Ruth Asawa

"An artist makes use of ordinary things and makes them extraordinary" -Ruth Asawa

Last month Glennis Dolce left me a comment here in which she mentioned a favourite artist, Ruth Asawa. I had never heard of Ruth Asawa but soon discovered a great deal of information including video clips , podcasts and articles (see below), about this amazing artist and her life's work. Born in 1926 in Southern California, USA, she is perhaps best known for her tied and crocheted wire sculptures.

Organics
Crocheted wire sculpture
by Ruth Asawa
Photo by Aqui-ali

Among other works, are hundreds of masks that she has made over the past forty-five years of family and friends, documented in this short film by her son Laurence Cuneo. About the masks she said, "When I cast a face I know I’m just capturing a minute of a person...I don’t care about making that a technique. But I like the idea of stopping the moment of time" [link].




If you're interested in reading more about Ruth Asawa, the Oakland museum of California has posted this article on its website entitled Ruth Asawa: Completing the Circle. Leonardo Digital Reviews has an excellent online review by Amy Ione of the book "The Sculpture of Ruth Asawa: Contours in the Air" by Daniell Cornell, Director of Contemporary Art Projects at the deYoung Museum in San Fransisco and curator of the Ruth Asawa retrospective of the same name. There are also several good blog write-ups about her life including one by quilt artist Pam Rupert on Ragged Cloth Cafe and another by jewelry artist Louise Hill on Louise Hill Designs.

Thanks to Glennis for telling me about this artist.

April TIF - Part II

In my last TIF post I mentioned an unbidden image which came up for me when I read Sharon B's April TIF concept. I said I would incorporate that image into my April TIF challenge piece.The image was of myself as a baby in a crib. I've heard some stories over the years from various family members about those early days. Not all of them very happy ones. I have the sense that a lot of us may have been asked to spend quite a bit more time our cribs than was actually necessary. Just a guess. Probably for that reason, I'm not a big fan of cribs. Both my daughters slept with my husband and I for the first few months after which we moved them to a futon on the floor of their own bedroom. It was much easier to change the baby, put her down to sleep and easier to deal with her when she woke up crying in the night; we would just go in and lay down for a while on the bed. It worked for us. I thought about the crib image for a while, not sure how it might inspire a small quilt or piece of textile art. After awhile I came up with the idea of a repeat block based on the bars of a baby crib. Below left is an image cropped from a photograph of a crib. Below right is a quilt block based on the image.

Here is the block repeated four across, three down.


I added some colour, and an orb (below left),to suggest the sun rising, thereby representing the passage of time which I also said that I would incorporate into this piece. Then I shifted the orb to the right side of the piece (below right),


and simplified the whole thing somewhat by removing half of the blocks for a total of six blocks instead of twelve. I also flipped over some of the blocks to break up the patterning a bit. The sun then became a much bigger part of the overall composition.


I wasn't sure what kind of a time commitment this would turn out to be but the next step was to take it to fabric, which would represent the element of positive transformation that I also wanted to convey in the work. The idea of positive transformation is also addressed by taking a somewhat heavy memory and injecting it with colour and movement.

April TIF - Part III

Related posts: April TIF -Part I, April TIF - Part II

Here are the first six blocks pieced together. What I liked about making them was cutting the fabric free hand with the rotary cutter. The effect is that there's a bit of variety and movement added to the blocks.

Looking at these six block I realized that I was moving away from my original colour scheme and that I was also spending more time on the project than I had originally intended or could afford. I had been wanting to make a quilted cover for our piano keyboard for quite some time. We have a small, apartment sized Yamaha with no keyboard cover built into it. Thus, the keys sometimes get quite dusty, (like when I haven't dusted for a while). When I laid the six blocks end to end, they fit the piano keyboard perfectly so I sewed them together end to end, like so.

Added batt and pin basted,

quilted and bound, et voila, a happy piano and April's TIF challenge completed.

Keyboard Cover
Commercial and hand
dyed cotton and silk
Machine pieced
Machine and hand quilted
8 x 52"
April 2008

Detail

Quilting as a metaphor

"[In] my 'Secret Garden' series [link]...I take as a starting point, old memories of gardens of my childhood with their combination of water paths and foliage. This also becomes a metaphor for deeply embedded old memories that rise unbidden in our consciousness; sometimes clear and structured, sometimes vague and formless. Quilt-making with its multiple layers seems an ideal medium for exploring these ideas." - Rosalie Dace

I have an opportunity to take a one week class with Rosalie Dace who is teaching at Quilting by the Lake this year. I have looked at her work on line [link][link] and read about her on a handful of websites and blogs. Her quilts are absolutely sumptuous and appeal to me directly. As well, she appears to be a process person; no patterns or kits provided. On her website she states that her interest is in helping students to bring out what is personal to them in their work, and to encourage them to stretch beyond what they think is possible for them. Great! I am hesitating to proceed though, because I attended a class at the same conference last year and had a very mixed experience, largely because the class I took was poorly organized and, I thought, did not deliver what had been advertised. I would hate to set aside this kind of time and financial resource again for a repeat experience. However, all things in life present certain risk, along with the concomitant possibility of benefit or great gain. So, I'll ponder on it for a few more days and think about the benefits that this experience has to offer. It has long been personal challenge for me to let go of preconceived expectations about how things should or shouldn't be, a challenge which requires a heightened trust in life and in people, and a willingness to allow things to unfold as they may.

