New Adventures with Felt Wallhangings

I love trying new things! I've done some experimenting before with shibori tying felt and adding on prefelt, but thought I would try creating some different types of relief on a 2 dimensional felt surface. 

In this one called 'Breakup', I overlaid the light blue felt and tucked in edges and stitched in some ridges to create  relief.

In 'Something's Fishy' I created the fish in prefelt and used resists to keep the fins from attaching to the background felt. 

A bit of 'stuffing' inside the fish created a quilted quality when stitched. The eyes are slices of felted marbles made from concentric circles of different colours.

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Felt Pillow - Commemorating Canada's 150th Birthday

In an earlier Post about designing a commemorative pillow, I provided some pictures of its development and the inspiration. Here it is ... done!

It certainly was fun creating the landscape. It took a lot of thought and effort to pull it together into a finished piece. The buttons came from deer antler shed on our property.

One of the challenges was that I had to felt the piece to a much harder state than I would normally do for a wall hanging. As it continued to shrink the definition faded. Consequently there was much more stitching to regain detail. Lots of fun, but awkward to do on a pillow.

Back to School Update: Painting 223 - Methods and Methodology

One more painting class under my belt last Fall! As I have ranted before - for those of you who are not familiar with many of the contemporary art schools - painting classes are not about learning or refining technique, but about concepts and how to best relay them using a variety of media. Not surprisingly, as a second year course, we were required to experiment with different techniques and media.

Our first project was about consumption and, after doing several studies, I decided to try something completely different.  We have one of the most beautiful waste transfer sites in our community and I chose a view of a series of bins placed in what looks like a countdown. I decided to use "media" that would be going into the transfer site so ... this is a piece painted with garbage on the backside of an old art school project. Coffee grounds, egg, spinach, beets, burnt match sticks and anything else that was left over from supper went into this one. Enough said!

The second project was to be inspired by a quote about Andy Warhol by Mathew Collins (This is Modern Art). "Warhol was a genius but he was a new type of genius. He was a genius at expressing what it felt like not to be sure what you felt at all ... He wrote books, made movies, produced records and painted paintings. A lot of it wasn't good, but he looked at a wasteland and said this is modern art, and it was."
The final product is different than my original plan. The beige panel was to be a wall with a drawing mannequin looking through a window into a surrealist background. My instructor really encouraged me to push and experiment with minimalism so I focused on contrasting the minimalist wall with other elements. I expect to go back into this one and do more on it - maybe add the drawing mannequin.

In the next project, the instructor assigned each of us an artist to research and gain inspiration from. Sure enough, he assigned me Brice Marden who is a Minimalist and Post-Minimalist painter. I credit minimalism from completely turning my youthful self off art in the 60's and 70's so this felt like the worst kind of deja vu. However, after voicing my opinion, I chose to stick with him and I did find his later line work more interesting and inspiring. I have been experimenting for some time with combining painting with felt making. These pieces were experiments with creating pre-felts and drawing lines on them with various acrylic paint mediums. I cut out the line figures of two of the them and then further felted them. Lessons learned - it is really challenging to keep the paint from disintegrating or breaking off during the felting process so I probably won't do this one again.


"Neighbourhood" was our next project and I decided to experiment with photo transfer on stretched canvas. I used photos that I have taken of the amazing wild life that shares my back yard. I am not overly happy with this piece, but am happy with what I learned and plan to use the technique in the future.

The final project was about mass-communication and consumption. This piece became about process and the amount of branding and advertising we are exposed to. I have a stash of old tractor feed paper that I thought would work well to create a large number of logo rubbings and quick sketches. I went around my car and house to do rubbings on anything with an embossed logo. I expected a lot, but it was alarming (if you want a shock, check out the number of logos there are on your car). Next, I sat down for one hour of television and did a sketch for each ad. What was I thinking? I ended up with a "Black Box" spewing out a frightening amount of sketches of advertising images that I encountered in very short period of time.

Back to School Update: Art History 210 - Visual Arts Modernism

I'd been looking forward to taking an Art History course in Modernism last Fall with mixed feelings. It was a huge amount of work but I really enjoyed it and learned more than I anticipated. I came away with a much better understanding and appreciation of Modernism.

Our instructor gave us a fun bonus assignment at the end of term to create two self portraits reflecting Modernism movements.

The first one drew on the concepts of Synthetic Cubism. It was made from found objects from my studio. The intent was to make the image as flat as possible but with interesting figure/ground effects (e.g. the eyes).











The second, entitled "My Morning Coffee" references the Gutai movement - a post-war Japanese movement which rejected traditional mark-making with a brush and moved towards performance art.This piece references one of the predominant contemporary North American rituals (and a personal vice) –  coffee drinking. It utilizes an unusual medium (coffee grounds). It is about the body and action rather than the final product. As I proceeded making marks I realized that I could not recall ever signing my name with my feet, so the piece became about that. Finally, it was a lot of fun, albeit very messy.

Back to School Update: Fibre 213 - Cloth Dyeing and Painting

Well ... here it is almost time to start school again and I haven't updated from last year. It was a great and busy year (too busy making, showing and travelling to write about it!). I took three classes last Fall which worked out very well.

Fibre 213 was a wonderful course that I would highly recommend. The instructor, Bill Morton, is knowledgeable and motivating in the best possible way. We worked with many techniques including eco dyeing, rust dying, painting onto silk, shibori indigo dyeing, vat dyeing, etc. etc.

After producing volumes of practice fabric, we had two final projects due that required using multiple techniques to produce large scale finished products. I decided that this would be a good opportunity to make use of a stash of beautiful fabric remnants that I inherited from my Mom. I was originally planning to make a wall hanging, but in the end chose to create an installation entitled "Metaphor for Memory." There were many smiles and tears while working with these fabrics that brought back so many memories.

Much to my surprise, I grew to love shibori tying and made a beach ensemble for my second project, dyeing and discharging a printed fabric with bleach and then further tying and over-dyeing it with indigo. A rust dyed piece and two silk scarves can also be seen in the photo.