Friday, December 31, 2010
Tuesday, December 28, 2010
EU regulation out to kill Light Art
A few days ago I read an article in the Süddeutsche Zeitung to which I was attracted because it was crowned with a picture of a wonderful work by Dan Flavin, light artist (here are some pictures of his works):
article heading: Extinguished! |
I had seen a retrospective of Flavin's at the Pinakothek der Moderne in 2007, which was on display at the same time when the old Amish Quilts were being shown. As much as I adored his works then, I still thought at the time that they could have spared a few of the many square meters he had been given for his installations to give the Amish quilts a few more square meters so they could breathe, they were so jammed into their room. But that’s a different story.
I loved Dan Flevin’s work, and am very grateful that I got to see such an overwhelming number of works at the same time.
I am a light person, and the biggest disappointment of my trip to Dortmund last May was that I did not have enough time to go to nearby Unna to see the museum for Light Art, Zentrum für Internationale Lichtkunst there.
Another wonderful light installation I got to see was Olafur Eliasson’s exclusive work for the Kunstbau of the Lenbachhaus Munich which was shown there and gave you a very specific feeling for the premises due to the constanstly changing colors of light. I could have stayed there much longer than the three hours I actually did. Some pictures of his works can be seen here.
The article I mentioned above, however, is about a serious threat to such wonderful pieces of art. The European Commission, known for a broad and extensive urge to regulate anything that can be regulated (from the thickness of toilet paper via the standardized size of condoms to the length and straightness of cucumbers, to name just three notorious examples) obviously has found another area where regulation and standardization is necessary and overdue. They have ruled that anything that has lightbulbs or neon lights in it – i.e. a standardized switch with which these can be turned on or off – does no longer classify as art, but is merely „an emitter of light“. Although article author Gottfried Knapp stays rather calm about the regulation, simply pointing out that this will affect video art and computer art as well, it is very clear that he expresses a certain lack of understanding for this most recent EU ruling. This is most obvious in his last paragraph:
Wie unsinnig der Makel ist, mit dem Brüssel fest installierte Lichtkunstwerke in Europa versieht, macht ein Blick auf die Installation deutlich, die Dan Flavin kurz vor seinem Tod für den im U-Bahn-Schacht eingerichteten Kunstraum des Lenbachhauses in München konzipiert hat: Die vielen im Raum verteilten farbigen Neonröhren animieren die sparsam eingefügten architektonischen Elemente – […] – zu einem plastischen Eigenleben und machen den leeren Saal zu einem begehbaren Kunstwerk, das keiner Ergänzung bedarf und vieles, was Brüssel für Kunst hält, blass und alt aussehen lässt.
(Free translation: It becomes obvious how senseless this Brussel-initiated stigmatization of permanently installed works of light art is when one takes a look at the installation which Dan Flavin designed for the Kunstraum of the Lenbachhaus, a museum in an underground tunnel in Munich: the many colored neon lights spread out through the entire room animate the few and sparingly inserted architectonic elemts […] to take up a plastic life of their own and transform the hall into a piece of art that can be walked through which needs no further additional elements – and which lets much of what Brussels considers Art look stupid and pale.)
So why am I so upset about this regulation? After all, I needn’t care, do I?
Gottfried Knapp points out that part of the ruling must be monetary – if these pieces loose their status as ART they no longer classify for a special tax rate but fall under normal VAT regulations, surprisingly resulting in the fact that these pieces will be more expensive in the future, although now they aren’t art any longer. And they will thus present more of an income for the state institutions. This looks to me a bit like the big ‚saving efforts’ the states are attempting these days after they bailed out numerous badly managed banks, which often are taken out on those at the bottom of the social scale, ingeniously hidden under inventive formulations.
For one thing, I care because two of my most recent quilts involve LED-strings. One of these was recently accepted by SAQA for the show „Beyond Comfort“ and will be shown in Birmingham next August for the first time. Here is a detail from Illuminated:
Detail from "Illuminated" |
The other one cannot be shown or talked about here yet.
