Opening in Neumünster, reactions

In a personal mail regarding my post about the opening in Neumünster, Claire Benn pointed out to me that she was merely asked to open Nancy’s exhibit Monoprinting, and that is what she did. She was not asked to talk about Color Improvisations.

Claire then clarified for my benefit that Nancy only considered 25 of her 100+ attempts worthy of putting forward to stitch and ultimately showing them, and was not displaying each and any of the first attempts at a new technique as accomplished pieces of art.

She also criticized my choice of language in saying “I was not terribly impressed” as too subjective, I should rather have said “I did not like them” and told the readers why, thus being more objective in my criticism.

Well, I wasn’t trying to be objective, that's not what I intend to do with this blog, I was stating a very subjective point of view. 

But I would like to go into just a bit more detail about what I was trying to say:

• I love Nancy Crow, I admire her work.
• I think her personal insistence on bringing art quilts to attention can not be overvalued, and it is due to her doing to a large extent that we all can do what we are doing today, because she has given artquilts an importance.
• I have taken several classes with her, I have learned immensely from her, and I am deeply grateful for how she has kept pushing me in my development as a quilter. (In which I still consider myself a learning person.) She is a tough teacher, and I would not want her differently, even if some of the things she says about one’s work might hurt at that point. Most of the times she’s right.
• I also feel deeply honoured to be part of the exhibition Color Improvisations.
• I wrote the announcement article for the German Guild’s journal on this exhibition, and I was very curious and excited about seeing this new work by her. So let me here re-state the choice of language that Claire criticized me for when I mentioned ‘not being terribly impressed’: I was not as impressed as I would have wanted, or expected to be. I didn’t not like them, and therefore I did not want to say that. But I personally could not connect to these compositions. Knowing the high standards Nancy uses in her classes, I was expecting to be more overwhelmed.

But I did say that I am looking forward to numbers 100 and up, because I think Nancy will have a lot to say in mono-printing.

As Gail and Kit have put it in their comments to my other post: this new direction of Nancy’s is interesting, but/and it takes getting used to. And perhaps – hopefully, soon! – there will be a piece in this series of which I will be able to say: Wow, personally and subjectively speaking, I am terribly impressed and completely overwhelmed. 

"Color Improvisation" and Nancy Crow's Self-Portraits opened in Neumünster

My trip to Neumünster was strenuous and not without delays, but I won’t go into that. The textile museum Tuch + Technik  is a wonderful presentation of the history and development of spinning, weaving, in combination with the local history of Neumünster, which was once called the “Sheffield of Schleswig-Holstein”. And it is a wonderful venue for the many large quilts of “Color Improvisation”.

View over the museum hall when entering

Two of Marina Kamenskaya's four quilts

Randa Stewens, Uta Lenk,
and Kathy Loomis in the background

Bonnie Bucknam

Nancy Cordry, and Leslie Riley in the background

Uta Lenk, Jayne Willoughby Scott,
and Cathy Shanahan in the background

Some of the quilts are hung on a system that makes it possible for the viewers to take closer looks at the back sides. Which definitely give very interesting sights with some of the quilts, e.g. this one by Jayne Willoughby Scott. Seeing the quilting pattern on the back side certainly adds to the pleasure of having seen the front!

Jayne Willoughby Scott, back of "Nightdrawing 14"

Jayne Willoughby Scott, Nightdrawing 14

The second part of the exhibition is dedicated to the newest quilts by Nancy Crow, who has started on a completely new path a little more than a year ago, when she began making mono-prints.

As I already mentioned in my last post, Nancy Crow’s name is presented prominently on the front of the flyer, suggesting that this is the more important part of the exhibition. The same was true for the opening speech by Claire Benn, http://www.committedtocloth.com/ who had flown in from London to open the exhibit on Nancy’s behalf. She barely mentioned the other fifty quilts that were hanging throughout the museum.

Because I had written an article on this ‚coming exhibition’ for the journal of the German Patchworkgilde in September, for which I had received pictures of Nancy’s quilts, I knew sort of what to expect in terms of different style of quilts and color.

However, when I recall what I learned in Nancy’s classes about colors, design, composition and unity of the whole arrangement, I admit that I was not terribly impressed with some of these quilts.

