Being an Artist Outside the Studio and the Skills Required

Lesley, Lingrid, Laura, Louise

Opening Reception Dualities exhibition, Cre8ery Gallery website, Winnipeg

May 9 to 21, 2019

What began in the studio results in an exhibition with many steps and stages in between. 

Ingrid Lincoln standing by her work at the Opening Reception, May 9, 2019.

Nearly half, if not more of an artist's time is spent doing things other than making art.

Louise Lamb (r) talks about her work to a guest at the opening.

An artist has to like doing all of those other art related things to be able to get the work out of the studio and in front of the public.

 Using cutting, measuring and duct tape skills to make a shipping box.

One can buy shipping boxes from a number of different sources. It is time-consuming to track down the right sized box. If it is only just big enough there is not enough room for padding to protect the work. If the box is much bigger than the work the cost of shipping is more than it needs to be or it is too big and the company can't ship it.

I prefer to make my own boxes from recycled cardboard. Yes, I have been known to dumpster dive when I see large flattened boxes sticking out of a bin. I have a large collection of boxes, cardboard and recycled packing materials in my studio's packaging room.

The box needs to be made so it can be opened when it arrives at its destination then filled again and resealed ready for the return trip. Every piece of packing material needs to be named and I often add my email to the larger padding pieces and the box. Labels need to be printed for both journeys. 

The work in this box was in an exhibition until the day before I flew to Winnipeg for Dualities. I took the work with me on the plane. At the airport there was a hiccup - it was too big to go through the x-ray machine.

The box had to cut open, the work physically examined then returned to the box and resealed with special tape with words saying the box had passed inspection. With all of that, I forgot to ask for fragile stickers for the box. As it disappeared down the conveyor belt I wished it safe travels and hoped it would be unmodified when I saw it next.

Several weeks earlier I had shipped two large boxes of art to Ingrid's place in Winnipeg. While the smaller box was within the dimensions Canda Post will ship the larger one was not. I needed a courier. Previously I have successfully shipped large, heavy boxes at the lowest prices using Greyhound buses but that company no longer exists on the island. The new company is still setting up its parcel delivery services and is not yet fully automated. I found that and their new name, Box on a Bus, slightly unreassuring. However, all was well when all three boxes were safely in Ingrid's house waiting to be hauled to the gallery.

The next step was to get the boxes from the vehicle up to the second floor of the gallery.

This was a fun part because we got to use an ancient freight elevator. The Cre8ery Gallery is in the old Exchange District of Winnipeg where there are many buildings over 130 years old.

Bob (left), the gallery art installer and Bob (right) Ingrid's husband who has enviable woodworking skills, are manually operating the elevator working it to get its floor to stop in line with the building floor.

When the artwork, tools, and equipment are all in the gallery the installation can begin. This a stage requiring another whole set of different skills the artist needs to have mastered: agility and balance shimmying up and down a ladder, steady use of the hammer, a good eye for leveling or use of a level against the art, strength to repeatedly move plinths until they are in the right place, stamina to keep working steadily for however long it takes to get things perfect. Depending on the gallery the artist will hang their own work or there will be a curator. Cre8ery's owner, Jordan Millar is an experienced and well-qualified curator and installer and she has Bob to hang the work. Her decisions and Bob's experience made for a quick hang this time with 7 people working for 3 hours.

The promotion of an exhibition is another arena where the artist needs to have knowledge and develop skills. Image management, promotion materials design, and keeping up with effective social media developments are all time-consuming activities necessary for a successful exhibition.

If the artist is the exhibition's project coordinator, as Ingrid was for Dualities, there are a lot of administrative tasks including liaising with the artist group and the gallery staff.

I do enjoy all the activities required of an artist but I have to admit some days I wish they didn't keep me out of my studio for so many hours.

Dualities Exhibition at Cre8ery Gallery Winnipeg May 9 - 21, 2019

'Dualities' is the brainchild of Ingrid Lincoln. She invited three other artists to join her in expressing this concept: Laura Feeleus, Louise Lamb and me.

The four of us are exploring two very different geographical locations - the vast expanse of the Canadian prairies with its continental climate of extremes and native plant cover of prairie grasses contrasted with the Pacific Northwest coastal region with its moderated climate and native plant cover of vast rainforests. Yes, these are both big places.

Ingrid and Louise live in the middle of the vast Canadian prairie. Laura and I live on a forest covered island next to the vast Pacific Ocean. Louise grew up on this west coast but now lives in the prairie city of Winnipeg while Laura grew up in Winnipeg but now lives in Victoria on Vancouver Island. Ingrid's childhood began in the interior continent of Europe while mine began on another temperate forest-covered island in the southern hemisphere. These experiences of contrasts in place and geographic shifts are reflected in our distinctively different art practices. 