Of course it is upsetting the see these pieces, which have a hard standing in the art world to begin with because they are quilts degraded as ‚not art’ simply because they rely on a plug-in for the lights that are a composite of the design.
Secondly, however, I feel threatened by the Commissions decision – they as non-artists, but true bureaucrats, are telling artists what art is allowed to be, at least by bureaucratic standards.
Isn’t that taking it a bit too far?
Certainly I am all for a lively discussion about what constitutes art or not, and anyone is allowed to have an opinion on the fact whether a piece of work including a lightbulb or a neon light is ‚true art’ or not. But do we need a governement regulation to tell us that? And if you look at all the wonderful pieces by people like Dan Flavin and Olafur Eliasson, by Brigitte Kowanz
(pictures here) or Christina Benz , to name only a few, one just realizes that certainly in this case the European Commission took a wrong decision.
Let’s hope it really is the only wrong decision they took – and that they realize their mistake a.s.a.p. and take it back.
PS: However, yesterday, in my local paper, I read that another EU regulation which is already slowly being implemented is also endangering Light Art, from another side. The new regulations regarding light bulbs, which are supposed to be replaced by energy-saving-bulbs completely by 2012 is already affecting many works of art today. According to Wulf Herzogenrath, the director of Kunsthalle Bremen, the new bulbs are not adequate to replace light bulbs incorporated in many pieces of art on display in museums. It seems the EU is really going strongly after Light Art.
Friday, December 24, 2010
Thursday, December 23, 2010
Dyeing with snow – further results
On Sunday, snowfall stopped to give me break and take a stock of what I had done during the storm.
After washing and ironing I am very pleased with the results – especially with the increase of knowledge that I went through in these few days! Although I have to admit that I don’t like every piece equally well…
Let me show you a few pictures, with explanations of what I did.
This is Brown Rose after washing. Certainly a very characteristic piece.
This is the first blue.
Another blue, from a different mixture:
This was turquoise, very thinly mixed, and yellow, both distributed on the same layer of snow:
When dyeing you are bound to come up with results that you don’t like. Usually I put those back into the cellar right away to be dyed again with another color the next time. Here is an older piece of magenta, overdyed with brown:
This is a piece of linnen which had not been soaked in soda ash beforehand. I had wanted to find out how the pattern changes when the soda is applied after the color. However, I had forgotten that it was this piece, and when I remembered I had already rinsed it partly, so the soaking in soda ash took place with only a limited amount of color left. Pretty interesting chameleon-fabric, I’d say!
One time I did not use a flat tub but put the fabric into a flowering pot where the melting snow could exit through the holes in the bottom. The first snow layer was soaked with yellow
and a second layer after the first one had melted was soaked with blue.
This is the first piece, which thus went through two colorings, no rearrangement took place.
This is the second piece which was put on top and dyed blue. Here you can see very well that the closer arrangement of the fabric in the smaller container caused a more crunched-up layering and resulted in larger white areas. I will definitely overdye this piece with another shade of blue.
And last not least a detail from a piece that was dyed with a color „avocado“. As with brown rose you can see that the components in the mixed powders have different reaction times.
I must say, dyeing with snow certainly is a lot of fun and to my liking. I love experiments, even if (or should I say exactly because?) I don’t know what exactly will happen. However, I don’t consider all the pieces that I made during this past snow storm equally usable. But then that’s a question of taste, too. Let me know your favorites, I'd be interested to find out about other people's tastes in this regard!
I'm very satisfied with the fact that I choose to go for bigger pieces of fabric right away rather than doing Fat Quarter sized samples. Large expanses squeezed into smaller containers give more patterning!
During the next storm I will stick to the simple colors and see what happens to the patterns depending on how you manipulate the fabric , crunching it up, twisting it, perhaps even knotting, who knows. I also have a few shibori-style pieces in the waiting into which I bound up pebbles. That might be interesting, too.