I admire the guts that Nancy has to be starting on such a completely new venture by taking on a new technique, and I am convinced that it will be very interesting to follow her development. Claire Benn said in her speech: „And then I tell my students ‚now get to work, and do at least a hundred of these.’ Nancy is exceptional in that she did.“

But even a well-known artist perhaps need not exhibit all of these hundred first attempts as accomplished pieces of art. Of these four quilts in the picture, the one in the lower right hand corner carries the number 97.

Nancy Crow, Self-Portraits

While I was looking at the exhibit, it was the only one that I really found worth looking at in more detail, and that I could relate to in some manner. With most of the others I did not connect easily. When looking at the picture now, I do think the two white and black ones are also worth looking at, this seems to be an effect of the zooming onto picture size, though, they certainly did not appear clear or understandable to me when I was standing in front of them. 

It will be interesting to see numbers 100 and up, because I am sure Nancy has a lot to say through printing.

The exhibit is on until March 10, 2013, and the museum is within walking distance of the train station in Neumünster.

Color Improvisations in Neumünster

I have packed my bag and am planning to hop onto the train early tomorrow morning to attend the opening of  the double show of Color Improvisations and fifteen quilts by Nancy Crow in Neumünster, north of Hamburg.

There has been a bit of a discussion on the Contemporary Group of QGBI's yahoo list about the recent showings of this exhibition in London (badly hung) and Dublin (wonderfully hung) and how the advertisement with a provenance of the name "Nancy Crow" had influenced visitors' expectations.
Margaret Cooter commented on this on her blog with some interesting thoughts, weighing carefully between the arguments for either side.
It is an interesting topic. I don't know how the advertisement for the two shows in England and Ireland was constructed. But when I received my invitation for the opening at the Tuch + Technik Museum, I of course immediately noticed that the quilt on the front of the flyer was one of the three quilts by Bonnie Bucknam in the show, while the prominently displayed name was that of Nancy Crow.

Now I happen to know some things about how the show came about, and how difficult it was to find appropriate places to show it - 50 large quilts need some space, after all! - because Nancy Crow's original intention was to show it only in art museums. As a matter of fact, it was my suggestion to Ginie Curtze to try at Tuch + Technik that secured this last stop in Europe before the show is supposed to go overseas.
I think it is quite justifiable to combine these two shows, especially since they are closely connected through the person of Nancy Crow - she is the initiator and curator of Color Improvisations, which shows quilts by her students from several countries, and of course she is a famous quilter herself. If museums and organizers of shows demand some additional attraction that will catch people's attention after Color Improvisations has been traveling for more than two years, that is quite understandable and acceptable. It's just a case of negligent editing that the flyer combines Bonnie's quilt with Nancy's name.
Does the name of the artist affect a viewer's perception of a piece of art? Of course it does - but that does not necessarily mean that this will be the same in every viewer. I openly admit that I was not terribly impressed with Mona Lisa when I saw the painting in the Louvre - no matter who painted it, and how many people think differently. On the other hand, I was really impressed with several of the works I saw in the Global Paper exhibition in Deggendorf, that I went to without knowing more about it than that it was supposed to be an interesting exhibit, and although I really only knew three of the names of artists on display (and one of the three turned out to be a doppelgänger). One of my most favorite quilts was made by an anonymous slave. All it requires is to keep an open mind. Great names may promise great stuff,
but no-names can certainly create great stuff as well.
In any case, I am looking forward to my trip. Let's just hope German Railways can cope with the fact that it is snowing...

Beyond „Beyond Comfort“, „Color Improvisations“ and Carrefour Ste. Marie-aux-Mines

Currently I have five quilts travelling in internationally oriented exhibits.

Two of them are with SAQA’s “Beyond Comfort”, which will next be ssen at the Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio, from January 13 through March 10, 2013.

Two of them just had an appearance at the Alexandra Palace Knitting and Stitching Show to – “Color Improvisations” was in London, and is now scheduled to go to Dublin and then Neumünster in Northern Germany in December, before going on to other international venues. The fifth quilt is my jury member’s contribution to this year’s Contest at the Carrefour Ste. Marie-aux-Mines, which will be travelling with the exhibition for a whole year before it gets returned.

And of course, I had that big show in Ste. Marie-aux-Mines in September, so overall I guess I could already now say it has been a successful year.

