Fiber Art Weekend

I escaped for two nights and a full day to meet up with three longtime friends, members of the original art quilt group that I joined when I moved to Austin twelve years ago. Our children were young then, our time was more free, and we met weekly to play with whatever medium caught our eye. Now we're strung across the country and meeting together is a rare treat.

Judy Coates Perez, well known for her whole cloth painted quilts and smaller fiber art projects, made the pilgrimage back to Texas to teach a couple of workshops and give a lecture on quilts and creativity for the Dallas quilt guild. Luckily that's where Julie John Upshaw (bottom photo) lives, so she arranged a suite with working room for us to hang out. With prizes from Quilt National, museum solo exhibitions under her belt, and work in the Walsh collection, she's the most accomplished of the old gang. Frances Holiday Alford, of over-the-top embellished quilt fame, managed to detour through Dallas for one short night because of weather delaying her flight on her final move from Austin back to Vermont.


Between eating well and catching up on life and eating some more chocolate, Judy was kind enough to give us a mini-workshop of her embossed and stitched metal ornaments, like this one she gifted me one year for my birthday. Notice how her ornament has precise machine stitching to attach the metal to the ornament and finish the edge so fancily.


Alas, our hotel suite didn't have a sewing machine, so I sacrificed my fingers to blanket stitch though aluminum. The results were so fun that it was worth it. It's definitely a Judy ornament with a Vickie twist -- both birds, but with our different aesthetics clearly visible. Can you imagine Judy's holiday tree loaded with these treasures?? You can peruse a collection of ornaments as well as other mixed media on Picasa here and her art quilts here. We sat and stitched and chatted like old times...

If you have an opportunity to take Judy's ornament workshop, her mixed media painting workshop, or her online color class, DO IT! She's a fabulous teacher, well prepared and encouraging.

My Favorite Fiber Piece, and Why

My first immersion was fiber, and one piece stood out for me as I made it: my wall quilt Soul Searching. Even the title indicates that it was a very introspective piece. It has always been my favorite, and it has garnered a lot of recognition. In the quilt world, it won ribbons and prize money, but the piece transcended the quilting world. I felt confident enough of it to enter it into competitions in the greater fine craft world where it was embraced.


It won a Juror's Prize at Materials: Hard & Soft, a very selective mixed media show, juried that year by renowned enamelist Harlan Butt. It was incredibly validating to have an artist whose work I'd so admired recognize my work as exceptional!

The piece was also selected by Michael Monroe, former curator of the Renwick Gallery (the crafts collection of the Smithsonian), for Craft Forms, and by David Revere McFadden for Crafts National, two other prestigious mixed media annual exhibits. If it hadn't been off at another national exhibit, Michael Monroe would have chosen it for an annual fundraiser at the Mint Museum of Craft + Design, and I wouldn't still have it in my collection (lucky, that!). One of only thirteen pieces auctioned off, its substitute sister shared glory with Dale Chihuly and other work of that calliber.

It was a transformational piece for me, where I finally felt entitled to that title of artist, even though my diploma says scientist. Michael Monroe, for heaven's sake, asked me where I did my art training!! At home.

It is also a bittersweet quilt for me. Michael Monroe asked me which galleries carried my work, so I felt enabled to send out porfolios to seek that representation. But before they were shipped, my tiny little blond boy, loathing first grade (even in a Waldorf school) came home for his education. A Ph.D. scientist can't bear to see their child turned off to school, so art full time was sacrificed to ensure a love of learning, and the search for a medium that could see progress in fewer hours per piece began.

The True Meaning of Hallmark

I've been asked by someone in the silver clay community if Hallmark is really my name. Yes, I was born with it, changed it once in a first marriage, had to petition a judge to change it back, and vowed to keep it after that. I've always wondered if there were silversmiths back in the ancestors somewhere, since a hallmark is a maker's mark on sterling silver. 

