"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.

"Tradition in Transition" – the Canadian Exhibition at Ste. Marie-aux-Mines (report no. 3)

As I was mostly bound up with my own personal exhibition in the Eglise St. Louis I did not have a whole lot of time to go around and see other exhibitions. But I did get a chance to run over to the Eglise de la Madeleine where the invited countries usually have their venue. Two years ago it was the German Guild, and I was represented in that show with two of my quilts. This year it was Canada, with a beautiful and impressing show curated by Sandra Reford. (Read her blog here and find her homepage here.) 

Curator Sandra Reford explaining the exhibition to visitors.

The theme of the exhibition was “Tradition in Transition”. It was meant to show the diversity of Canadian quilt making these days, oscillating between traditional patterns and methods and modern approaches and designs. All of this with a number of quilters from across the entire country, from Prince Edward Island to the West Coast. 

Unfortunately, this church really suffered from relatively poor lighting, and photos did not turn out very well.

The show included no. 3 of Jayne Willoughby Scott’s  wonderful “Night Drawings”.

Jayne Willoughby Scott, Night Drawings no. 3

JudithMartin’s work “Energy Cloth” is covered with a lot of embroidery stitches that add another layer of texture to the piece overall, and have a definite effect on the coloring of the wholecloth batik.

Judith Martin, "Energy Cloth"

Judith Martin, "Energy Cloth", Detail

On the edge between traditional and modern is Kate Busby’s “3600 (Beats)” (on the right of the picture). Next to that is “Aglow” by Anna Hergert. 

More on the traditional side, but still with a rather unusual slight twist is “Nine Patch Minuet” by Penelope Player. Sandra Reford told me that Penelope is a third generation quilter, without a website. I love such a modern interpretation of traditional patterns.

Penelope Player, Nine Patch Minuet

What I liked most in the entire exhibition, though, were two pieces that weren’t quilts at all. Sandra Reford told me that she chose both of these artists because they use quilting techniques in other dimensions of textile art. One of them is Chung-Im Kim’s  three-dimensional felt sculpture “Dawn”, which you need to look at from many different directions in order to fully appreciate its entire beauty.

Chung-Im Kim,
"Dawn", viewed from a sideways angle

Chung-Im Kim,
"Dawn", viewed from front

The other one is “Accumulate” by Amanda McCavour. This piece in particular suffered greatly from the poor lighting in the church, and really should have been hung freely from the ceiling instead against a wall.

Amanda McCavour, "Accumulate"

Amanda McCavour, "Accumulate", Detail

Sandra Reford had told me that she did not really go for pictorial quilts and that, of course, her selection was a very personal one. But it was an exhibition very much to my liking - lots of piecing, a good mixture of traditional and modern interpretations. I was very glad to have chosen and seen it.

First anniversary of writing a blog

Towards the end of my former life as a linguist I witnessed a lot of discussion about the textual qualities of so-called „Hypertexts”. There was quite some dissent about the fact whether they were texts at all, or whether they qualified as ‘literature’. After all, they did not appear in print, thus would never have a definite and final form such as a last edition, they could be continuously altered, and different readers might read them in a different order, thus they would never be able to have a similar reading experience of the ‚same text’. At that time, being on the way out of linguistics, I did not really pay a lot of attention to those discussions, nor did I take hypertexts seriously. I thought they were a soon-to-disappear fad. A couple of years later I heard that people had started writing blogs, and had a hard time understanding what that was – nor could I really grasp why somebody would want to write an “internet diary” for public readership, as they were sometimes called in German.

In 2008 Jayne Willoughby Scott told me during a conversation at Nancy Crow’s farm that she had heard of the advice to artists that they should certainly write a blog for potential customers or followers. Still, I wondered whoever would sit down and read that. Then Bonnie Bucknam

started writing a blog on her Guatemala-bound-project (and let me know about it) and I started reading it sort of regularly. Through this blog I discovered others, such as the interesting and well-written blog by former journalist Kathy Loomis or the very instructive blog on 365 patterns for machine quilting, and I finally began to realize that it could be fun reading other people’s blogs, and that it might actually make sense to write one’s own.

So when I started preparations for my fabric-club for hand-dyed fabrics just about a year ago I knew I wanted to combine that with a blog that related to my dyeing experiences, and the various shipments of the club. Accordingly, the first posts on my German blog were all fabric-club-related.

Parallel I wanted to let my international friends and contacts who do not know any German know about what was going on in my quilting life. However, for ease of reading I did not want to write a bilingual blog. So I decided that the German blog would be more dyeing-oriented (in principle), and the English blog more concerned with my various experiences with art – my own, and art by others. I figured that would make it more interesting for me, too, because I feared that always writing the sort of same text in two languages would become boring for me. So you can find different types of entries on my two different blogs, although they do coincide every once in a while. For example, my Daily Art Projekt „Daily Oak“ appears only on the English blog.

Slowly the number of registered followers grew – to my husband’s surprise. Not surprised at the fact that the number grew slowly, but that anybody would care to read what I was writing about... Meanwhile he, too, has bookmarked the site and  has turned into an occasional reader.

Over the year I slowly got acquainted with the different types of functions that blogger provides. Most likely I still don’t know about all of them, but it’s always good to have something left to discover. Already after six months I realized that it was possible to save posts for a later publication. Which is nice if you want to keep a possible gap due to absence with uncertain access to the internet at a minimum, but can be rather stressful if you have to prepare and write several posts in advance.

I’m still learning what it means to write a blog, too. What is a good topic – would this be interesting enough to let others read about this? Do I really have something interesting or noteworthy to say about this? ... But I have found that it is a motivation to educate oneself about some topics that I might not have tackled or bothered about, had I not been writing a blog.

During the workshop in Falera I realized for the first time that there are actually people out there reading my blog who have not registered themselves as followers, when some people started talking to me about some of the posts. And in August blogger changed their design for writing. I am somebody who is rather slow in embracing changes in relation to computer stuff, once I have got myself used to one design, but I tried out their new design pretty much immediately. So I discovered that it was possible to view statistics of how may people have looked at a blog on a particular day. What a surprise – there were actually quite a number of people out there reading my blog! A chart of the number of readers throughout the last week might look like this:

It does matter – seeing these charts did have an effect on how I feel about writing my blogs (not that I didn’t care before, but to see that people actually do read it is a really nice feeling). So at this point I would like to thank all of you out there who care enough to check out once in a while what I have to tell. It’s good to know you are out there! 

I myself am curious as to how this blog is going to develop, I am certain that there are still a lot of topics out there that will catch my attention at some point. Looking forward to new postings...