However, I did not get into any of the other shows to which I submitted entries throughout the year. Neither EQA nor Quilt Triennale nor SAQA’s Wide Horizons III, nor Schweinfurth’s Quilts=Art=Quilts, and, most recently, Quilt National. Now with QN I didn’t get my hopes up high to begin with, having heard about the numbers of entries, which reduces probability to get selected even further than in any other big event. And I’m in good company when looking at all the people I have heard from who got declined as well. I think that might make a wonderful exhibit – “We did not get in”! (And, of course, it raises VERY high expectations as to the quality of the show as such, when all those well-known people were rejected.)  And after my experience as a jury member at the Carrefour, I have heard that I have been the cause of indignation in others, whom I (well, partly I) rejected...

Conclusions from this? Keep trying, don’t take it personally, and look for other chances and possibilities to exhibit.

How do you spell "relief"? 23,90m.

When I was an exchange student in High School in Charlotte, North Carolina, my Swedish exchange student friend had a green T-shirt which read “How do you spell "relief"? G=R=A=D=U=A=T=I=O=N!” It took me a while to understand that shirt, because I had been enjoying the year, but after somebody had taken the pains to explain it to me that first part of the sentence has stayed with me. Every once in a while there is an opportunity where it can aptly describe my feelings, whereas the second half may vary.

One such opportunity for calling up that first part of the sentence occurred earlier this week. After my husband and I had sat down to update our plans for 2012 in early January, I had felt rather panicky at first. I realized how much, and how many different things, I had on my agenda especially during the first part of the year. And I also saw that I needed to have quite a lot of yardage covered for the show at Ste. Marie-aux-Mines. I thought I would never be able to come up with 29 running meters of quilts.

For a few days I slept badly, was running around like a headless chicken with that distinctive feeling of panic, and, I admit, even considered calling it all off. Turning to making traditional quilts as blankets, giving them away, and quit trying to be an art quilt maker.

But after a couple of days I had a serious talk with myself. I told myself that this was a chance I wasn’t going to get again. That I had had other exhibits where I had hung more yardage than 29 m. That there was still a total of eight months left, which gave me ample opportunities to make more quilts, even if therre were a lot of other things that would keep interrupting me. “Stop worrying, and sit down to work!” was the thing I finally told myself.

The first thing I then did in preparation for Ste. Marie was that I once more read the rules carefully, which quilts I would be allowed to hang or not. Not allowed are quilts that had already been seen in Ste. Marie earlier – fair enough! That excludes at least five quilts of mine, two of which are still traveling with Color Improvisations and won’t be back until the fall anyway. 

Still traveling with "Color Improvisations",
and has already been shown in Ste. Marie-aux-Mines:
excluded from my show in the fall, Play of Lines VIII.

Not allowed are quilts that have been shown at the Festival of Quilts in Birmingham or other major European festivals, that excludes four other quilts, again two of which are still traveling with Beyond Comfort and are not likely to be back before the fall.

When I sent in my signed contract to the Carrefour I asked whether quilts that had been shown at the Italian Abilmente in Verona (where I had a solo show a couple of years ago) counted as “shown at a major European venue”, and received the answer that if I showed one or two of them at Ste. Marie that would be ok, just as long as I did not rely entirely on those. And I also received note that I would be allowed to hang the quilt that was part of the competition last year, even though, of course, it had been shown in Ste. Marie last year.

Detail of "Personality",
my entry to last year's competition in Ste. Marie

Then I sat down and started a file in which I listed the quilts that I would be allowed to hang, including their actual measurements, and the 50cm space allowance between them added. At first calculation I arrived at about half of the yardage I need to cover. Which helped to allay the panicky feeling at least a bit. Work grew slightly more concentrated after that.

Detail of Play of Lines XXIV: Tangle (2011),
will be shown in Ste. Marie-aux-Mines

Earlier this week I updated that file with the measurements of the quilts I’ve been working on recently.

Detail of a new Play of Lines,
I think it will be No. XXVI or so,
and will be shown in Ste. Marie-aux-Mines

I also included one which is currently hanging in my husband’s office, about which I only recently realized that it had been the beginning of a new series a couple of years ago. I just did not know that then. Now the follow-ups are popping up in my mind.  