For years I've used a simple superposition of my initials, VMH, as my hallmark. I like that it's symmetric, being that I'm a Libra and into balance. This is very useful when I stitch it onto double-sided quilts -- it reads the same from both sides. 

In my most complex electroforming, I've been inserting a cutout of the hallmark into the design.

For silver clay, I made a photopolymer plate of a printout of the hallmark above. I cut out tiny squares 2 cards thick to place on the back of my more involved silver clay pieces. 

One of the things I most wanted to learn last spring in my Loren Stump workshop was how to make signature cane. Initials were what we learned to do, but I came home and made hallmark cane first thing. It took a bit of thinking to plan out the steps to build up the cane properly. Essentially, I built a 1" x 1" x 2" solid block logo, then pulled that out to 3/8" diameter cane. Then I put it in a drawer and forgot it. 

Recently, I decided that I should really use it, so I practiced preheating a section in the kiln and pulling it down to about 1/8" diameter. I didn't do a very nice job of building the black box around the initials, but now I know to be more careful next time. I will use small slices of this, nipped off, to hallmark my beads.

How do you mark your work?

From Mistakes to Inspiration

All week I left the two broken fish tiles sitting on the graphite near my torch. Every time I saw them I felt a pang of loss. I kept thinking about how to salvage them. Then two things went together in my head -- inspiration!!


Leaf patterns are pretty ubiquitous in the glass bead world. I've been practicing my stringer work leaves with what I call my kelp pattern. That stems from one of my earliest art quilts, Going with the Flow, which has beautiful silk kelp and jellyfish. The kelp leaves have a float at the base of each one, so that's the way I do the leaves -- a stem with attached dots for floats and then long upward leaves.


Yesterday, I decided to wrap the broken tiles onto the bead anyway, try to attach the second part as best I could, then cover the break with kelp. Along the way I remembered this idea I had about surface sculpting the beads to give more dimension to the fish. See the trail where the kelp winds around? That's where the crack was.


It also masks nicely the back of the bead where the tile comes together, especially in the beads where I use dichro sheet underneath, because it leaves a noticeable line.

I am so in love with these -- so much more enchanting than the plain, flat fish. I'll never go back!!! I guess I should wish for more mistakes.

Which do you like better -- the plain, flat fish or the sculpted fish?

Venus

A continuation of detailed looks at the planet quilts:

Venus is represented by Aphrodite, the Goddess of Love, in the Greek pantheon. She is the planet of artists, governing the creative urges, passion in all its guises, from procreation to culture in general. Lush and green, she bursts with growth. Friday is her special day (ah, that weekend ahead!). In the world of power numbers, with sevens popping up all over, Venus claims that number for her own, hence the 7x7 magic square on the back side.

Venus/Aphrodite rules love and affections, art, pleasure, grace, beauty, compassion, marriage, music, friendship, happiness, romance, and harmony.

Planets

I thought I'd add a series of posts about each of the planet quilts, giving details and info that didn't fit with the Quilting Arts magazine article. Warning: not all the quilts are finished, so it'll be a while to see all seven. ;-)

Sol

It's hard to imagine back to the days when the sun was considered a planet, one of seven known to ancient man's geocentric planetary system. Sol is the Roman name, and Helios is the Greek version -- hence our current heliocentric system. In the Greek Pantheon, the sun is Apollo, the Lord of the Day and light of consciousness.

Each of the seven planets is associated with one of the days of the week (seven was a power number and I've been thinking about lots of series of seven). It's no surprise that Sol connects to Sunday. It also seems imminently reasonable that the color and metal associated with Sol are both yellow gold.

Sol confers all things sunny and bright -- honor, good reputation, influence, power and popularity, riches, freedom, vitality, succes, intellect and wisdom, fame.

I'm not quite certain how the planets got connected to magic squares, except that numbers were themselves considered so powerful and magic squares must have seemed purely mystical. After all, the incredible Benjamin Franklin was quite taken with magic squares as well. Sol is planet number 6, so a 6 x 6 square will have all the numbers from 1 to 36 inside, and the rows and columns will all sum to 111, and 6 x 111 is 666, the number of the beast from the Bible!

