Sep
26
0

Floral Impressions

…from the dye garden.

I am often asked if my plant dye art and experimentation includes ecoprinting, i.e. making flower prints on fabric. Until 2023 the answer has been no, not yet. It’s sort of like the questions I have been asked since I started weaving: Do you spin your own yarn? Do you dye your own fiber? Do you (insert any number of deepening of experience of working with fiber arts)? While the answer was always, no, not yet, I have done some beginning work learning spinning (of wool), and started dyeing with foraged plants in 2017. The dyeing has now supplanted weaving as my main fiber art. The point is that at some moment, techniques and curiosities seep in and start to become part of the practice.

So, I first tried the popular craft of ecoprinting with a test shirt I bought for use as a farm work shirt, and used fresh coreopsis blooms to make a print on the fabric. The pigment-rich coreopsis blooms make a good impression on these cotton and cotton/linen blend shirts, and I have continued to decorate a range of colors and some different styles.

[A note that I did not dye the shirts, they come to me pre-dyed.]

I call it the “FLORAL IMPRESSIONS from the dye garden” line, and the shirts are for sale. I have a small selection of sizes and colors in stock.  Please contact me if you are interested in what I have available.

The tags for my FLORAL IMPRESSIONS shirts are made from the cardboard slipped into the pockets when hammering the coreopsis blooms onto the fabric.

 

 

“Common Threads” project textile held up to light for a nice stained glass effect and to highlight the bojagi technique of hidden stitches

I am the Irish Consulate of San Francisco’s chosen artist to participate in a global project: “Common Threads” in celebration of St. Brigid’s Day 2023. See the gallery showcasing each piece and the artist who created it.

As an Irish-American using materials endemic to this place where I live, I am contributing a small part of a larger cloak or “brat” to be assembled from pieces coming from all over the world and to be exhibited in Dublin in February 2023. It will be the first time in history that Lá Fhéile Bhríde (Brigid’s Feast Day, the traditional pagan Imbolc, or beginning of spring) is observed as a public holiday, the first named after a woman. It’s an honor to contribute my many layered work to this worldwide project!

St. Brigid is both a goddess and a saint, and a patroness of many things, not only the Patroness of Ireland: poetry, learning, healing, protection, blacksmithing, livestock, and dairy production. St. Brigid’s cloak is often depicted as a patchwork of colors and materials, and is central to the story of how she founded her church and became Ireland’s patron saint. As the video for the project explains: “The myth of St. Brigid’s cloak explains how her first church was founded. Only given enough land that her cloak would cover, Brigid and her sisters pulled the four corners of her cloak and it miraculously expanded across many acres.”

The aim of “Common Threads” is 1) to promote and support textile work—a traditionally female industry and art form, 2) to symbolically honor the legend of St. Brigid’s cloak, and 3) to visually represent the reach of the Irish consular network.

As “Common Threads” aims to visually represent the reach of the Irish consular network, for my textile I chose to use a selection of dyed silk and cotton dyed with plants endemic to this place—San Francisco/Yelamu. My textile square is  made of plant-dyed silk (the backing is cotton) using California native plants as dyes. Over the years I have been using plants as dyes, I have often been asked: “What are you going to do with the fabric/yarn/textiles? Since 2017 the experiment of foraging or growing plants, using seeing what color they give as dyestuff, and having that result has been sufficient. But this idea has also always been in the back of my mind: to create patchworks of the various colors together. Celebrating St. Brigid and her legacy is a way I can situate myself as a woman textile artist and strongly in my Irish heritage. It has been a profound personal exploration to represent this place—San Francisco—which I have come to know deeply, while reconnecting to our family’s place of origin.

Here is the result of piecing together California native plant dyed silk and cotton into a bojagi (a traditional Korean wrapping cloth made by patchwork) square. I am most attracted to bold colors, but with this palette I love the muted hues of the yellows and pinks playing against each other, and set off by the dark brown.

