Banff March 18

Last Sunday I took the afternoon off and went cross country skiing with Ron. The fresh air and vigorous exercise was mind clearing.
Today we are continuing our sessions with Martha Cole. This morning we learnt some strategies for coping with negative criticism of our work - great tools to have when putting your work out there.

Gloria is working on a large hand embroidered work. She is covering great expanses with french knots. One afternoon Ingrid offered to help out and make knots for her.

Donna planning her work.

Banff March 17

We are now into our 3rd week here in The Banff Centre. On Sunday, Vickie Newington, the 7th member of Articulation to arrive, brought Martha Cole with her. Martha is a successful, established artist who we asked to join us for the week to work with us to get ourselves as individual artists and our group to the next level in our development.

Donna Clement, Ingrid Lincoln, Martha Cole

Vickie Newington

We have been working on exercises focusing on becoming aware of our strengths these past 2 days. We rented another studio space in Glyde Hall for the 4 days of the workshop. We have each covered a section of the walls with our work and a diagram of our interests and strengths which we continue to add to and rearrange as items emerge from the exercises.

This is what my part of the walls looked like 1st thing this morning. I have since added to my strengths & interest diagram and taken the bottom right work off the wall because it doesn't reflect the characteristics of my style.

This evening I have an individual critique with Martha, which I am very much looking forward to.

Banff March 15

Wonderfil is a thread manufacturing company headquartered in Calgary. They generously donated boxes of machine thread for our Women Rock project. I think most of their employees are sewers and one contacted her quilting guild to tell them about our project. She told me, for several days she would find bags of treasures left on her front step. People had been saving leftovers for something special and this project in the mountains seemed right.
I brought the cache up to The Banff Centre and we set up a 'shop' in the sewing studio. We go shopping when we are looking for something we don't have. It was quite a challenge to anticipate what we would need to work on for a month, especially for those in the group who had to fly here. We have also been able to offer materials to other artists in The Centre also.

I am using some of the donated materials in this thread-rich piece. Here I am sampling using Valerie Campbell-Harding's strip piecing technique. This patchwork cloth will be cut and re-joined with a cover stitch many times before it is done.
So a big thank you to the staff at Wonderfil for supporting and enabling Articulation's Women Rock project.

Banff March 14

ReBecca Paterson, the 6th member of Articulation to arrive in Banff, had to ignore her jet lag because we had booked a curatorial led tour of the Whyte Museum collection where we were looking for inspiration for our Women Rock body of work.

Michale Lang is the curator of the Whyte Museum.

She took us through the Peter & Catherine Robb Whyte Banff Heritage House, which is such a treasure trove of Banff mountain culture, frozen in time.

Banff March 13

Flossie Peitsch from Sydney, Australia, began her self-directed residency in The Centre this week. We invited her to visit us in the woods. We had lots of fabric we could give her to get her started on her project.

She generously gave us her time to listen to each of us talk about our work and offered feedback to help us along in the work's development.

As a group we have decided we are ready to learn how to self critique and our work needs to be critiqued by others outside the group who are qualified. So Flossie's arrival is timely.

Banff Art Centre - March 12

It is still cold up here in the mountains but the days are clear and sunny.

On our last day in the dye studio, I printed with 2 more deconstructed screens.

Last time I put too much thickened dye on the screen & didn't squeegee it on so the dye came off in lumps & I lost the pattern after only a few passes.
I'm learning lots with this opportunity to work long, uninterrupted hours in the dye studio. When something doesn't work, I can repeat the process straight away, applying what I have just learned.

This time I put the dye on more thinly but I suspect too thinly. I embedded different grids which produced interesting patterns.
I do like this technique for adding lots of pattern to cloth. It is much looser than stamping and stencilling and with practice I think I could develop some control of what is happening. It is a real test of one's knowledge of colour mixing.

Banff March 11

Yikes it is cold here. A couple of nights ago I was walking from our studio in the woods down the mountain to the dye studio. My forehead started to ache & my thumb started to freeze again. I realised it was really cold so I started to jog to get there faster but the moisture in my lungs started to freeze which made me cough. Anyway, I made it. The next morning I found out it had been minus 40.
We have finished our 1st week in the dye and print studios. Now I spend mornings in my room working on my BA(Hons) Embroidered Textiles studies. I had a phone tutorial with my tutor in England but had to call her 3 times before I got the time right. Daylight Saving is very confusing when calling internationally. I have to go through the logic again at the end of the month when the UK changes.

