dyeing.quilting.knitting.blogging
"Generally speaking, colour is a power which directly influences the soul. Colour is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammers, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand which plays, touching one key or another to cause vibrations in the soul."
- Wassily Kandinsky in Concerning the Spiritual in Art, 1911
Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France.While browsing the Textile Museum of Canada's website I discovered two additional sites related to the museum that I found interesting. The first is the Textile Museum of Canada's Online Collection. What's nice about this database is that it has thousands of items and each includes a detailed description of the object as well as a very high resolution photograph. When you zoom in on the image the detail you get with some of the objects is amazing. Try keywords like bead or basket, to get an idea. They also have a nice Advanced Search interface. One difficulty that I had with this databases is that there is no obvious way to return to the main information page. The best way is to navigate is with carefully chosen keywords. Try a country name, such as Peru or China, or a keyword related to textiles like indigo, quilt or tapestry.
The second site, located on the same server, is called Canadian Tapestry: The Fabric of Cultural Diversity. This site has entries grouped into five categories: places, origins, stories, bridges, workings, and functions as a front end to the Textile Museum's online collection since it links to similar objects in the bigger collection. It has extensive information about each object, and seems geared to senior elementary or middle school students in its language and organization. At the bottom of each entry page are some activities related to making textiles that also seem to be geared to this age group. I enjoyed playing "Make a mola" for a little while.
Last week we took a four day trip to Toronto and found a real treasure when we visited the Textile Museum of Canada. There is a permanent hands on multi-media exhibit there called Fibrespace, complete with several working looms including a treadle loom that you can weave on. My daughters loved this. We also saw a fantastic exhibit called The Blues which tells the ancient and contemporary story of the colour blue (check out this video review by Peter Goddard, visual arts columnist for the Toronto Star). Also, showing as part of this exhibit is a beautiful new documentary called Indigo, A world of blue shot on an indigo farm in southern India produced by Maiwa Productions. The exhibit is on until March 2008 and well worth the visit.
Also on exhibit was Shadowbox 2007, a silent auction and fund raiser for the museum in which more than 150 original fibre art pieces were displayed for sale. Each one was approximately eight inches square. What really struck me about this show was the variety of the media used in the works as well as the uniqueness of each piece. I fell in love with a shadow box by Susan Strachan Johnson, who kindly gave me permission to post a photo of it here. She describes the process she used to create the piece this way, "The ground is a computer print on muslin of a colour sketch from a photograph. It is then appliquéd with distressed, hand-dyed fabrics, and hand embroidered." While browsing Susan's webpages I noticed that she does something interesting in her studio, located near Toronto, called Play for a Day. If you're in the area, check her out.
