Fun with Fibre...Cloth & Wood - An Annual Art Group Exhibition at Tulista Gallery

Dale MacEwan

email - dalemac@telus.net

Each year, around June, a group of 5 local artists install an exhibition in the Community Art Council of the Saanich Peninsula (CACSP) gallery in Tulista Park, Sidney.

Dale makes pieced and quilted compositions reflecting micro views of the landscape she lives in. She often incorporates her photographs printed on cloth and fabrics she has built up with texture using printing, stencilling, and stamping, all in her distinctive warm pallet.

Heather Corbitt

email - khcorbitt@gmail.com

I am going around the gallery to show you how each artist has set up a mini studio to work at during the exhibition. 

Heather makes wearable art garments and landscapes by building up very small pieces of fabric to produce multi-layered textured cloth. Her fabric of choice is dupionni silk.

Maya Brouwer

Brouwertree 

This setup offers the viewer a unique opportunity to talk to each artist about their work or to just watch them at work.

Maya makes large pictorial art quilts. Many of the fabrics she uses she has herself dyed, discharged, and added surface design elements to.

Kathy Demchuk

website

Each artist sets up a display of their work around their work area. Most of the works are for sale.

One of Kathy's techniques is to draw a resist on the ground fabric before dyeing it. Her signature style is to tell humorous stories that make the viewer chuckle. Kathy also makes jewellery using beach glass she has collected from local beaches.

Peter Demchuck

website

I have heard some viewers ask for special finishing requests, place orders, and commission new work.

While Kathy is beachcombing for glass, Peter collects driftwood. To quote from Peter's website, Besides giraffes, I carve bowls, make yard birds from driftwood, and do some wood sculptures, mostly of fish.

It is interesting to visit the gallery several times over the week to see how work is progressing.

And to sample Kathy's daily fresh batch of cookies.

'Know Your Place - Ideas In Art Form' Exhibition at Tulista Gallery, Sidney, Vancouver Island

Sherley Gordon Edey has invited 7 other artists working in different media to exhibit their work with her photography while exploring the many layers of meaning in the statement

'Know Your Place'

Sherley presents her work in a wide variety of formats, including video and keeps the viewer looking for the story. Often several different stories will emerge from one collection.

The artists who have joined her: Colleen Golumbia, Norma Lofthouse, Dale MacEwan, Terry Murray, Pamela Truscott-White, Lesley Turner, Jean Weller, tell their stories about knowing their place through their own media: clay, wood, baste fibres, fabric.

It all makes for a most stimulating exploration of the theme.

Section/Township/Range

Starting nearly 150 years ago twelve percent of the earth’s land mass was divided up by a straight line grid system, a system now deeply ingrained in western Canadian rural culture. A hierarchy of roads and fence lines mark the boundaries of land ownership. Land parcels have been passed from one generation to the next and continue to be bought and sold. The boundaries of one’s place are still defined by those original Dominion Land Survey lines now deeply etched into the landscape.

This is my contribution to the exhibition. 

Throughout history, many people have been told where their place is, whether a surveyed plot of land, a designated reservation, a placed they fled to or a legally enforced place of incarceration. 

Some have a long family history of living in one place with the passing of each generation reinforcing their feeling of belonging.

Others travel and respond intuitively to their surroundings sometimes arriving and knowing this is where they belong.

As a geographer, I explored one's connection with the land. The other artists explored very different 'Know Your Place' associations. 

I do hope you can make it to the exhibition and see the works for yourself.

CACSP Community Arts Centre at Tulista Park, 9565 Fifth Street, Sidney

April 11 - 17, 2016

Monday - Friday 10 - 4, Saturday and Sunday 12 - 4  

'Canadiana', May 1-8, 2015 Textile Art Show

‘Canadiana’   May 1 - 8, 2015  Textile Art Show
Community Arts Centre, 9565 Fifth Street
at Tulista Park in Sidney  Open daily 10 am - 4 pm

A travelling exhibition of 30 works exploring a sense of place in Canada by members of the Fibre Art Network.  FAN is a co-operative of Fibre Artists in Western Canada.  This exhibit made it’s debut in Palmerston North, New Zealand in January 2015.  It is scheduled to travel for two years in Canada with the first showing in Canada at Tulista Gallery in Sidney.

Yukon Gold - Katie Stein Sather, Maple Ridge, BC

Pine Beetle Blues - Marcy Horswill, Cumberland, BC

Maria Shell - SDA Conference Exhibition, San Antonio

Another stunning exhibition at the SDA conference was a collection of Maria Shell's quilts, at Gallery Nord.

"Color Grids"

Every quilt was made using the same quilt block.

But Maria played with 'line, shape, print, and color' to produce a collection of technically exquisite and very different quilts.

The quilts were installed in a 3-sided booth, which made viewers move in a complex dance back and forward between the walls as they looked, compared, and looked again as discoveries were made.