They are calling for more snow tomorrow – and what else is there to do on Christmas Eve than think about dyeing with snow…
Sunday, December 19, 2010
Dyeing with snow – first results
Snowfall continued heavily until this morning, and I have indeed set up a little experiment with snow dyeing every day. They are calling for heavy rain tomorrow, but I do hope it will be snow again! And the results so far have been exciting and encouraging. In case you are curious, I now want to present the first results.
As I did not want to turn on the washer for only two pieces of fabric I have thoroughly rinsed them in the sink and then hung them up to dry. They were photographed without having been ironed. I will continue to collect further results and then wash them all together when a full load has assemble. Then I will present pieces that will have been ironed!
This picture shows approx. half of the piece that was dyed in blue. Snow was heaped onto a dry piece of fabric in this case:
And this is the result of the so far unknown shade of Brown Rose, again approx. half the piece of fabric:
I particularly like this little area in the lower half of the piece, where the mesh printed itself onto the fabric.
It is only a very small area. But certainly an incentive to use this mesh for printing, too. I hope I can get more from the building company that did the renovation of our house last year!
And I do believe I might try to get some more of this color!
Once the washer has been through a full load, I will present the other results, too.
Thursday, December 16, 2010
Dyeing with snow
What is a sensible way of spending one’s time while one is still waiting for the new sink in the newly tiled laundry room, when one really wants to be dyeing? Add another component to this scenario – the fact of lots of snow piling up around the house, with a possibility of being snowed it – then what do you do?
Exactly! You start dyeing with snow.
Mixing the colors is slightly more of a problem because you have to lug everything upstairs to the bathroom as there also is no faucet in the laundry room right now – but I was so eager to get going that I took that easy. However, this picture of our bathroom sink once again convinced me that dyeing is nothing you want to be doing in your bathroom!
I had made plans for snow-dyeing when I first heard about it from a participant in one of my classes. She had brought beautiful examples of snow-dyed fabrics. After that all it took was the right kind of weather.
Of course you need containers and a method to prevent that the fabric will muddle up in that soup of melting snow and color. I decided to make use of some of the many empty marmelade jars downstairs and put them on the bottom of the container upside down.
On top of these I put a mesh to make sure the fabric would not slide into the melted snow-water on the sides. I still had several pieces of fabric that had been pre-soaked in soda ash, so that did not need to be taken care of anymore. And I was lucky enough to find these pieces right away when I started looking for them.
To be on the safe side I decided to start off small, using only two containers. Into each came two pieces of fabric each, on top of the glasses covered with mesh. And on top of the fabric came hand-reaped freshly fallen snow from right outside our front door. (It does make sense to use gloves for this, and not the rubber gloves you use for dyeing, but real gloves.)
Each container was meant to hold a different shade of color. Recently a friend had given me all her colors that she wasn’t using anymore, amongst these was a shade called „brown rose“. Since I had never had that shade before I had no idea what it would turn out like, so I decided it was the right shade to participate in this experiment. I did not measure exactly but simply mixed the remaining amount of powder in the little jar with water. The other color was a shade of blue, also mixed in a rather random manner, no exact measuring. The color was then squirted onto the snow.
The containers were left sitting in the basement where the snow melted slowly during the day. As the melted water dripped down onto the fabric the colors were reacting with the soda-soaked fabric.
I have checked the first batch and it looks wonderful and exciting, results of a kind I have not had before. I will present the first results after washing.
But I can tell you this: I have decided to set up a double container of snow-dyeaing every day for as long as we have snow! I already have several more ideas of different experimental set-ups which I want to try out.
And: the sink has been mounted, too. I can now mix the colors in the basement. Much easier!
Saturday, December 11, 2010
Making plans, and what becomes of them…
This week seems to be the week of thwarted plans.
Originally, I had wanted to start dyeing another dye chart fron yet again different shades of red, yellow and blue, to have more colors at my disposal for my little fabric club. And I had wanted to go to an interesting opening of an exhibition last night.