Good Heavens!

I finally got the week's mail (held from my holiday vacation) and found my copy of Quilting Arts Magazine tucked inside. My article, titled "Starmaker: Heavenly Results from a Space-Age Material," appears on page 42. (No, I can't take credit for the humble title. ;-)) It describes my techniques with interfacing as a quilt surface, and really shows off the details of Venus/Aphrodite with a beautiful, full-page close-up photograph of the center.


Even better were all the other great articles -- two by my fellow Gomez Sisters, Judy Perez and Frances Alford. Judy reveals all her secrets about using painted batting as a quilt surface, and Frances gives recipes for "bead soup," her encrusted quilts that have surfaces literally covered with beads, buttons, and other collectibles.

As a fellow yogini, I particularly love the yoga quilt series by profiled artist, Pam RuPert,who has a delightful sense of humor. There are several more enticing articles as well, including a lovely article involving needle felting by Sara Lechner. I'm looking forward to sitting down and reading it front to back in detail.

ADD

I finally had a weekend to address my ADD -- that's Art Deprivation Disorder.

Friday night, I went to the newest Austin warm glass shop, Helios, to see a slide show by wildlife artist Kathleen Sheard, who calls her work micromosaic. Some of her incredible pieces involve 50 passes through the kiln. Beautiful! This egret is 8 pieces and 4' x 7'!


Saturday I started the ADD rounds in my various media. I spent time before yoga stitching on Assunder, a Matrix quilt started more than a year ago and left in limbo because of being overwhelmed by the amount of stitching needed to get it to my taste.


Then I fired my precious metal clay pieces (PMC) for assembly later.

I finished painting a new group of glass tiles and fired those, as well. I cleaned up in the glass studio during all that kiln time (I didn't want to trip the electrical breaker by turning on the oxygen concentrator and another kiln). Finally, I was able to get on the torch and make a few beads, refamiliarizing myself with the technique for wrapping glass tiles around a base bead.

Finally, I trekked to New Braunfels to see two demos by an incredible Japanese beadmaker by the name of Akihiro Okhama. He was teaching classes at Heritage Glass on Japanese torches with Satake glass. I watched him make a cherry blossom bead like this one:


On Sunday, I was back out at the kiln at 7 am to get the PMC assembly fired before my yoga class. Then, back on the torch, I wrapped a few more glass tiles and made some beads intended for electroforming experiments. I also painted the cicada wing with copper paint, readying it for electroforming.




Whew! No wonder I couldn't sleep last night. Too many ideas were bouncing around in my head!

Planets Aligning

I've long been fascinated with space. As a child, I read science fiction, subscribed to Sky and Telescope magazine, and planned to study astrophysics, thinking that might get me off the planet. Alas, the colonization of space has not proceeded apace.

As I homeschool my son (we're in the 7th year!), I have developed a fascination with history, which was an incredibly dry, boring subject in the multitude of public schools that I attended as I hopscotched around the country with my family following the Corps of Engineers water control projects. Greek mythology and the ancients' views of the planetary bodies controlling our day-to-day lives has caused me to fill a notebook with research into the imagery and concepts associated with each of the ancient planets. As art would have it, a series of small works demanded attention.

You'll be able to see what I've been up to in detail soon in an article to appear soon in Quilting Arts Magazine. Stay tuned.

Fauna Details

emprint asked for more details about Fauna. I've put small cuts of my strip here so that you can click on them and really see the details.

For the best coverage, see the article about it in the April/May 2007 issue of Quilting Arts Magazine. I don't have the details right in front of me, but the overall size of the quilt is roughly 4'x5'.