Detail of No. 3 in the new series Shapes, work in progress,
will be shown in Ste. Marie-aux-Mines

And after a new calculation I arrived at 23,90m. Whew.

That’s only 5 more meters to go – with six months ahead, and many ideas left in my sketchbooks. Now that count includes the 2,30m of the quilt I just entered for the Quilt Triennale – not knowing whether it will be accepted, I am still counting it on the list as a possible participant. So the count may actually go down to slightly under 22m. But still – even 7m sounds feasible. And who knows, some of the quilts currently on the list can easily be exchanged for newer ones that are waiting in line to be made and finished.

Color Improvisations - exhibition dates for 2012

The participating artists in "Color Improvisations" have meanwhile been notified of additional venues in Europe in 2012, before the exhibition is then moving on to the US and overseas.

Netherlands: 
From June 8th until September 2012 the exhibition will be in the Open Air Museum Het Hoogeland, Warffum, The Netherlands. For more information and updates, check here. 


Germany:
According to the Color Improvisations hompage, the show will be shown in Munich at the German Patentamt in September. Unfortunately, no exact dates have been given yet.


UK and Ireland:
The exhibition will be held alongside The Knitting and Stitching Show in both, Alexandra Palace, London (October 11 through 14, 2012) and the RDS in Dublin, Ireland (November 1 through 4, 2012).


Hope you'll be able to check it out at any one of these places.
To order a catalogue, click here. 

My sewing machine, quilting and I

I am a dedicated and convinced hand quilter. Unfortunately, my normal days only have 24 hours, and that is by far not enought to deal with all the quilts I want to make by hand. Add to that the fact that I have seen many modern quilts during the last years which were expertly machine quilted, which did contribute to my caving in – I can say these days that machine quilting indeed has its merits for modern quilts. (Still not so sure about those made in a traditional pattern/style, but that’s a different story.) Even for mine! Accordingly, I did decide that it was necessary to improve my machine quilting capacity. The first attempts a few years ago were rather tedious, partly because I stupidly started out with rather huge pieces, on a plain home machine, using my walking foot. Both of these quilts measure more than 180 cm across either way:

Play of Lines VIII -
machine quilted by a beginner, size 185 by 188 cm

Play of Lines X, machine quilted by a beginner, size 203 by 188 cm

For Play of Lines VIII I chose parallel lines all across, which went very well with the three-part-partition of the composition. Play of Lines X was even more of a challenge because I decided on varying patterns in different areas. So I had to deal with figuring out tension issues in free motion quilting. Certainly a huge challenge for my veteran home machine, together we reached our limits, although we did make it. Both of these pieces have been traveling with “Color Improvisations”.

A few smaller quilts followed, with me mostly relying on those parallel lines, which my machine could handle.

But when I began to tire of parallel lines I was a bit at a loss, because of the limitations of my machine. Every time it came to subjecting a finished top to quilting I would fret to myself “well, how I am going to quilt that thing?” When I tried out other patterns than the parallel lines while still using the walking foot, I usually ended up with a lot more threads to sink than I actually cared for. 

At that point I even pondered buying a longarm machine, perhaps taking in commissions to quilt other people’s quilts in order to pay it off. Even went to a business start-up workshop to figure out the necessary business details for such an undertaking. Needless to say, the coach could not even fathom that this might be a possible way (of course, he had never heard of quilting before anyway) and seriously doubted that there would be any possibilities of obtaining a loan to pay for the machine to begin with.... Add to that the fact that around the same time we realized my son would need a room in the house for his drum set, and I certainly did not want to take the risk and start renting additional rooms where I could install a longarm machine which would even have added to the costs.

So I took advantage of the offer for the new Janome Horizon which was launched at the German Quilters’ Guild’s Patchwork Meeting in Dortmund in 2010. Teachers of workshops got an even better offer than the world-launch-offer for visitors of the festival, and it has since become my quilting machine.

Nevertheless, first attempts at free motion quilting offered rather unsatisfying results, again, tension problems. Machine quilting was not liking me – and I was beginning to return to not liking it either.

Meanwhile my Janome and I have been on a wellness-tour together when I took it to the dealer in the Bavarian Forest, about a two-hour drive from here. There the tension was readjusted, and I bought a special bobbin for free motion quilting.