The dyeing was completely intefered with, however, because a few weeks ago we discovered that the tiles that covered the walls of the laundy room in the basement where I also do my dyeing where falling off.
Because we had had water in the basement earlier in the summer, experts were called in, and they found out that the walls were dry, the tiles stuck very well to the plaster they had been put on – but the plaster was coming off the wall. My husband and I had agreed that since no immediate danger seemed looming we would have the necessary repairs done in February. Early last week we received a call from the firm which had been chosen to do it that they had a three-day slot this week, that the work would be finished within that time and that they would prefer to do it now rather than later. So I packed up everything into boxes, stored it in the next room. The tilers came, were very efficient, did a neat job and left after three days.
New tiles - imagine, how glad I am that the new tiles are white! Before, it was all covered with similarly colored tiles as the floor still is ... |
The problem was the sink in the laundry-room. We had decided to replace it with a larger sink because it was going off the wall anyway, and I wanted a bigger sink than the original one, which had been in the house when we moved in. However, the sink will be installed by a different firm, they don’t have the one I want in stock, and right now we have a perfectly tiled laundry-room without a sink. At least the washer and dryer are working, and I can take care of the laundry while waiting for the sink. It is supposed to come ‚sometime early next week’. Let’s hope it does.
The opening of the interesting exhibition yesterday evening, on the other hand, was interfered with by the weather. It was supposed to take place in Rotthalmuenster, a small town more than an hour east of where I live. But we had lots of snow during the night before:
This is how our car greeted us when we opened the door yesterday morning. |
Although it had stopped snowing during the morning I did not really feel like driving for over an hour in these road conditions, and more snow called for by the weather people. So I did not get to go.
I’m interested in the concept: Jutta Koch-Franciso, a friend of mine, is a gold-smith, has a wonderful shop in Rotthalmünster, goldrichtig (sorry, no website), and always has interesting shows going on in her shop.
I was lucky to exhibit a few of my quilts there together with unusual furniture pieces handmade by carpenter Winfried Neuhäuser in 2009.
Quilt by Uta Lenk, furniture (except the mirror!) by Winfried Neuhäuser |
Quilts by Uta Lenk, furniture by Winfried Neuhäuser (except the display stand for jewellery). |
They started off with a show of Franziska’s own work – and unfortunately I couldn’t go to that opening either, because I was out of town then. Yesterday they started the second exhibit, BRUT by Lena Zehringer, and I really wanted to see how they do it, and to find out what people come to the opening. When the weather gets better I defifnitely want to go and have a look at it, or at least go to the next opening in February.
Do you know about other or similar alternative ways to exhibit art work? Let me know, and perhaps you can tell me how they were received by the public, too.
Friday, December 3, 2010
Inspirational pictures
Whenever I leave my house, I almost always carry my small digital camera with me. While I don't consider myself a great photographer, I do like to take lots of photos. I consider them inspirational pictures, though not every one will necessarily turn into a real inspiration and result in a piece of artwork. Every once in a while I would like to share them with you.
Given the current weather situation, today's pictures are all about winter.
Given the current weather situation, today's pictures are all about winter.
Leftover leaves |
Winter scene |
Tree in winter, in front of truck |
Snow pattern |
Lake Chiemsee in winter |
Sunday, November 28, 2010
More thoughts on Kathy Loomis’ statements
After posting yesterday I spent a long time during which I couldn’t go to sleep because I kept thinking about the whole matter of pictorial quilts, quilts in the art world, art in the quilting world, women in art etc.
This morning I talked to an friend of mine who is a goldsmith by training, and an artist – graduate of Munich Art School – and she pointed out to me that goldsmiths/jewellers face the same problem. Jewellery has a hard time being recognized as art, because it is considered decorative, a craft.
We both agreed on that it all boils down to the question of „what is art?“ What is the line that separates some kind of self-expression from art.
For example, when you see the following picture and know that it was drawn by a five-year-old boy, you would probably not consider it to be 'art':
However, if it bore a different signature, say 'Picasso', you might assume it to be an unknown picture dating from his blue period. (Far-fetched, I know, but let's just assume.)
