The sketches and Ideas for My Independent Study of the 2012 Spring Semester

This semester I am choosing to work on a series of three art quilts for my independent study. For this study, I am concentrating on the concept of natural borders and obstacles that exist on earth that hinders any sort of travel. This idea came to me because I have unfortunately never traveled to other countries besides the United States. This fact upsets me because I once experienced the wonders and excitement of traveling when I flew to Pennsylvania to visit a friend on a day’s notice and I often wonder why what stops me from going further.

There are a couple of different factors that have caused me not to pursue traveling such as school, money, time and language.  As I desire to overcome these trivial barriers between cultures, I will be constructing three art quilts that focus on very broad conceptual barriers that we think of as being obstacles on the earth. 

I am looking at textile traditions from different countries and cultures as inspiration.  Certain techniques and traditions such as embroidery from Mexico and Asia, Indonesian Batik, and Kente cloth from Asante tribes in West Africa have always interested me in the world of textiles.

Kente Cloth

Indonesian Batik

The fact that I am using quilting as a medium represents two things. The first is that I am using a textile tradition from my own country to represent different techniques from the countries I have never traveled to. Simultaneously, I am using a symbol of comfort to demonstrate the anxieties and fear of the unknown events that could potentially happen during traveling.

For the first quilt, I will be focusing the world as imagined from a larger perspective. I thought about all of the countries separated by larger oceans scattered across the globe. I wanted to illustrate this idea by piecing and sewing together strips of fabric in a range of blues and greens.  Then as from inspiration from Kente cloth from West Africa, I will piece together a quilt using the strips. I am doing this because I envision a “pixelated” map that is distorted and hard to read.  I will use the stitching element to create Longitude and Latitude lines to have the front and the back of the quilt together.

World Grid

For the second quilt, I wanted to use the use of elevation lines found on maps to indicate higher or lower land.  I wanted to illustrate the effect mountains have on traveling because of the difficulty of passing through or around them.  I thought that studying the art of batik would help exemplify this idea.  In Indonesia, batik is made up of layering the areas of fabric that are dyed on top of a wax-resist. I want create this quilt longer than a common square to stress the obstacle of traveling around them in order to reach a destination that maybe on the other side.

Elevation Obstruction

Finally for the third quilt, I am focusing on the boundaries and borders that we draw for countries that mark these areas of culture. I want to embroider on a quilt the shapes of the countries’ borders.  I like this idea of using embroidery becasue the stitching will be slashed and gives an indiation that something IS there but you cannot see it.

i.e.    ———————–

Embroidered Borders

BFA Senior Thesis Exhibition December 2011

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For my senior show, I chose to illustrate different metaphors that our English Language often uses to compare the body and the earth.  I concentrated on the physical appearance of the types of imagery associated with each different phrase to compose and construct a wall-hanging.  Each piece is about 90 inches long and 45 inches wide.

Summer Art.

Keepin’ busy.

WordPress will not let me rotate this picture Lame.

Sunlight

I tried Sammy’s pressed flowers which i thought were awesome!!

Oh yeah, my dog is still freaking cute and lovable. He hides in the dryer when it is raining.

Found my cam.

So a while back, I started to get into tapestry making.  I left off with my double delight Indian head cotton piece, (before my locker swallowed my already chewed up camera), and continued with a new direction of out to make effective tapestries.

I decided that I wanted to start working with raw silk because it is so thick. I also wanted to do something different like working with embroidery…..but that is still being decided.

I started off dyeing 3 23X45 pieces of raw silk and so far I have only had the chance to work with two of them.  Well the third piece I really wanted to work with but since i messed up the one depicted above in its dye bath, I felt like I just had to fix it some how.  The original dyed piece was a box degrading in color double delight orange and midnight blue. I folded and rolled the fabric a certain way because I guess I thought it would look cool. Casey did anyways. The more I mess with it though the better it is to me.  I used different inks and even mixed my extender into them for transparent efect.

I was working with the discharge when I decided to make kind of a weird star and moon setting. I dunno just goin with the flow is all I can do for this strangly dyed piece.

The way the printing is laying on the dyed fabric still seems strange to me so I have been heavily considering about cutting it in half and displaying both tapestries together.  However, the reflective quality that the trees seem to present is quite interesting to me and I think that I will try to work with it some more.

Oh yeah, I am working on the other piece also.  But guess what, my camera dyed before I could grab the photos off of it.  so it will be up later.

P.S. It is a blood tapestry.

The Ladder Project and My Random new Project

So Buddy chewed up my camera a month a go or so. I still love him but for a long time I could not update this blog because I had thought my camera was worthless. Then someone mentioned to me that even though the picture the camera shows on it screen may be quite distorted, the memory card saves the real image. It “works” now.

Here is my beginnings of my Ladder piece. I am doing a cut and cut again with cotton organdy complexly dyed with layers of silk organza that have disharged text on them.  It is visually appealing how the text is illuminated with the dyed fabric behind it.  I want to work on fraying the raw edges of the organza as well.

