts Blitz. Come by the space at 1315 East Pine. Mandy will be having a crochet party from 5-8pm and I’ll be giving my talk at 6pm. It’ll be pretty casual, I’ll mostly be bringing some samples to look at and answering questions, but I’ll also spend some time talking about my process and “Why I Make.” I hope to see you there!

mandygreer3

Teaching in Philly!

I recently found out that my proposal to teach a workshop at the 2012 SAQA/SDA Conference in Philadelphia was accepted! Woo hoo! The title is “Beyond the Surface: Sculptural Explorations with Soft Materials” and it will be a sculpture class. More details to follow.

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

Workshop with Jane Dunnewold

I just got back from a week-long workshop with Jane Dunnewold at the Pacific Northwest Art School in Coupeville, Washington. Jane, whether she knows it or not, has been my mentor since I discovered her first book in 2001, Complex Cloth. She is an innovator in the field of surface design and is ever researching new techniques and continually updating her methods as materials change and improve. I have all of her books including her newest, Art Cloth, and refer to them often. Suffice it to say, I’m a big fan.

I took a workshop about four years ago from Jane on printing with thickened dye. I learned a lot and applied it immediately to my work and my teaching, where it has become a big part of my practice. This workshop though, on layering techniques with dyes and paint, didn’t seem like it would have as much new material for me. I decided to go for it anyway because I’ve been wanting to take a class for a while now to have time to get away and work with different focus. I also knew from my previous workshop with Jane that there would be plenty of lessons beyond technique. Jane’s critical eye for composition, her way of relating material to students through relationships, her depth and breadth of knowledge, and her warmth and humor are all part of the workshop experience.

Swatches after two dye baths

The concept of this class was to create art cloth through creating multiple layers of dye and paint. We worked on small, swatch-sized pieces of fabric to be able to try many combinations. We manipulated fabric and dyed as many as three layers on a single piece of cloth. We created tools including stamps and stencils. We worked with various temporary resists on fabric and on silk screens. We worked with paint on the dyed fabrics using the tools and resists. Students made beautiful, complex pieces (and I made a few complete dogs which you will not see here.)

Jane has replaced the use of discharge in her personal work because of health and safety concerns. She uses paints to mimic what she used to do with discharge. She did demonstrate using chlorine bleach as a discharge agent, stressing safety and telling several cautionary tales, because she said she’d rather people learned to use it safely than try it on their own without guidance. I’m not ready to give up discharge, but I took her stories seriously. Although I use safe practices in my work, it was good to reinforce the respect that should be given to the dangers that can lurk in misusing these chemicals.

It was important to keep up our strength during class.

A few times during the class I found myself thinking, “Well, that’s not the way I do it!” I had to laugh at myself and tell myself that I wasn’t there to do things my way, but to try something new. If I wanted to do it my way, I could stay home and work! The class was a great opportunity to try new things, to get out of my head, and to do some open ended exploration.

Along with the techniques, the big focuses of the class were on color theory and composition. Jane stresses creating a “color constant” for yourself matching the media you use to the color wheel. You can then teach yourself how to mix color using the pure color dyes and paints so that you are in control, rather than using the proprietary mixed colors sold by the dye and paint companies. I have to admit I love my mixed dyes. I test them fully and find them a great short cut for working with tertiary colors, but I understood her point. I’d like to spend some time in the studio this Fall working with blending tertiaries from pure colors. It’s something I’ve been wanting to do for a while.

For me, the most valuable part of the class was the time spent in critique sessions, analyzing color and design choices. Jane is amazing to watch in action, stressing that there are many answers to each question. It is up to the individual to identify the options, and then pick one based on objective rather than subjective analysis. In critique we can apply the same choices, analyzing objectively rather than responding to our “likes” or “dislikes.” Jane spent a morning identifying language and concepts to analyze these choices. It’s discussed in her new book and is definitely worth reading.

I was really pleased with the workshop. I came away with some nice samples, some new tool ideas, and some deep thinking to do about color. It was a great group of women and I enjoyed meeting new people and had a great time hanging out with my roomies. I definitely drank a lot of wine! But like any workshop, it will take many months to assimilate what I learned into my own work. That’s part of why I don’t take many classes. As much as I love Jane Dunnewold and her work, it’s not my work.

The rest of this long, long blog post is photos and descriptions of some of the swatches I did in the workshop. I documented each layer so that I could go back and trace what I did.

golden yellow with purple overdye

paint in complementary color stamped in overall pattern

Here are three swatches I did in the class, explained layer by layer.

On Monday I started by loosely gathering a piece of rayon and dyeing it with golden yellow.

Tuesday, I used rubber bands to make circles on it and overdyed it with a purple made with Mixing Red and Mixing Blue.