Or, the above question put differently: „what sells as art?“ It is one’s own decision whether one is determined to make good art or whether one wants to join into the large group of commercial artists.
If you want to sell your work, you may also have to sell your soul. If you believe strongly in what you’re doing you might not have the nerve or time or need to sell what your are making. Vincent Van Gogh certainly strongly believed in what he was doing and didn’t spend a whole lot of time trying to sell his pictures. (Of course, he was lucky in that he had a brother who paid the bills). His pictures do sell well today, though. I think they do because he only concentrated on painting good pictures, and not whether anybody wanted to have or see them, as long as he thought they were showing that he was getting better and better in what he was doing.
If you want to sell your work, you may also have to sell your soul. If you believe strongly in what you’re doing you might not have the nerve or time or need to sell what your are making. Vincent Van Gogh certainly strongly believed in what he was doing and didn’t spend a whole lot of time trying to sell his pictures. (Of course, he was lucky in that he had a brother who paid the bills). His pictures do sell well today, though. I think they do because he only concentrated on painting good pictures, and not whether anybody wanted to have or see them, as long as he thought they were showing that he was getting better and better in what he was doing.
Another point my friend and I agreed on was that if quilters want to be recognized by the ‚real art people’ and participate in the art market (i.e. get their share of the money on that market) they need to get out into the real world and meddle with the real art people. Quilters, however, tend to hang out with their fellow quilters, and as much fun as quilt festivals may be, they simply are a big family convention – quilters meeting and talking to other quilters. The quilt world is a closed circle, and an art critic is not bound to go on the lookout for interesting new artist talents at a quilt show, even if it be a large one such as Houston, or the international quilts festivals in Birmingham, England, or Ste. Marie aux Mines, France.
Then, of course, there is the problem of making art with a needle, the wonderful title of Kathy Loomis’s blog. Any kind of needlework – as making jewellery, weaving, pottery – is still considered a ‚craft’. And, as Julia from NZ said, many quilters are perfectly content with considering themselves as crafters.
In big business art, the artist has the idea and employs crafters to execute these ideas. Ai WeiWei’s catalogue for his "So Sorry" exhibition at the Haus der Kunst in Munich, Germany, last year, shows this very clearly:
Ai WeiWei's Map of China, as it is being executed, photo of the page in catalogue |
Ai WeiWei's carpet for the hall in the museum, as it is being made, photo of the relevant page in the catalogue |
Ai WeiWei's various tables - photo of the page in the catalogue |
Obviously he did do the vases himself. Photo of the page in the catalogue |
Ai WeiWei has the ideas, crafters execute them for him, and he earns the credit. Don’t know how well he pays the crafters … (Don't get me wrong - I loved the exhibit and I think he has great ideas, and I think it honorable that he would employ people to do the manual work.)
I won’t go into the fact that the very large majority of quilters are women. That’s too much to talk about tonight!
Let me – and/or Kathy – know what you think, I’d be very interested in your thoughts.
Saturday, November 27, 2010
Pictorial Quilts and Abstraction in Modern Quiltmaking
In a couple of recent posts Kathy Loomis (Art with a needle) has been talking about pictorial quilts and their significance in the modern quilt world.
I fully agree to what she has to say about quality and beauty of design, and her desperation about the fact that leaves, trees and flowers seem to be en vogue at the moment. I have to say that looking at catalogues of, say, Quilt National in the past few years, had kept me from entering in an American show as I felt that my designs differed rather too strongly from the American taste, and that was mainly due to the many pictorial quilts in these catalogues.
In Europe, pictorial quilts have not been quite so abundant as in the States, but I have the feeling that lots of quilts are being painted on, splashed on, glued on - and from a European perspective the Houston Winners gave a bit of hope that perhaps the time of „the painted quilt was over“ as Barbara Lange has called it in a personal communication.
