Backyard Project: Designing with the Step Motif and Form

The gabion baskets defining the guest patio edge make a stepped form to echo the  patio paver placement and the house walls.

An image taken during early construction days shows the stepped form of the house envelope.

The stepped line was continued with the shed placement.

I became aware of the stepped motif during a study of the Art Deco design period that happened almost simultaneously throughout many places in the world. It was the first universal design style and used the stepped motif on architecture, garments, interior design, graphic design, product design....

 1920s dress with silk devore burn-out in a stepped pattern.

This NZ Art Deco period house illustrates the stepped form at its simplest.

The side view shows a stepped roof line.

I carried out some tests on different people using flash cards to find out the minimum number of connected lines needed to be recognised as a stepped motif. Result - 4.

While researching an essay on the Art Deco design period I focused on why the stepped motif appealed at this time and was used so extensively. I found the form and motif seemed to give a feeling of being uplifted and instilled hope. 

With the Backyard Project design, I worked with the vertical and horizontal stepped motif forms in the house architecture by mirroring and echoing them in the garden structures. I don't yet know if there is an uplifting feeling in the garden yet because it is still at a busy stage where I am focused on soil building and planting. Maybe by next summer, I will be able to gauge the feeling in the garden. 

Greece in Winter - 2016 Family Holiday

We looked up

We looked down

We climbed

We looked up

We looked down

We climbed

We walked and walked

And once some of us ran - on the first Olympic track, ever

We fact checked

And every evening we warmed up, sampled unique Greek drinks and talked about what we had seen that day.

We roamed Athens for a few days then drove around the Peloponnese Peninsula for 10 days.

Greece is having a quieter than normal winter with colder than normal weather so we often had the famous sites and the hotels to ourselves.

It was a wonderful family time in a unique part of the world.

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 15th Biennial Symposium

Textile Society of America Symposium 2016

The opening reception was held at the SCAD Museum of Art scad.edu/museum

On a balmy evening, 400 delegates from 23 different countries gathered on the podium between the oldest surviving antebellum railroad depot in the US and the modern building of the art museum.

After a time of nibbling delicious southern canapes, sipping cool drinks, listening to the band, talking with old and new friends, and paying attention during the speeches of welcome and thanks, we moved into the exhibition spaces.

Ebony G. Patterson, 'of 72 project,' digital prints on embellished bandanas, 2012

'What happens when 72 die and no one knows who they are? 

Who were these men and this woman?

Ebony wanted to make people aware of a 2010 massacre of 72 men (and 1 woman) at the Tivoli gardens in Jamaica. It is an event that has received very little attention from the media, has been ignored by Jamacia's usually vocal music scene and has had little acknowledgement governement. By making a mixed media portrait of every victim and hanging them all together on a clothesline the sheer number has great impact and the viewer is forced to realise these silenced people do matter.

Subodh Gupta, 'Known Stranger,' mixed media, 2014

This fabulous installation is an endlessly fascinating collection of well-used cooking pots and containers. The setting sun reaching through blinds to spot illuminate the work only added to its curiosity. People just walked around and around looking up and smiling.

This was just one of many exhibitions available for delegates to enjoy throughout the week. There was a well-organised gallery-hop one evening.

The daytime hours were mostly spent listening to the presentation of research papers on the theme "Crosscurrents: Land, Labor and the Port."

3 or 4 papers were presented in each session  X  5 concurrent sessions at any one time X 8 periods of concurrent sessions over 3 days = 140 papers presented. Phew, no wonder my head felt full towards the last day. The last day was spent attending roundtable discussions, films, videos, a merchants market. poster session, a closing plenary session and finally an awards banquet dinner. Those who still wanted more could join the post-symposium workshops and tours.

All in all an amazing event.

The next symposium will be in Vancouver in 2018. I can hardly wait.

Art Nouveau and Art Deco - On the Lookout for Art Styles While Travelling

After flying across the Pacific from New Zealand we endured a 10-hour layover in San Francisco. We occupied ourselves with: finding a short term hotel room - no such place; a shower - closed for renovations; a place to sleep - the meditation/prayer room but that didn't last long because the dark quiet room was intoxicating when in a jet-lagged state and lying on the floor, as opposed to sitting cross-legged, was forbidden.

The many exhibitions within the airport were a welcome distraction and kept us moving.

Curtain panel, c. 1900 - 1910, USA, cotton

The SFO Museum was established by the Airport Commission in 1980 to humanise the airport environment, share some of the unique cultural life of San Francisco, to provide educational services for the travelling public, and to keep jet-lagged people occupied.