2013 SDA Exhibition - Kathryn Clark

Foreclosure Quilts
This is the intro members got before viewing Kathryn Clark's work:
"Clark's life as an architect and urban planner influences her work as an artist. As the foreclosure crisis spiraled out of control, this exhibit took its form from foreclosure maps that marked the disintegration of neighborhoods in major U.S. cities."
Many of us had also previously read articles about her work.

'Detroit Foreclosure Quilt' 

But I wasn't prepared for the impact of her work.
The fabric was torn and roughly cut away. Each exposed, raw, red shape documented the upheaval of family homes or businesses.

We had all heard the statistics but Kathryn's quilted cloth mapped out the reality of the situation.

She translated the collected numbers into a story the viewer could relate to.

Inspiration for Fundy Post Cards

The inspiration for Post Cards # 4 and #5 came from the Age of Sail Museum http://www.ageofsailmuseum.ca/, the sailor's costume for Post Card #4 and these woolen quilts for Post Card #5.

The quilts appear to be made from woolen clothing, particularly men's suits.

One of my favourite textile researchers is Anne Hollander. She has written extensively on the role the suit has played in society. Her books read like novels as she reveals the story. 

In the Post Card I incorporated 3 different horse hair textiles traditionally used to interface suit jackets. I collected these fabrics last November while exploring Toronto's textile district with other Articulation members.

Another important source of information for this series of work has been Allen Penney's book Houses of Nova Scotia.

The Quilters Hall of Fame

I found this such an interesting book.
I went through it twice, once for the photos and again to read the well written bios of mainly American quilters.

It is a 'Whose Who' of the past and present North American ( mainly) quilt world.
By featuring quilt artists from the early 19th century to the present it also does a very good job putting the contemporary art quilt in its social context and illustrates its historical development.

My New Quilt

My friend Carol made me a quilt!
It is a very special quilt because usually Carol makes her quilts for babies who have to spend time in hospital and she makes them for her family.
They are made from previously worn cotton velour clothing she finds all over the city.
She cuts them up and with her painterly eye she transforms them into works of art.
My quilt was inspired by a Mark Rothko painting, a painter whose work Carol knows I admire.

There is a surprise on the back - a Marimekko fabric to make a perfect match.
I feel honoured Carol gave me a piece of her treasured Finnish fabric from her collection.

A close up to show the elegant simplicity and genius of a Marimekko design.

Oops! This a poor image of the Rothko painting that inspired the quilt - and I have posted it lying on its side.
Mark would not be happy. In fact he was not happy with the way the original owners of the painting planned to display it either. This is just a 'sketch' of the real thing but he never made the painting because the owners of the hotel were going to hang it in a dinning room. Mark couldn't bare the thought of people eating in the presence of his work so he withdrew from the commission.
What would he think of it as a cosy quilt?

Thank you Carol.

More from Articulation's CQA Exhibit

(Left) Wendy Klotz's 'Gates Puzzle' silk piecing and applique and Vickie Newington's stump work and stamping.

Donna Clement's 'Spruce' and 'Cedar', free motion embroidery on cotton, silk, linen and paper.

Wendy Klotz's 'Colours of the Forest', hand dyed, hand/wet felted, machine embroidered wool and organza.

Vickie Newington's work. (not sure of the title of the left hand one, 'Alley' or 'Concrete Reflection', but it is from her Winnepeg series), painted, printed, burned, felted, machine embroidered, layered. Right, 'A Hole of My Own', cotton, rubber, metal , plastic has been hand dyed, embroidered by machine and hand and layered.

I think Articulation's work was successful in showcasing a wide variety of stitching techniques and materials.

More Articulation work at CQA

I am posting images of the Articulation exhibition at CQA on 2 different blogs - mine and Articulation's.
Left - Ingrid's "Night" is an abstract response to the city she has lived in for many years. There are lots of layers here: screen printing, applique, mark making by hand.
Middle - Gloria's work started as a black piece of cloth that she discharged, cut up and reassembled. The black boarder is lost on the black curtain.
Right - My work. While I was researching the Tyndall stone quarried just outside Winnipeg, I found a reference to it also being known as 'Tapestry Stone', which just begged me to make a stone block in a tapestry technique.

Here are 2 different responses to being in the rain forest.
On the left is Donna's work and I find her response as a prairie girl most interesting. With a life-long perspective of the flora being below her knees, she has emphasised the continual falling of leaves and debris from above as a unique aspect of the rain forest ecosystem.
The work on the right is Vickie's. Her perspective is as a more distant observer looking at the rain forest as details move in and out of focus. She has a more atmospheric response.

The work on the right is Leann's, another life-long prairie girl, and like Donna, she too responded to the mass of many greens and leaves falling from overhead.
The work on the left is Donna's from the Winnipeg body of work. She explored in a number of works the ethnic diversity of the immigrants to Canada as they came to claim their grid-surveyed plot of land.

While in the rain forest on Vancouver Island, Vickie looked down and in the decay of an old stump saw new life growing. She layered 9 fabrics and, using the reverse applique technique, she revealed the stump's growth rings and rotting core. She used stump work techniques to show the new sapling (nice pun there).