By A Lady

A kind friend sent me a yummy book. WACK!, the exhibition on in the Vancouver Art Gallery left me wanting to find out more about what women artists were doing in Canada over that time period and then this book arrived in the post.
One of the reviewers, Robert Fulford, wrote, "Maria Tippet reveals in By a Lady that the tradition of women's art in Canada is far richer than most of us ever imagined. Her book makes an important contribution to our understanding of Canadian art."
The title comes from how people in the C19th referred to a work of art by a woman.

Tyndall Stone Wall

I am making a Tyndall Stone wall.

I have prepared my palette, just as Julia Caprara says to do. Torn strips of fabric...

..lengths of thick yarns, tapes, ribbons & threads are ready for building up in layers on the burlap base. I have 3 stone blocks under way. I'm not sure how many I will need to make a wall.
I'm now thinking the title should be something like 'Walls Talk'.

'Costume In Detail'

I just received this yummy book in the mail & I have already spent several hours dipping into it.

Nancy Bradfield obviously loves costume because it shows in the inspiring, detailed drawings she has made of the outside & inside of hundreds of garments & accessories. Most of them have never been seen by the public and never will because they are too delicate or are disintegrating.
Most of the earliest costumes are drawn from a cache she discovered in the basement of Westminster Abbey on wax effigies beside the owner's tomb.
The drawings are so detailed they are an 'invaluable source of information for those concerned with fashion, with period dress, with history, and with theatre, film, or TV.'
ISBN 0-89676-217-3

Vancouver Art Gallery, The Revolution - What Revolution?

I have been thinking about the exhibition Wack! and why the time period it covers, 60s & 70s, is called a revolution in the art world. Though not all of the art world. The art historian, Robert Hughes has the view 'The 1970s, a time that evokes little nostalgia in the art world today, went by without leaving a "typical" art behind' (The Shock of the New p.364). He must have spent his days in white cube galleries over this time period. Or he defines art as a work in oils or acrylic painted on a regular shaped canvas. Anything else doesn't fit his definition of 'high/fine' art.

The 2 floors of the Vancouver Art Gallery, here, are full of works in a myriad of media with only a hint of the smell of oil. What work there is in oil/acrylic and worked traditionally on canvas is macro views of the human form such as Joan Semmel's work, or photo realistic/personal memento still lifes of Audry Flack and Jacqueline Fahey, all pushing the boundaries of 'real' art.

Sylvia Sleigh's Turkish Bath is a parody of the long popular nude harem fantasy subject of male artists. Sylvia's wicked sense of humour is even more apparent when one learns the men depicted are all art historians of the day. There also 2 versions of her regular model. After all, if she is painting him as an object, just as nude women have been painted for centuries, then her male object can be reproduced as many times as she wants to only she doesn't follow the rules by putting her multiple copies of her object in the same painting.

WACK! Art & the Feminist Revolution

I went to this exhibition in Vancouver last weekend. Vancouver is its 4th and last stop in its North American tour. I recommend you go to it if you are in the area before it ends January 18th, 2009.
It is a huge exhibition covering 2 floors of the Vancouver Art Gallery. For me it was a thrill to see works I had only looked at in books. The real thing is such a different experience. The air crackles with strong emotion and the political voices of the women who were part of a social revolution.
On the 2nd floor there are a lot of Canadian artists, which I was relieved to see because all of my reading for the current module I am studying has been about European and American women artists. So the revolution was happening north of the border too. My ignorance supports Martha Rosler's comments that the "lessons of the feminist movement have been contained and particularized."
Martha's work Hot House (Harem) is on the cover of the exhibition catalogue (see above).

Progress with Stitching

I am adding on the 2nd layer to this Tyndall stone work by weaving in a variety of thick yarns & tapes. I want to show fossil/organic shapes that are preserved in the stone as record of the physical past -the 'stitched in stone' idea.
I also want to record the social history of Winnipeg, when people arrived and stayed while they 'outfitted' before continuing their journey west to their new homesteads. I am including materials that are reminders of what these homesteaders may have taken with them. I have woven in torn strips of bedsheets, felted wool yarns to suggest woollen blankets, women's head scarves, also Indonesian batik & Indian cotton to reference the different cultures that made up the population of the city.
With these 2 ideas going through my head as I work I haven't come up with a title yet that pulls them both together.