Also, I wanted to delve into another project that I though I would really get into. This long piece of double-delight dyed Indian Head cotton will be a tapestry like piece. I want to work with discharge and making patterns and borders and layers.  Right now I have the background and the first border. I will be adding another intricate boarder and making forms in the middle. Then I will shibori over-dye with a dark green. After that, I plan on printing with dark brown and metallic ink.  I believe that when this is finished, I will work on another type of fabric such as cotton lawn.

Second Project for the semester.

For this project, I would like to make a ladder piece depicting how I see the obstacles in life and how they can improve. I also want to work with text and to choose my words wisely so that they may be a functional and aesthetic part of the piece.  The ladder will be constructed of dyed cotton organdy in ranges of red and green and silk organza in claret to wrap around the ladder. The silk organza will be heavier at the top of the ladder suggesting that life would get easier at the top and organza is very much softer than cotton organdy. I want to work with stuffing the organza inside the sewn organdy  also.  I am also looking for scrap yards around town for a wired gate, which I would want my ladder to hang on and drape over so it appears to be going over something rough and hard.

Materials:

Silk Organza/ Cotton Organdy

Thread

Gate piece

ink

Timeline:

Thursday 3/24        Finish dyeing Fabric, begin printing pieces already dyed.

Saturday 3/26         All fabric dyed. Finish Printing and discharging.

Wednesday 3/30   Finish Assembling ladder. Begin to sew on organza.

Saturday   4/2         Attach to gate if found.

Here is a basic sketch that I want to follow but may change due to the fluid fabric that I am using.  I really hope that I find a gate like the one that I drew.  However, in scrap metal junk yards I might find odd shapes and sizes that I will be willing to work with also.  This factor is definitely a changing one.  I thought that if I didn’t find any gates that I would want to work with I could fabricate one with dyed fabric. But that is just a back up choice.

Influences:

I first looked into street graffiti art for some inspiration from artists such as Banksy for example. I found some Tibetan Prayer inspired work in New York, where wooden shoes were painted with names of Brooklyn and then hung on telephone wires in a Prayer-flag style. I thought that this was a good inspiration since I wanted to create something that depicted an overcoming struggle with words.

I also looked Noel Palomo-Lovinski’s series of dresses with printed Text. In Mary Smulls’ article called “Noel Palomo-Lovinski: Styling Confessions”  the artist describes how she found written confessions from strangers from chat rooms and forums that people would confess to other strangers but not to their own family.  She studied the restrictions of the dress and designed the clothes in that way with the printed confessions on top. I thought that these ideas were strong consider in constructing my ladder not in a traditional form but more of a droopy looser form.

Citations

A. Carolina, Miranda. (2011, January). Beyond graffiti. ArtNews, 110(1), 88-93.

Smull, Mary. (2010/2011, December/January). “noel-lovinski: styling confessions. FiberArts, 30-31.

Finished Piece

 

Here is the final product. I thought about working a little more to somehow connect the pieces to give further quilt-like features but I am quite happy how it turned out and i do not wish to mess with it further.  I had this project in mind for quite sometime now and I am proud of myself for not only doing it but sketching enough ideas to create this project and figure out every technique that I would use.

Here is a close up on the raw-like edges and bound edges of the quilt relating to the concept of my piece.

I wish to make more non-functional quilts like one for water and one for glass or spiderwebs.

However, I cannot comprehend how i wish to do these yet so i am going to work on my off-the-loom weaving done with fabric instead of yarn.  I wish to make some sort of self portrait or fill up missing pieces of The Coptic Monastory weavings.

Tapestry Weaving- Kirsten Glasbrook

Kirsten Glasbrook’s Tapestry Weaving is not only a guide for every beginning weaver but a great idea source for advanced weavers.  I was interested in buying this book because of the feedback from buyers claiming that it was informative and encouraging with very clear pictures and instructions on how to achieve certain weaving techniques.  The artist covers everything from skeins, tapestry looms, warp, weft, colors, finishes and mounting.

The book makes it easy to find the technique you want to learn.

The artist includes her work in the book, that which surfaces ideas for every weaver after reading many pages of key techniques.

Pella

Last weekend my friends and I made a great trip to Pella, IA. All of the Dutch inspirations really stirred my fiber imaginations such as their Dutch lace, cotton and fabrics.

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Second Update Today

I got a lot done during class and thought that i would upload some photos.

This is where I started off today. You can see that I left some of the newspaper less colored at the hypotenuse part of the triangles  to sort of unify the center that is plain and sewn with the surrounding colored pieces.

 

I finally got for pieces cut. The colors are getting more intense and that images and the ink are starting to fade away.  The next step will be to get the larger triangles that would complete the square.  Since no newspaper page is big enough to be that large, I will have to work on a way to connect them together so that no one will notice a thing.

I am sorry that I take up this much space on the classroom tables.