Our mandate was to construct a panel, approximately 4'x1' with 1/3 sky, 1/3 land, 1/3 underground with fauna accompanied by flora. (We also stipulated blue, not turquoise, sky and a purple backing fabric.) Starting with white fabric, each of the five artists used their own personal toolbox to paint, assemble, and quilt their panel. I assembled the completed panels using a butted, reinforced seam of free-motion satin stitch and a grosgrain facing to finish the edges.

I won't try to speak for the other artists, but I can describe my panel in more detail. I painted Pellon interfacing for the front surface and appliquéd pieces onto a composite background. The cactus flowers centers are machine stitched of pearl cotton loops, and the cactus spines are thin copper wires tacked in place by machine.

Sisters

Sisters are special, and artistic sisters are especially special. Since we met almost a decade ago as a new group of Austin art quilters, now dispersed across the country, we've been supporting one another personally and artistically. We have also followed a common process of making group quilts, but with amazing prize-winning success.

Today, we did it again! After the disappointment of having Fauna barred from the International Quilt Association show in Houston last year (because of yours truly, who had the nerve to stitch sharp wire spines to painted prickly pear cactus), we were thrilled when Quilting Arts Magazine ran an eight page spread on the quilt in the April/May 2007 issue. Today we learned that Pacific International Quilt Festival awarded it second place in the Innovative category.

This quilt marks the first time that we have entered under the moniker of The Gomez Sisters. Our real names in order of the panels, left to right are: Frances Holliday Alford, Kathy York, me, Julie John Upshaw, and Judy Coates Perez.

Time is flying, and soon we'll be flying...on our way to Hawaii!! My husband, Keenan, is presenting a short talk at the meeting of the American Society for Bone and Mineral Research in Honolulu, so my homeschooled son, Joren, and I will tag along on an extended field trip to learn about Polynesian culture, Pearl Harbor, volcanoes and ocean life. This is why we homeschool! Watch for lots of Hawaiian flora and fauna photos.

Today I'm working on bead images to submit to glass magazines -- one of the goals that I set for myself after attending the Gathering. I have spent the entire afternoon with the camera and Photoshop. Whew!

Photographing glass is hard! It's almost the opposite of photographing quilts. Quilts tend to be large, giving flat field and extended lighting problems, plus they are light absorbing and make showing the tiny relief that the stitching adds difficult. Beads are small, need a tight focus and more depth of field, and they give hard reflections from the lights. With thousands of dollars previously invested in photographic equipment, I'm probably going to break down and buy a small light tent to make this easier.

Surprise, surprise! I did actually pull out fabric and start working on a small piece yesterday in the Leaf Mosaic Series. I really love the last piece I made in this series and I'm crazy about ginkgo leaves, so that's what I'm working on. For some reason I don't understand, there's a huge amount of red in the new piece. What's up with that?? I never use red.

Glass and cloth are so much alike!

When I started learning to work with warm and hot glass, I just kept repeating that to myself over and over. Art is art. The design elements don't change. If I can work with color and surface design in cloth, I can do that in glass as well. The techniques are different, but the ideas are the same.

In fact, I have a file on my computer for some future book on the subject! Starting with a list of processes I knew how to do on cloth on one side of the page, I listed how to do that same process in glass on the other side. If I didn't know how to do one, then I had a research project (and scientist that I am, I LOVE that!). I spent hours on the web looking at how people work with glass, and I took classes from lots of incredible glass artists. As of yet, I haven't dreamed up a catchy name along the lines of Jane Dunnewold's Complex Cloth, but I do spend time thinking about building up layers with glass in the same fashion that she does with cloth.

Incomplete it is, but I'm making a lot of progress. To give you a taste of what I'm looking at, compare a Robert Leatherbarrow powder wafer bowl or shield (his site seems to be down at the moment, rats, try again later) with a Debra Lunn/Michael Mrowka potato dextrin quilt.

When I started this compilation, I was thinking of working in fused glass to yield flat or gently curved panels, with the vision of combining them somehow with fiber. It's not a natural combination because there are real differences that mask the similarities between glass and cloth. But those differences are as attractive as the similarities. What a great juxtaposition of hard vs. soft, breakable vs. yielding, smooth and shiny vs. sculpted and matte.