Centrepiece, 1900, Loetz, Austria, glass, bronze

We didn't find all 25 galleries but what we did find certainly worked for a while to distract from our basic needs for sleep, personal hygiene attention, and moving the body. 

Jardiniere, 1903, Austria, bronze

When I travel I am always on the lookout for expressions of different art styles in architecture, interior design, and artworks. I am particularly interested in the more recent styles that encompassed more than 2D paintings and sculptures.

The rebellious Arts and Crafts movement at the end of the 19th century in Europe morphing into the Art Nouveau period was the beginning of taking 'art' off the walls and plinths for Europeans.

The motifs on this jardiniere are typical of the period - dragonflies and plants, particularly the stems and leaves caught up in the hair of languid women. 

What do you think of the women with their mouths open forming the feet of the dish?

Octopus Chatelaine c. 1900, William B. Kerr & Co., Newark, New Jersey, silver

I had not noticed the octopus motif being used before but with its curvilinear legs it would have been seen as having great design potential if more designers of the time had been familiar with sea life.

Art Deco shop front in Ngatea, New Zealand

My favourite art style is Art Deco, a style that flourished not only in Europe between the world wars but it was the first style that spread around the world. It may have been halted in Europe once WWII started but it continued to develop elsewhere. I love to find Art Deco gems in unexpected places.

It was the first style to unify people rather than separate them. Art Deco concepts were freeing providing a spring point for many different cultures to interpret.

Another reason why I find the Art deco style so fascinating is that it was the first style that permeated all material culture at all economic levels, from grand hotels to this modest shop front (above), from costly wood inlaid furniture to a mass produced milk jug. Everyone could identify with and express themselves through the style.

Professor Kerry Mason Speaks About Emily Carr at the Gathering at the Edge

Professor Kerry Mason and world authority on all things Emily Carr gives a presentation to the Gatherers about the artist's sketches, paintings, textiles and pottery.

I have the job of introducing Kerry

Sheila Wex, BC + Yukon representative for SDA and Barbara McCaffrey, Gathering at the Edge committee member.

Everyone was captivated by the way Kerry talked about the BC artist Emily Carr. 

In a post-event survey, people were asked, 'What did you like about the Event (the 3-day Gathering)?'

"Loved the lecture about Emily Carr,"

"Learning about Emily Carr. Such a wonderful talk!"

"Everything was so well thought out in detail but my very favourite was the Emily Carr 

presentation by Dr. Kerry Mason."

Circumnavigation: West Coast Vancouver Island

By the time we were on the west coast my knitting had grown much longer.

And I was working my way through the pile of stowed books. They included a few about and by Emily Carr because this was the country she traveled through and worked in.

Kerry Mason Dodd's book 'Sunlight in the Shadows. The Landscape of Emily Carr' is full of photographs of places Emily visited. It gave us clues as to where Emily visited and we were able to stop at a few of those places.

Emily Carr, Indian Church', 1927, oil on canvas, 108.6 x 68.9cm. Art Gallery fo Ontario.

photographed from Sharyn Rohlfsen Udall's 'Carr, O'Keeffe, Kahlo. Places of their Own.'

Emily Carr did sketches for this painting when she visited Friendly Cove, Nootka Island.

We anchored in Friendly Cove, puttered ashore and went in search of the church. We learnt from the resident warden that particular church burnt down in 1954. The above church was built as a replacement 2 years later on a new site further towards the point. It is now a museum for the local First Nations band's collection of artefacts.

Also in Friendly Cove is the Nootka Light Station.

Emily Carr sketched the light station buildings during a later visit, in 1929. 

I found this image in Doris Shadbolt's 'The Sketchbooks of Emily Carr. Seven Journeys.' 

Reading about Emily Carr, Georgia O'Keeffe and Frida Khalo, 3 artists with intense connections to nature and long attachments to specific places, helped me during the month at sea to look longer and deeper at the water, land and sky that is home and a source of inspiration for my work. As a result, I have a sketchbook of ideas to work with.

French Bucol Fabrics

A friend gave me 2 lengths of lame-type fabric. One had this label. A search of the name revealed Bucol has been a famous silk house in Lyon since 1920.

I needed to test the fabrics to find out if they were silk, or not. Out came the burn chart.

The silver one burned briefly then self extinguished. It melted giving off an odor of sweet chemicals and formed a hard black round bead.

It is polyester.

The gold one burned and melted. It was not self extinguishing. A hard black irregular bead formed. 

It is an Orlon or Acrilan acrylic.

I am a little disappointed they are not some vintage French silk from the 1920s but their melting properties will be something to take advantage of when working with them. And they are very pretty and shiny.