What I don’t quite understand is why quilting turned pictorial at all – after all, it began as something else. For what is a Log Cabin block, if not an abstract representation? Quilting design was abstract before painted art had even seriously thought about abstraction.
Personally I have never felt the urge to make a (serious) pictorial quilt – with one exemption, a crib quilt for my son which consists of several animals, mostly taken from the pieced animal patterns by Margaret Rolfe, except for one cat pattern that I developed myself. It was fun to make, in expectation of the child that would lie on it (though my friends then convinced me to put it on the wall in his bedroom instead of letting him drool onto it) - yet I would never show it in an exhibit, nor show a picture of it here on the blog.
As Kathy Loomis mentions, fabrics don’t lend themselves easily to quasi-photographic representation. So why do people feel the need to turn a picknick scene in front of a waterfall into a quilt? I’d rather have a painted picture of that, or an enlargement of the photograph that depicts the scene, if I need something to keep my memories of it alive. Tell me: why do you want to have a quilt of a waterfall on your wall – and what reasons should somebody else have to buy that quilt from you?
In the design classes that I teach I try to get the participants to understand the value of abstraction, as the process of abstraction is what turns their design into their very own. In a recent class I taught one participant came to the class with a copy of a picture from a famous German children’s book and wanted to turn that into a quilt, and I asked her „Do you really want to make a quilt with the little witch on a broom flying over the trees?“ In the end she had come up with an abstraction that to her symbolized the fire that the witches were dancing around, but could mean something completely different to another viewer.
In times when photography can give us pictures that are almost as real as reality itself the process of abstraction is what turns any kind or representation into your piece of art. And then the beauty, and perhaps the significance of it, lies in the eyes of the beholder.
Or what do you think?
Wednesday, November 24, 2010
White Walls
For those who do want to know: I did finish that UFO I wrote about in my latest post. However, it did not get included in the exhibit after all, because it just did not fit in well with all the other quilts, which are mostly from my series „Metamorphoses“ and „Play of Lines“. So some may think I might have taken it more easy beforehand, after all I should have known that it didn’t fit in with the others, being of a different style. But although I had been told in advance how many meters of hanging rails I would have available in total I had not really been sure how they were spread out throughout the house. So I wanted to have as many quilts available for hanging as possible. And now I am glad it is finished and I can move on to other things.
Which made me think about „white (design) walls“.
In German there is a saying that nothing is more frightening to a writer than a white sheet of paper on which the next story or text is supposed to be written. Supposedly a white sheet of paper can cause the worst of conditions in writers, a writer's block. Would that apply to a blank new document on a computer screen as well? The software for word processing is most likely going to give some color around that "white sheet of paper".
And in my case, as I work on a design wall in my studio, would that apply to the white or empty design wall, too?
Here is a picture of my design wall, empty as it was Monday morning:
my design wall - turned on the side because I don't know why the computer keeps turning it although the real picture is in the correct orientation... |
Though, to be honest, that wall is never totally empty as I pin stuff onto it on the sides – reminders, scraps, sketches, whatever. However, it was empty regarding ‚a piece of work in progress’. When you look at it, you can see that it isn’t really an empty white wall. First of all there is the line in the middle, caused by the fact that we put two pieces of material up and they had to meet somewhere. Secondly, the two pieces of fabric I used to cover the material differ slightly in make and shade. Thirdly, there are the screws that attach it to the wall. And the pins, waiting for new pieces of fabric. So it isn’t really an empty wall.
And as I have lots of ideas just waiting in my head for me to have enough time to set to work at them, it isn’t frightening either. In fact, I often wish it were a bigger white wall, with more space, perhaps even enough space to work on several pieces parallel.
I am eager to set to work again after all these busy weeks which did not give me much time at the sewing machin, working on art.
However, I started having a lookout for white walls outside. And found out that they, too, are hardly ever only white.
Here’s one that has a few little marks, although it is still pretty smooth.
The following two have slightly larger and larger marks on them.
Then there is one that looks almost pock-marked.
This one is dirty, obviously it has already met with quite a few things.
And this one has been mended.