Then I got sidetracked into beads because of the smallness and immediacy of the work. It's so addictive to make something in an hour or two and have it finished (admittedly it has to sit in the kiln overnight)! The notion of a series takes on a whole new meaning when each piece is that quick. What a contrast to a huge quilt with hundreds of hours of machine quilting that would take me months to finish. And people, including me, adore beads and jewelry. They collect them and hoard them and wear them, which isn't nearly as possible with quilts. No wonder I diverted!

Now I feel I'm finally coming around full circle. Yesterday, while drawing goldfish onto a small tile for a bead, I was frustrated by the limited canvas. I've been thinking about working larger. I've been thinking about cloth again. I've been poking through photos of my quilts and thinking about the connections to glass and looking at all the unfinished work. I've been going through my Book of Attractions, a book of magazine clippings of artwork that attracts me, reading what I wrote about why each piece calls to me. I've been sketching and collaging and painting in the sketchbook I took to Spain and Italy. I've been chatting with my online artist friends about what I should do.

Suddenly I have that feeling I get when some big shift is about to happen.

Glass and cloth are so similar, why NOT put them together?

Quilts or Beads or ????

Fiber.Art.Glass is a strange name for a blog. It makes you wonder if I'm making things out of fiberglass. I tried to choose a name that mixed fiber art and art glass, but that may not be apparent.

In reality, I have a decade plus background as a contemporary fiber artist, making quilts meant for the wall (not your grandmother's quilts!) with lots of exhibitions, publications and collections out there to prove it. The quilt here, Enlightenment, is 84" x 84" and resides permanently in the Museum of the American Quilters' Society in Paducah, KY.

Glass has always been a love (I did a lot of stained glass before my son was born), and I started buying a lot of beads and cabochons to embellish some of my quilts. That, of course, led to the notion that it would be better to make my own because then I could have exactly what I wanted. Oh, such innocent ideas! Lately I've made a lot more glass than fiber. And we won't even mention the metal stuff that calls as well.

I've been wondering who visits this blog -- are they fiber art people or are they glass people -- and what the heck do they think when there's none of "their" favorite stuff in sight on the top page. And what do they think of the "other?"

This got me to thinking about the commonalities in the work -- where are the connections between the fiber and the glass? So I thought I'd show a few pieces of each, side by side, to point out some common themes.

Cactus comes to mind. I never understood what people saw in them until the prickly pears bloomed profusely one year and I saw my first Santa Rita prickly (which has pink, blue and purple pads!). Then I got obsessed with the things. I loved the idea of soft, quilted fabric pads with hard metal prickles. So I made a couple of quilted pieces, including a panel for a group piece called "Fauna" with my quilting buddies, which was recently published in Quilting Arts Magazine (see back posts). And when I made beads and vessels, the cactus would sometimes pop up there, often with fauna.


































































Leaves got a lot of my quilting attention for a period of time. Among many others, there were a group of small, mounted Leaf Mosaic works that remind me of some recent leaf beads. And there were definitely ginkgos in both fiber and glass.
































































It's interesting to think about the overlap. I'll have to give it more time to percolate.

Quilting Arts

Issue 26 of Quilting Arts Magazine contains an eight-page spread of "Fauna," a group quilt including my desert fauna panel. The magazine cover is a closeup of the seahorse from Kathy York's panel. Kathy also has her own separate article in the magazine detailing construction of the three-dimensional fish on her quilt "Sychronized Swimming." And another member of the group, Frances Holliday Alford, has a devoted article about her typically heavily embellished work. The two other members of the group are Judy Coates Perez and Julie John Upshaw.

This issue also has a special article on a public installation of two gorgeous fabric paintings made by Joanie SanChirico, a fellow member of Fiber Connection.

This is the best issue ever, IMO!

Prickles #1

15" square

Handpainted Pellon with copper wire spines.