I spend the afternoons and evenings in the studio in the woods. This is my current work -inspiration, sampling & paper mock up which you can't see very well. It will be all hand stitched.

On the way to the dye studio I had to walk out onto the road to give a herd of wild deer space as they grazed in front of the indoor swimming pool. Last night when I was in the foyer of our accommodation building, I saw a vole. I propped open the door so it could run out but it ran straight past the door, which I would have done too because it was so cold out. Then I rounded him up, he shot out the door and straight into my bag the door had pushed over. A few shakes of my bag sent him off into the trees.

Banff March 10

On Sunday I took the day off. Ron came up to Banff and we planned to go cross country skiing but it was cold and a bitter wind made it feel very cold. I hadn't packed my really cold weather gear. So we settled for a walk along the river.

The scenery was looking beautiful until I couldn't feel my thumb. We turned around and went back to the car. The Penhold Trail will have to wait until things warm up.

The beavers are still busy. We went back to the Banff Centre and had hot drinks in the Kiln coffee shop to warm up.
At 6:00 we all met in the Other Gallery and took our work off the walls. We had called the exhibition No More White Walls so we returned the white walls.

Here is Donna plastering the holes we made. The next day another exhibition started moving in.
We will be back at the end of the month, Friday 27th, with an Open House (wine and food supplied by the Leighton Centre), with the exhibit continuing over the weekend.

Banff March 9

On Friday, March 6th we all attended Concert Night Out, one of a series of Friday concerts in the Rolston Recital Concert Hall . As resident artists we get in free to these concerts (We are treated so well here at The Centre). We were most fortunate to catch a very special concert. The first half we heard Linda Andonovska play solo on flute, then Cheryl Law on viola with Cecilia Lee on piano, then Nick Alvarex on cello with Kieth Kirchoff on piano. All wonderful, so young and so accomplished.
The second half of the concert featured a group from Japan who play contemporary Japanese music on traditional instruments. What an experience to contrast their music with what we had just heard.

I managed to get some after-concert images of the group Pro Musica Nipponia and some of their instruments. This instrument is played like a horizontal harp and appears to be quite a physical feat to play.

A tray of percussion instruments.

Those magnificent soul stirring Japanese drums.
So we had an uplifting night off after 6 days of work.

Banff Art Centre - March 6

Yesterday we spent most of the day in the dye and print studios. After Ingrid's demo on making a deconstructed screen with thickened dyes, I made one and left it overnight to cure. The next day I printed through it onto a length of soda ash soaked cloth. This is the first layer of colour with the 2nd colour, blue, ready to be pushed through.

This morning I rinsed it after it had cured overnight.

...and hung it to dry. I won't be able to see the complexity of the layering and colour mixing until it is dried and ironed. The stringy stuff in front is cheese cloth. I was wanting analogous warm and cool but the warm is too much like salmon so I will be over-dyeing it.

Banff March 4

While in the paper/dying studio, Ingrid gave us a demo on making a deconstructed screen for printing on fabric with thickened dye.

The screen needs to be left to dry before being used to push dye through onto cloth.

I soaked fabric in soda ash and hung it to dry in preparation for printing on. This is the view to the back of the studio where the bedrock has been left exposed. This studio is in the basement of the Glyde building which sits on the side of a mountain. You have to know where you are going to find this studio because it is isolated from the others. It is a great place to work.

Wendy made felt using fleece she had dyed and hand carded. The equipment behind her is used in paper making.

Banff Centre Dye Studio

This is the Banff Art Centre dye studio.
It has everything one could want when working with fabric and dyes.
This morning I put some fabric to soak in soda ash to get it ready to dye.

Banff March 4

Here we all are at Banff with more of the group to join us at various times through out the month: (left) Gloria S. Daly, Ingrid Lincoln, Lesley Turner, Donna Clement, Wendy Klotz. We are standing in front of one of Donna's works, All That Glitters Is Not Gold that we put up yesterday in Other Gallery.

This morning Wendy Tokaryk explained to us how to use all of the silkscreen printing machines, which was like a mini-workshop. The image above is the lounge in Glyde Hall that we use when we are working in the dye/paper studio and the print studio