Wrap, Stitch & Burn

If you're in Toronto in May, textile artists Nieves Carrasco and Valerie Knapp will exhibit at the *new* gallery in Toronto. "A monochromatic palette captures the unique qualities of resist-dyed Japanese paper" says Nieves Carrasco about her work.

April TIF - Part I

This month's Take it Further challenge concept is this question from SharonB:

How do you see change?

I related fairly strongly to something that she said in her post,

"It amuses me when people say we have to learn to live with change as change has always been part of life. As soon as we are born we start to grow in other words we start to change."

The first thing that came to mind when I read this was an image related to the first year of my own life, not that I remember anything from that period, I guess that's the point. But the image was there, nevertheless. So, my challenge piece will somehow relate to that image.

How do I see change? Change may bring new opportunities or great joy, as in the birth of a child. It can also bring loss, regret, sadness or pain, such as in the death of a person we love. And it may bring both. The loss of a job may bring with it the discovery of a previously unimagined and inspiring new career path. In the case of difficult change (the positive sort is easy; you celebrate!) I rather try to approach change in terms of the hidden potential for personal growth, no matter how it may appear at the outset. Work with it, as one would with clay, steadily remolding it into something that will hopefully give rise to a positive transformation.

For me, the inevitability of change is also (obviously) inextricably linked with the passage of time. So for this month's piece I'll begin working with these three ideas; (1) An unbidden image relating to the first twelve months of life (2) The passage of time, and (3) Positive transformation. Sound cryptic? It does to me too.

Quilt finished

I posted about this quilt early last year when I started putting it together. The design was inspired by a colour exercise in a book I was reading called The Interaction of Color by Joseph Albers. In the meantime, the finished quilt top has been hanging on my design wall where I have enjoyed looking at its brightly coloured squares while deciding what to do about the quilting. Last week I got to it.

First I machine quilted black concentric circles offset from the lower right-hand corner	and hand quilted quarter ovals starting from the lower left-hand corner which intersected the black circular stitching,

then added a narrow black binding.

Colour study: The illusion of transparency
Hand dyed cottons, machine pieced,
machine and hand quilted
29 x 29"
March 2008

Detail

Colourful Inspiration

Brenda Smith of Serendipity Patchwork and Quilting posted last week about an opportunity to win a painting by artist Abie Loy Kemarre by filling out an online survey and subscribing to the newsletter of the gallery, Central Art Aboriginal Art Store. After doing so, I soon found myself on another site called Aboriginal Art Directory viewing slideshows of some really amazing artwork there. Have a look at these Aboriginal Artists Slideshows for some colourful inspiration.

Flickr artists are another great source of inspiration for me. Some time ago I stumbled across the excellent photo collage work of Roger Kellison aka Rogerio, who kindly gave his permission to post his work here and to use it as a source of inspiration for a quilted textile collage.

collage287
Roger Kellison

He explains the process he uses to create his collages this way:

"it is largely trial and error of layering pics until I find something I like...and then enhancing the resulting image. Usually this is done by darkening and cropping the collage. [I] often will turn one or other image on it's side or even upside down. Just playing around you could say."

collage106
Roger Kellison

Roger also introduced me to flickrleech, a very cool online tool that allows you to view any flickr user's account 200 photos at a time, because, as the flickrleech developer so eloquently states, paging sucks. You can view Roger's work on flickrleech here.

Walk on Queen's Street -- Loop Gallery

Self portrait with paintings
March 2008

This photograph shows the window of the Loop gallery in Toronto earlier this month which, at the time, was exhibiting works by Canadian painter John Abrams. The gallery was closed that day, probably because of the snowy weather. I like the way the vivid colours and images in the paintings shine through the reflection of the mostly black and white Toronto street scene outside. There's more info about John Abrams here.

Small blog changes

I've often noticed that many blogs and websites have a personalized icon (called a favicon perhaps because it shows up in your browser favourites menu) which precedes the URL in the browser address bar and on browser tabs as well as appearing in links bars, desktop internet shortcuts and next to the site feed in RSS readers. I recently tripped across this Digital Inspiration tutorial which shows how to replace the standard blog favicon with your own personalized version. I tried it out and felt the usual sense of accomplishment that comes with playing around with blog code. The new favicon was made from a photo of this quilt which is still in progress.

Next, I decided to hide the Blogger navbar, that pesky tool bar which is plastered across the top of all Blogger blogs. Why hide it? Because I never use it, it looks clunky, and it's a subtle, or maybe not so subtle form of advertising, which I don't find particularly enhances my blog. A quick Google search turned up this Real Blogger Status tutorial with instructions for hiding the navbar, including a discussion about any legal issues which may be involved. After hiding the navbar, I thought that readers might still occasionally want to do a blog search and after another fruitful Google search I added a Blogger search box to the sidebar using this clearly explained Tips for New Bloggers tutorial.

Lastly, I juggled the sidebar contents around a bit so that the tag cloud, search box and archives sit at the top. I felt that the tag cloud gives a far better idea of what the blog is about than my personal statement does. Another idea whose time has come, is migrating the blogroll to a feed reader like Bloglines or Google Reader, instead of listing it on the blog sidebar like I do. One blogger who's already done this is Lisa Call, who explains the thinking behind this move here. I'll save that job for later, once I've synchronized my blogroll with my feedreader subscriptions. That'll be the day.