And then, of course, there are white walls which are more than just a white wall, as this one, which is the wall of a stable in a nearby village.
So, come to think of it, there is really no need to even start getting scared of an empty or white wall, because there is almost always something there already. As there probably is in one’s store of ideas. There is bound to be one particular idea waiting to be pulled out and brought to life.
Wednesday, November 17, 2010
Two days left before the opening
On Saturday my next exhibit will open at „the Petersberg“. You can download your personal invitation here.
„The Petersberg“ is a Catholic Rural Community College just west of Dachau, near Munich, where I have been teaching patchwork classes for several years now. Here is a photo which I have downloaded from their website:
Petersberg -
the fountain in front of the window of the room
where my classes usually take place
What I like about this house is the friendly and open atmosphere and the fact that one can rely on the staff with all one’s needs and wishes. And it is simply wonderful not to have to deal with little organizational matters such as, e.g., mailing the lists of materials needed to the participants. And we can sit down at a loaded table for breakfast, lunch and dinner, including a fantastic salad buffet. It is easy to focus on one’s work there. The number of participants who keep returning shows that this is a very successful concept.
This coming weekend I will also be teaching a class, which will only be interrupted by the opening of the exhibit on Saturday night. The class is called „Finish your UFOs!“ And I myself will probably be working on a UFO until the very last minute before the opening, which will then be sneaked up on the wall as the first guests arrive … I am running just a little late with this because, as always, there are a lot of things that still need to get done before an opening – having hanging strips cut for new quilts, finishing the signs, writing a price list, etc. Not to talk about sinking all these threads and finishing the binding of this last quilt… Who was it that said "if it weren't for the last minute, a lot of things would never get done"?
I actually finished sewing this particular top over a year ago, and had immediately put it onto my standing frame for handquilting as I wanted to use this quilt to return to handquilting for some of my quilts. However, after an impressive start with the quilting, that’s where it was. And that's where it stayd. Too many other quilts called to be made for my exhibit in Dortmund last May, the various calls for entry which I entered this year - 10 days ago I finally took it down from the frame, took out those hand-stitches I had already put in and started quilting it by machine. In fact, I think it will turn out much better now than if it had been hand-quilted. But there are still numerous threads to be sunk and the binding and the tunnel to be finished – we won’t know until the very last minute, whether I will make it or not!
The exhibit will show all my quilts from the series 'Metamorphoses' and 'Play of Lines' which are not traveling with another exhibition and which haven't been sold, and a few quilts which were made before the Metamorphoses.
Hope to see you there!
Hope to see you there!
Tuesday, November 16, 2010
Eternal Calendar
Last Friday I received two large and heavy boxes, which were so heavy that the delivery man wouldn’t even carry them to the door before I had answered and thus shown that he would not have to carry them back to his van. In these were my 150 copies of my (eternal) calendar with pictures of quilts from my series „Play of Lines“.
The series was first initiated by a couple of charismatic line drawings by my then 2 ½- and 3-year-old son. A few of the quilts in the series, which has meanwhile grown to number XXIII, have also been inspired by other images of lines, but a number of those early line drawings are still begging me to be transformed into quilts. As had done the first in the series, which is featured on the title page of the calendar:
Play of Lines I (2008)
March features one of the two quilts on display in the international show Color Improvisations, curated by Nancy Crow.
Play of Lines VIII (2009)
Color Improvisations has been shown in Stuttgart (pictures of the opening can be seen here), Germany, and, a selection, at Ste. Marie-aux-Mines, France, and will again be on display in Karlsruhe, Germany, in May 2011. Further international venues are still being negotiated.
And June features another interpretation of the first drawing.
Play of Lines XI (2009)
All of these quilts are made of my hand-dyed fabrics.
Those quilts which are not traveling with Color Improvisations, and No. XXI, which was sold to Canada during the most recent fund-raising for SAQA, will be on display in my next exhibition for two months, starting this coming Saturday.
I will give you more information about this exhibition tomorrow.
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