There is also a duality in the different media and techniques within our individual practices. For Laura, it is textiles and paper she paints and waxes. Ingrid's stitched textiles are often based on her drawings. Louise uses printing inks and paints while printmaking and referencing her photographs. I work with worn domestic textiles and organic processes adding hand and machine stitches. The resulting works explore the duality of media and place.

Laura - Laura's website here

Ingrid - Ingrid's website here

Louise Lamb

Lesley - Lesley's Gallery here

Another aspect of this duality concept involves how each of us approaches our work and the methods we have chosen to resolve an idea visually.

   As we explore the duality of our own geographical childhood memories and current homes we also visually express concepts either as internal or external dialogues. Imagine an X-axis geographical line intersecting with a Y-axis dialogue line forming four quadrants:

• coastal forest + internal self-talk - Laura
• coastal forest + external dialogue - Lesley
• continental grasslands + internal soliloquy - Ingrid
• continental grasslands + external conversations - Louise

 Ingrid’s work, while identified with the prairie city of Winnipeg, expresses her inner voice as a soliloquy. The conversation she holds with herself about her adopted city includes references to its people, the climate and the surrounding environment.
  Laura grew up in Winnipeg but now strongly identifies with the waters of Coastal B.C. Her art expresses a visual monologue between the two locations.
  Louise Lamb’s external conversations with her chosen materials and painting processes are influenced by her childhood home on the West Coast as well as her present home on the prairies.
 My textile work is firmly grounded in British Columbia’s maritime rainforests where I undertake external dialogues with the trees to develop a more intimate relationship with the place I currently call home. I reference childhood memories of growing up in New Zealand's temperate rainforest, an earlier home I knew well.

Each one of us intuitively works within a defined quadrant providing context for our work, which is highlighted by our different choices of media and processes.
We will be arriving at the Cre8ery Gallery, website here  to install our work together. We have never exhibited together before and not all of us has yet seen each other's work. I am really looking forward to searching for the commonality and duality in our individual bodies of work once it is up on Cre8ery's walls.  It is going to be so interesting to see how the multi-layered concept of duality will be expressed in this exhibition.
We do hope you can come to see the exhibition while it is on May 9th to May 21, 2019.
The Opening Reception will be on May 9 from 7 to 10pm. We four will be there and would love to meet you and talk to you about our work.

   

   

Articulation's Forest and Sea and the Place Between Artist Reception April 13th, 2019

Cedar Wind Drawing, detail

The Artist Reception for Articulation's 'Forest and Sea and the Place Between' exhibition at Portals Gallery, Duncan is on Saturday 13th from 3 to 5 pm.

Artists Wendy Klotz, Ingrid Lincoln, and Lesley Turner will be in attendance to talk about their work and they look forward to answering questions about the exhibition.

Tree Wind Drawings

My contribution to the exhibition and the Salish Sea biosphere story is a triptych of 3 drawings done be 3 different trees found in the Pacific Northwest coastal maritime forest.

Big-leaf Maple

Douglas-fir and Western Red Cedar

 By getting the trees to draw on a fabric I explored the connection between the air and the earth in the Salish Seas' biosphere.

I blogged about my process to make the first of these works here.

Understanding this place we call home is an ongoing area of interest for me and continues to be an area of focus in my work.

Visiting Washington DC Museums - Textile Museum, Renwick, National Museum of Women in the Arts

After attending the Textile Society of America Symposium in Savannah Ingrid and I flew up to Washington DC with the intention of checking out the newly relocated Textile Museum now on the George Washington University campus. Unfortunately, our timing was not great. We could only enjoy the shop because the gallery was closed while a new exhibition was being installed.

We visited the Renwick Gallery. I didn't take my camera because I wanted to focus on looking at the work and thinking about it. Sometimes while I am taking pictures/photographs I feel as though I am missing out on the full experience. 

We also visited the outstanding National Museum of Women in the Arts and spent many hours working our way up through the floors of the gleaming marble building.

On the top gallery floor, we thoroughly enjoyed the current contemporary exhibition "No Man's Land - Women Artists from the Rubell Family Collection" where the work was often provocative, cheeky and humorous, as its title suggests.

I particularly enjoyed artists whose use of particular materials was intriguingly icky and so full humour.

Karin Upson's 'Kiss 8' is part of her " The Larry Project." There is bit of a weird story about Larry which led her to paint a portrait of Larry and at the same time a self-portrait. While both portraits were still wet she pressed the 2 together creating 'a pair of unsettling hybrid faces.'