On Wednesday I created an all over pattern by stamping over the entire piece with a complementary color.

paint applied through flour resist screen

On Thursday I used a silk screen I had created by scratching a pattern through flour resist on the screen to print orange stripes across the grid made by the registered stamps.

And on Friday I added a large scale element to add a focal point using the purple of the background.

large scale image added in background color

dyed mixing red and boysenberry

overdyed with rust

I started this second swatch by twisting the fabric and then dyeing it in the Mixing Red.

Tuesday, I twisted it again and overdyed it in Boysenberry, a red violet pure color I haven’t used before.

I thought that was pretty bright and not my color scheme so I put rubber band circles on it and overdyed it a third time in rust, a color mixed with Boysenberry and Golden Yellow.

On Thursday morning I covered it with a flour paste resist. Once that dried I crackeled it and painted over it with thinned black acrylic paint. I’m pretty happy with it now.

For the third sample I started on Monday with a piece of mercerized cotton broadcloth which I loosely pleated and dyed turquoise.

I didn’t get much texture from the manipulation so on Tuesday I folded it diagonally and overdyed it Rust.

That wasn’t very interesting either so on Wednesday I flag folded it and put rubber bands around the corners, then overdyed it with Mixing Blue.

Well, that was getting somewhere! I then used an chrystallographic design of scattered elements and printed with complements using stamps in a bright value of the complement, stencils in a darker value, and finished it by printing my flour paste silk screen in a medium value. You can’t go wrong with orange stripes!

SDA/SAQA Reinvention Conference

I recently attended Reinvention, a conference cosponsored by the Surface Design Association and Studio Art Quilts Association at San Francisco State University. It was my first chance to attend a national conference, and was a great opportunity to meet members of both organizations from outside Washington state. Attendees heard from museum directors and artists their viewpoints about the role of fiber in the art world. And personally, it inspired me to do some hard thinking about my own work.

The conference started with keynote speaker Marci McDade, editor of Fiberarts Magazine, who gave an overview of current fiber exhibitions. Other presenters that day represented museums. Jane Przybysz (pronounced “Prizbee”), of the San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles, brought a historical perspective to the question of “What is Fiber Art?” drawing heavily from the book, String, Felt, Thread: the Hierarchy of Art and Craft Through Fiber. Jill D’Alessandro, of the de Young Museum, described the evolution of the Textile Department of the museum.

Stefano Catalani, of the Bellevue Arts Museum, gave a presentation called “Reinvention or Reassertion?: Fiber Art and the Contemporary Identity Discourse.” This presentation was a standout for me because of the artists’ work he showed and because he put their artwork into context by telling the artists’ personal history. He focused the theme of reinvention by highlighting work of three artists who have “reasserted” themselves through the lens of their artwork, Dinh Q Le, Ed Pien, and Mandy Greer. Although each of these artists works in different materials and content, each approaches media from a grounding in culture. Craft is, in each case, a functional part of the meaning.

Later in the day the panelists participated in a question and answer session. The question that caused the most heated discussion was a theory put forth by an audience member that quilt artists are marginalized by their media. The panel’s response was that any media can be successful as long as artists are intentional about how they use it. Mastery and technique do not make the artist; rather they are applicable only in the way that they convey the meaning of the artwork.

Saturday’s sessions started with a dynamic panel of emerging artists: Mung Lar Lam, Lacey Jane Roberts, and Bren Ahearns, moderated by Victor De La Rosa, head of the textiles department at SFSU. Each of the artists works in fiber as a way of addressing gender politics. Mung Lar Lam’s work includes her “Ironings” series in which she performs the act of ironing in an exhibition setting, creating sculptural work by pressing creases into cloth. The performative aspect of the work provides context and a way for the viewer to engage through observation and discussion with the artist. Lacey Jane Roberts knits her artwork using a Sparkle Barbie Knitting Machine, incorporating ideas of gender assignment for children and definitions of craft. Lacey has created barbed wire fences, knitting both the wire of the fence and a pink yarn covering. Her work asks many questions including “Who is being excluded?” and “Who is locked away?” Bren Ahearn uses stitch as a way to question definitions of gender and sexuality, crosstitching “manmade” onto samplers, and stitching images of men cage fighting, bringing the homoerotic nature of this macho sport out into the open for reconsideration in another media.

A panel on environmental art, an historical look at the magazine American Craft, and a talk by four experienced “elders” in fiber rounded out the day. Michael Rohde, a weaver for over thirty-five years, talked about his process and evolution in the craft, moving from his work exploring colorways and pattern to more thematic work. Consuelo Jimenez Underwood, a Latina artist whose life story is as fascinating as her work, talked of finding her voice in political art. Throughout the conference, panels discussed themes including “Art vs. Craft”, messy art vs. mastery in craft, and the perceived disrespect of quilts, and other “women’s work”.