Now that the hardware seems to have been optimized as much as possible, I was totally motivated and decided to start yet another major effort with at my machine quilting by practising practising practising. First, I want to sort of follow the 365-day-free motion filler quilting design project by Leah Day.

I’ll keep you posted on how that goes.

Workshop with Nancy Crow

I’ve been in Falera in Switzerland for three days now, taking part in a workshop taught by Nancy Crow.

This is the view from my working space:

However, anybody who has ever taken part in one of Nancy’s workshops knows that there is really not a whole lot of time to enjoy a magnificient view!

On the first day you usually start with sewing various – and rather numerous – sketches within the topic. Our topic this time is “Lines, Curves, Circles, Figure and Ground”, and we began with lines. Now that is just the right thing for me, since I have been working on that series „Play of Lines“ for three years now, and I don’t have the impression that I am done with it yet.

Thus I spent quite some time trying to figure out, amongst others, the most interesting arrangement of three lines to each other, which were not allowed to touch each other. Let me show you only a small selection of the various arrangements I laid out before finally sewing one together:

In the afternoon we were allowed to use some neutral colors as well. This is a first stage in the design process for that exercise.

In the evening we then received the first exercise in which we were allowed to use color. I first thought this might be an exercise that would leave me with another UFO, a workshop-piece that I would not want to finish. I then decided to interpret Nancy’s instructions in a rather liberal manner, which is something I have learned to do over the number of workshops that I have taken with her. If you can argue convincingly why you did not follow the instructions to the point, and the result is convincing, too, that will be fine.

So now I am sewing according to instructions, sort of. It will be interesting to see whether it will be a UFO or a completed piece.

Daily Art Project as a Dialogue: Daily Mail

I started reading Kathleen Loomis' blog just about a year ago. I'd met Kathy for the first time at a Masters Composition Class at Nancy Crow's barn in Ohio in 2008. At that time I had been filled awe and respect about her work - after all, she was the first person ever to machine quilt one of Nancy Crow's quilts! At the barn, I got to work on the table next to Kathy, and although we were both caught up in our own work, we had enough time to look at what the other was doing, and I was really impressed with the pieces Kathy was working on, and also with the way Kathy was talking about her art.
After that, we had a few contacts by e-mail, and finally found out that we were both going to be part of Color Improvisations, soon opening at Karlsruhe, Germany.
A few weeks before the first opening of Color Improvisations in Stuttgart on July 12, 2011, I then found out about Kathy's blog via a hunt from Bonnie Bucknam and, not having had any real experience with blogs before, started reading it backwards. Slowly I made my way back to January when she had started writing it, reading a few entries every time I had a chance. About two weeks before the opening in Stuttgart I had finally found out how Kathy got started on her Art-a-Day project, which she regularly posted about, and which had had a most inspiring effect on me. Knowing that I would meet Kathy in Stuttgart a thought occurred to me which then slowly evolved over the next two weeks: what would it be like for two people to join in such a daily art project in an exchange? What kind of dialogue would it turn into?
It took me a lot of courage to tell Kathy about this idea at all because I was a little bit afraid she would think I would be trying to steal her idea. But it turned out she was very open to my initial suggestions, and within less than a complete half hour we had come up with a handwritten "contract" about our joint project which would be called "Daily Mail":

'Contract' for joint "Daily Mail Project",
signed July 10, 2011

Starting on September 15, 2011, we would commit for a period of six months, each of us sending the other one an e-mail every day, with either a picture, or a piece of text, or a little explanation. Themes were allowed to develop.
During the two months between our signing of the agreement and the actual beginning I started taking many more pictures than I ever had before, trying to stock up on pictures because I was slightly afraid that at some point I might actually run out of current pictures to send. Little did I know about the dynamics that this project would get caught up in!
I was lucky early on, too, to find two instances of a motif  that made it possible to open and end the project with a pun on Kathy's blog title "Art with a Needle", as I could name them "Art with a Noodle":

Daily Mail, September 15: Art with a Noodle

 Living in Europe means that I was six hours ahead of Kathy, and I got to start first.
Early on I sent a picture of our local cemetery - which got Kathy started on a long though intermittent row of cemeteries from all over the world:

Daily Mail September 16: Cemetery

 And that was only the beginning of it all.

See future posts for further reports on the project, and read about Kathy's side of the story here!