The paint was so thick and textured one had to step back quite a distance before the faces emerged.

Analia Saban's 'Acrylic in Canvas' was so tongue-in-cheek. The paint wasn't on the canvas as is 'normal' with fine art, instead, she filled a canvas bag with paint so it was in the canvas. It was kind of icky while at the same time humourous.

Solange Pessoa's 'Hammock' looked from the entrance to the room like the suspended intestines of a huge beast. But it was not what it seemed. On closer inspection, the materials were familiar: fabric earth and sponges. Up close the mass and scale were somehow comforting which was a huge shift my first impression.

Dianna Molzan's 'Untiled' is work toying with the definition of fine art as paint on a stretched canvas mounted to look as though it is floating against a wall. Dianne took each of those elements and played with them. She removed the vertical threads from the canvas while leaving the horizontal threads mounted conventionally to the stretcher bars. Then she applied paint to the remaining draped threads. I enjoyed the way she had cleverly brought together the fine art expectations with the materiality of craft and women's detailed repetitious work.

Rosemarie Trockel's 'Colony' is another play on the definition of what is fine art. From a distance, her work looks to be worked in the Colour Field style where large blocks of flat colour cover the stretched canvas.

Closer inspection reveals it is not what it seems and so questions the definition of fine art.

Rosemarie is quoted as saying, "I tried to take wool, which was viewed as a woman's material, out of that context and to rework it in a neutral process of production."

Lots of food for thought.

Textile Society of America Symposium 2016

Textile Society of America Symposium 2016

The Textile Society of America 15th biennial symposium was held in Savannah Georgia in 2016.

The co-hosts were the Savannah College of Art and Design and Art Rise Savannah.

Ingrid lincoln and I attended the symposium this year.

We caught one of the pre-symposium tours opting to have a group of enthusiastic, knowledgeable students take us on a tour of their university - Savannah College of Art and Design.

The Savannah campus is spread over 80 buildings most of them restored historic buildings in old downtown Savanah, all within walking distance of each other.

The first stop on the tour was the student centre. The beautiful building was filled with art. See the fireplace above.

Pencil drawings on planks of wood.

Next Stop: The Fibers Department, one of 42 disciplines offered.

The entrance art installation - light shining through fibres trapped between acrylic panels on the walls and ceiling.

The dyeing studio.

It looks small but that is because the class sizes are small and only a few students would work in here at any one time. All of the studios are open 24 hours, 7 days a week so students are free to work as their muse strikes or as close to deadlines as they like to.

Induction heating surfaces, steamers and pressurised vat.

SCAD offers 3 fibers degrees - B.F.A., M.A., M.F.A. link here.

Articulation's 2016 Study Session

This year Articulation members collected in Winnipeg Manitoba to begin their annual 2016 Study Session.

Winnipeg has wonderful artwork on its buildings - old and new.

View from the rooftop of Mandy's studio building.

This rooftop building has stories to tell.

Descending

Wendy, Mandy, Donna

Go to the Articulation's blog  link here to see more of what we got up to.

Articulation's Victoria Study Session Continues

On the ferry, crossing to Saltspring Island for the day: to visit Articulation member, Shannon Wardroper's home and studio, to check out potential gallery space and time for a little retail therapy. 

Stitches Fibre Art Supplies, http://www.stitchesfibreartsupplies.ca/ very kindly opened up their store just for us, even though it was Sunday.

Continuing our study of railway hotels across Canada, we took a tour of the Empress Hotel.

This is the view from a 6th floor corner suite looking out over the inner harbour.

A table in the present day Empress tea room, set for their famous afternoon tea.

On the tour we learnt the tables were made from the original hotel floor boards after it was replaced.

Articulation taking the harbour ferry from the Inner Harbour, below the Empress hotel, up to the Upper Harbour.

We got off at Point Ellice House where we walked the grounds and toured inside the house with its intact, original contents. All chattels both inside the house and in their archives are thoroughly cataloged making it a perfect place to research the Victorian era in Victoria.

Leann Clifford

We did stop for afternoon tea while sitting out on the lawn but passed on a game of croquet.

We toured Fisherman's Wharf with its floating restaurants and floating houses that make up the village. 

We continued our driving tour around the Victoria peninsular, stopping and walking the historic sights, including Ogden Point breakwater without a breath of wind and barely a ripple of water.

After a week exploring and researching in Victoria we have returned to our respective studios across Canada to make a body of work for exhibition some time in the future.