I learned of some upcoming opportunities to get involved in these national organizations. SAQA is looking for a Washington State representative; you may contact Pat Gould, the assistant executive director of SAQA, for more information, at patriciagould@msn.com. SDA is starting an Ambassador Program to get more people involved at the state level. We’ll hopefully be starting a small group of Seattle area SDA members. I’ll relay more information about that as it becomes available.

I would definitely recommend attending a national conference. I came away from the conference reinvigorated about my work. The overarching theme that resonated for me was the necessity of intentionality in art, whatever your media. I tend to work very intuitively, often not verbalizing themes and meaning in my work until it comes time to write an artist’s statement. My new resolve is to be more mindful in my work, bringing meaning to the forefront while (hopefully) still tapping into the intuitive choices I make.

Fiber Sculpture Class

Therese's prototype

This last weekend I taught an intensive at Pratt Fine Arts Center, Fiber in Three Dimensions. I was nervous because, although I’ve taught plenty of technique classes, this felt different. I wasn’t sure if I would be able to teach how to see and design in three dimensions. I had a terrific group of artists to work with, each with their own vision, each willing to try something new.

Susan's bowl

We started the first day with a slide show survey of fiber sculpture, beginning the conversation about designing in 3d and how to support your structure. Our first project, what I think of as a pinch pot, was a circle of fabric that we cut and overlapped to create dimension, adding structure through stitch. A very basic and simple technique, yet versatile and a good way to feel the transition between two- and three-dimensions and how quickly that can happen.

In the afternoon I showed a second slide show introducing my sculptural technique, a multipanelled piece using peltex as an inner layer to add structure. They started sketching their ideas with the plan of starting on patterning the next day.

Judy's piece

The next two days they spent drawing, patterning, and layering their pieces. Some people worked faster than others. As always, it would have been nice to have had more time to work. Only one person finished her piece, although she called said it was a prototype and had plans to embellish it further.

I felt it was a successful class, the samples all worked, the slide shows were helpful and well-received. Only one student had much experience with sewing, the others came from working in other media including jewelry and printmaking. Several of them were apprehensive about sewing at first but felt much more confident by the end of the weekend. One woman, a jeweller, had no confidence in her ability to sew and wasn’t sure she was going to stay. By the end of the class, she was talking about buying a sewing machine!

I’ll definitely teach this one again!

Susan's piece

Lisa's piece

Now What?

Now that I’ve finished the work for the Foster White show and had time for a breather, there’s the perennial question, “Now what?” It’s not a comfortable place to be as an artist, but something that must be muddled through. I usually spend this time cleaning my studio (I even washed the floor!), looking at books and magazines, and mentally pacing. I pick things ups, I put them down, nothing seems to fit. It’s a good time to try new techniques and make messes, not sure of where I’m heading.

I have a new class at Pratt coming up, Fiber in Three-Dimensions, so that gives me some focus. I’m trying some other ways of working in 3-d, some other structural materials that have been sitting on the shelf. I’m also doing some research on other artists sculpting in fiber. I also picked up a book at the library, Transparency in Textiles by Dawn Thorne, that’s got me thinking about revealing the space within.

And so I continue, picking things up, putting them down, until the next big thing reveals itself to me.

Working with Resist

Flour and potato dextrin resists

Teaching informs my work in multiple ways. First, I get inspired by the students’ enthusiasm. I also usually have some time while the students are working to work. This unstructured time allows me to experiment without an agenda. My prep time also gets me to delve deeper into techniques. I’ll be teaching a workshop on using resists for surface design later this month at Pratt and it’s kept me in the studio, delving away and as a result, influencing the pieces I’m currently working on for the Foster White show in February. It’s kind of a chicken and egg sort of thing.

Three pole wrapped shibori pieces

I’ve been doing a lot more shibori work, dyeing, pole wrapping, discharging and then overdyeing. I’ve also been working with organic resists, flour and potato dextrin. The potato dextrin is tricky, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. I tried it a few weeks ago and it worked pretty well. The potato dextrin gives a really interesting, characteristic cracked earth looking effect. So I tried it again last week and it totally failed, and on some pretty big pieces of fabric, too. Instead of drying and cracking, it simply caked over and was white and floury. I decided to go ahead and over dye it anyway, figuring even if I didn’t get the full crackle effect I would get something. And I hated the idea of just washing it all out and starting over. I ended up with some pretty interesting fabric, not exactly what I’d planned, but when does that ever happen?

potato dextrin on velvet

detail of flour and potato dextrin resist

Batik Workshop in Oregon

ocf1

In May I was invited to teach a batik workshop on the site of the Oregon Country Fair. I love the Fair and it was a great chance to meet people and pass on skills to people. Expect to see a lot more batiked silk in Chela Mela Meadows this year!

ocf2

Backdrop for Five Fingers of Fun