Ragged Cloth Cafe, serving Art and Textiles

For the past 3 or 4 weeks, my house has been in turmoil while we build a sewing studio in the basement. Although I’m thrilled and looking forward to having a new spacious “playroom”, I miss having quiet time to relax and be creative.

This forced sebatical has made me realize that my mood and emotional stability is largely dependent on having art as an outlet. The closest I’ve come to working was spending the weekend painting… No, not a landscape or abstract oil on canvas. More like 2 coats of primer and 2 coats of paint on the ceiling and walls.

I’ve realized that even though my sewing machine and fabrics are still here & available for use, I just can’t concentrate with all this stuff going on. It’s “cluttered house; cluttered mind”. I really need organization and quiet in order to do my best work. Some people thrive on chaos. I’ve realized I am NOT one of those people. And by the time we’re done building, painting or running back & forth to Home Depot, I’m just too exhausted to think.

This experience has raised my level of anxiety and really made me quite irritable. I’m trying to keep things in perspective and not freak out. Of course I’ll be back to work soon; it’s not the end of the world. But emotionally, I miss my creative time like I would miss a good friend.

In desperation or maybe displaced anxiety, I have taken to making numerous detailed sketches of what my work room will look like when it’s done. I’ve started taking the graph paper, ruler and labels a little too far. As my husband noted “Do you really need to draw the box of dryer sheets on the shelf? What is that, a pegboard? Do you have to draw out every single one of your tools?” No, I don’t. But it’s something to do. I can’t concentrate enough to draw a still life, so I’m trying to go with the flow & live in the home-improvement-design-construction moment.

Have you ever been “cut off” from your creative outlet without warning? What did you learn from the experience?

See below for a few pictures of my work-in-progress…

images below: we’ve painted the ceiling and walls, and installed a wanescoating panel behind the work sink. A small area of vinyl tile covers the floor under the sink and washer/dryer (installed it myself!) Now we’re working on finishing some of the built in shelves.

This hanging lightbulb & string serve as a “placeholder”. We’ll be installing 1′x4′ florescent lights this week.

Left: using painter’s tape, I mapped out on the floor where my sewing desk and machines might be placed. After that, we’ll install pendants for task lighting. A decorative dressing screen will hide that water pipe.

Once all the junk is off the floor, I think it will be a nice place to work!

Claire Watson’s unusual glove sculptures were on view at Art Sites gallery in Riverhead, NY during my recent visit to Long Island. Taking advantage of the opportunity to see unusual textile based work by an artist unfamiliar to me, I took time out from beachcombing to visit this exhibit.

Watson’s art is formed from ladies gloves that are taken apart and then reconstructed and altered. Doll parts and doll-making techniques are incorporated along with additional seams to form lines and shapes that change the original glove into an entirely new creature. The resulting forms are stuffed with sawdust and presented as discrete (and often unsettling) objects.

In making these sculptures, Watson hopes to suggest flesh (and its fragility), preoccupations with its containment or disclosure, and escape through role-playing and costume. She says she thinks of women’s traditions of handwork and long hours spent in sewing while she is working on these pieces, and also is reminded of dolls and toys. The artist has said that the shape of each sculpture comes from the gloves themselves- the extent to which they were deconstructed and then rebuilt evolved as the piece developed. In some cases, Watson made the gloves from sewing patterns. Other times, they came from the collection of gloves that she has accumulated.

I was quite fascinated by these sculptures, as each piece seemed to fool the eye as it traveled along the piece. There were legs that morphed into a hand, or fingers that attach to a doll’s head instead of a hand. Some pieces invited longer study, to discover clever construction. My favorite work of the exhibit was a piece that had gloves where each finger ended in its own tiny-gloved hand.

Also on display at this gallery was Claire Watson’s most recent work called “Familiars”. The sculptures in this exhibit begin with kitchen and household tools that have been transformed with polymer clay. These pieces start with sock darning eggs, wooden rolling pins, wooden spoons and mallets. These items were selected both because they are made to be grasped or touched by the human hand, and also because their shapes suggest parts of the human form.
The polymer clay that encases these wooden objects is flesh colored doll-makers clay which gives each piece the appearance of human flesh. The sculptures’ shapes have only a vague suggestion of human form or human body part. The abstraction of each piece is intentional, according to the artist, as she hopes the work will not suggest an exact form or use for the underlying tool, but instead will suggest mystery of functions that are no longer part of our common knowledge.

In a fitting summation of her work, Claire Watson’s artist statement includes the following thought:
“Language and art are tools, and playthings. I make objects to see what they will look like, but mainly to give form to ideas that can’t be put to words, and names to images that arrive in the imagination wholly unexpectedly.”

Claire Watson, a resident of Water Mill, received a BFA from the University of Texas at Austin, and an MFA from Tyler School of Art at Temple University in Rome and Philadelphia. She received a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 1990-1991, and is a 2007 Fellow in Sculpture from the New York Foundation for the Arts.

Lei Yixin at work on scale model of Martin Luther King

There must be thousands of public art installations in the United States, and every once in a while there is a major brouhaha over one of them.

Right now, controversy is swirling around a memorial to Martin Luther King. It would be placed in the heart of Washington, DC, along the Tidal Basin, not far from memorials to four American presidents. The entire memorial will cover four acres and has a number of architectural elements (visit the website linked at the bottom of this post), but the one disputed piece is the statue representing King. It is based on a photograph showing a contemplative, philosophical King, rather than his more well-known oratorical persona.

Continue reading ‘MLK Brouhaha (Eileen D.)’

I got my members’ magazine from the Portland Art Museum last week and was intrigued by the photographs of work by Australian glass artist Klaus Moje. His work, including a four-panel work created especially for the exhibition will be at PAM starting May 31 and running to September 7.

The thing that caught my eye was the similarities I saw to fiber works. Moje seems to be interested in pattern and juxtaposing one pattern against another.

This is a detail from one of the Portland Panels.

These works really seem to work with the concept of “piecing” . It suddenly occurred to me that there are other kinds of art that use many of the conventions and constructions that quilters and fiber artists use, including glass apparently and, of course, mosaic and collage work. Duh—obvious, I guess. I just hadn’t thought of it in that way before.

Continue reading ‘Klaus Moje, by Terry Grant’