Good News Re Julia's Books

Avril, a member of our BA(Hons) Embroidered Textiles group, posted a comment on my last post that is such good news. Through Alex's work we can look forward to learning more from Julia in the future. Thanks for the good news, Avril.
Now I have the goal to get through all of the projects in 'Exploring Colour' before the next in the series is published.

Exploring Colour by Julia Caprara

Yahoo! My copy of Julia's new book has arrived and it is as inspirational as everyone says it is. It is really a workbook to keep you learning about colour for years to come. I have already got the sketchbook to begin the first Colour School project. I am going to do a study of my favourite colour - a warm blue.
The saddest part of the book is the last sentence Julia wrote,
'I hope that you will have found these chapters useful in mapping your own route for your personal colour journey and will join me again in the future to explore the next stage along the Path of Colour.'
I guess we will all have to continue on our paths on our own. But if we take this book along I am sure it will continue to be an inspiration.

Julia Caprara's Funeral

It was Julia's funeral yesterday. On and off, all day, I was thinking of her, her family and all of their friends and how sad they must be feeling. It has been a help to me to get stuck into some stitching, particularly when this new work is in Julia's buttonhole textile technique.

I have worked the first layer of torn fabric strips and lightly felted wool by weaving into a burlap backing. The late afternoon sun has made it look a bit yellower than it is in reality.

I have assembled the palette for the next layer which will be thick yarns threaded through loops of the first layer. The photograph is my inspiration - a fossil in a chunk of Tyndall stone.

Julia Caprara's Buttonhole Textile

I found some more images of the work I posted yesterday. This close up shows the work with the 3rd layer - the buttonhole stitch starting to be built up.

The buttonhole stitch works to blend and highlight specific areas of the textile.

This is another work using Julia's technique. It is a Rockies scene where fireweed is colonising an alluvial deposit. I still need to work in more of the buttonhole stitched flowers before it is finished.

Julia Caprara's Stitching Techniques

Back in 2005 Quilting Arts Magazine featured a series of articles written by Julia Caprara. In the Winter issue, Julia wrote about the importance of all textile students building their own personal "touch palette". Since reading the article, I have followed Julia's advice and used the technique she described as "painting with fabric, thread, and stitches".

This work, called The Day the Queen Came to Tea, has the 2 outer panels worked in Julia's technique to give the feel of what Baffin Island valleys, in Northern Canada, look like in the fall. One early explorer recorded the valleys had the richness of a Persian carpet.

Torn strips of fabric were woven into an open-weave burlap to make the first layer of the textile.

Next, thicker yarns, cords and ribbons are threaded through the woven fabric to make the next 1 or 2 layers.

Then finer threads are worked in buttonhole stitch to make another layer. As the final layer I attached shisha mirrors to this work. [Mirrors to represent the tarns (glacial lakes) and the mirrors the Elizabethans traded with the Inuit that remained after the visitors left.]
In her article, Julia explains how a stitcher can change all of the variables to get many different effects. It is an exciting technique to play around with.

Maggie's Interview with Julia Caprara

I have just reread the interview Maggi Grey did with Julia Caprara in her Workshop on the Web e-zine, May 2007. It is such a good interview. You can hear Julia's enthusiasm and zest for life as she talks.

It hints at all of the things Julia was involved in. The background of her and her husband, Alex's setting up of the Opus School of Textile Arts is most interesting. With Julia's typically gentle spirit what doesn't come across is the influence she and Alex have had on the lives of literally hundreds and hundreds of textile students over the years.

A valuable section of the interview is where Maggie asks Julia to explain how she goes about curating and hanging the huge annual Prism exhibition in the Mall Galleries in London. Maggie is right, Julia's answer was inspirational to anyone involved in displaying art work.
Thanks Maggie for this lovely memory of Julia.

These images for Julia are from a trip I made to India, earlier this year. If you would like to see more, click on Lesley's Galleries at the top right to get into my public web albums.