The plants I used are:

California Sagebrush

Cypress

Manzanita

California Poppy

Ceanothus

California Wild Rose

Red Flowering Currant

Elderberry

Purple Sage

There’s a FULL FALL line up of ways to see my creations in the world and I’d like to invite you to play with plants, view (and maybe purchase) my collage artwork, see the culmination of my several year collaboration with San Francisco Poet Laureate Emerita Kim Shuck in both book and exhibition form, and spend some time with me talking about life and art. It would be great to see you!
Details and links (where available) below.
Regular updates on these sorts of things found on IG: sfurbanwanderer AND lisaruthcreates
 
–> SEPTEMBER
LisaRuth’s Paper Collage exhibition
ODC Theater Lobby Gallery, 3153 17th Street, enter through Robin’s Cafe
ends Thursday, September 29 | wkdays: 8 AM–4 PM, wkend: 9 AM–2 PM
meet & greets with LisaRuth:
Wednesday, September 21 | 2–4 PM
& Thursday, September 29 | 10 AM–NOON
 
–> OCTOBER
Introductory Plant dye workshop with LisaRuth Elliott
A benefit for Alemany Farm
Sunday, October 2, 2022 | 10 AM–1 PM
$25–$60 (Registration Required)

Plant dye workshop with LisaRuth Elliott
with live music, art, and more!
Patagonia Store, 770 North Point, SF
Wednesday, October 12, 2022 | 6:30 PM
FREE
 
–> NOVEMBER
Exhibition of collaborative poetry and collages by Kim Shuck and LisaRuth Elliott
San Francisco Public Library 100 Larkin Street, Skylight Gallery—6th Floor
Saturday, November 5, 2022–February 16, 2023
Book Release & Poetry Reading: Thursday, November 10 | 6 PM
(Latino/Hispanic Community Room)

LisaRuth showcases fresh indigo dyed fiber above indigo plants at Rainbow from the Dye Garden workshop, October 2021. Photo by Michiyo Toya

In 2021, my forays into using plants as dye stuff really blossomed!

2021 saw the introduction of a dedicated space at Alemany Farm for growing ancient dye plants. In addition to my role as a longtime farm volunteer, since 2017 my fiber art practice has included using foraged plants from the farm and hillside to dye fiber for color experimentation and to use in my weavings. Building a close relationship to—and investigation of—place is very important to me as a guest on unceded Ramaytush Ohlone land. Learning about native, cultivated, and invasive plants through my art helps ground me in gratitude and informs my stewardship of this place.

I have offered several workshops at Alemany Farm since 2018 introducing others to the basics of dyeing with plants—mostly using foraged plant matter and kitchen scraps. As my practice has expanded, I have become more and more curious about cultivating specific dye plants.This year, my desire to know more coincided with a plan to move the medicinal herbs to a more protected area set farther back from the roadway nestled at the base of the farm’s northern hillside behind the Willow. At the beginning of 2021, this opened up the area at the farm’s front entrance totally dedicated to color.

In the spring, with herbalist Bonnie Rose’s oversight, the “Chamomile Crew” (medicine garden interns) transplanted medicinal plants from the front area of the farm near the tool shed into the newly terraced northwestern hillside. This cohort of herbalists also helped me in February with the propagation of weld (reseda luteola), woad (isatis tinctoria), indigo (persicaria tinctoria), coreopsis (coreopsis tinctoria), and marigold (tagates erecta), plants which we grew in the greenhouse. In April I began to shape a circle for the dye garden, laying irrigation lines, integrating curved outer pathways, and slowly planted out the growing plants in May. Weld and woad went in first, along the front pathway across from the box where Musette’s madder was planted many years ago.

Pollinators on Alemany Farm dye garden plants, 2021.

As I planted, I left the volunteer plantains as guardians around the pathway edge, and lupine and borage as pollinator attractors. Leftover from the medicinal crops, mullein plants became yellow flamed candelabras as sentries. Coreopsis starts and indigo plants went in at the center; the scarlet sage bush was pruned back, and the iris bulbs thinned. Finally, several varieties of marigolds were planted along the pathway edge across from the pond filling out the dye garden. Regular support of watering during the week by our farm interns helped this collection of plants flourish.

 

The emergence of blooms in late spring showed a range of shades of yellows and oranges, and then pinks in the late summer.

Dye garden plants on silk L to R: madder, coreopsis, fresh indigo, August 2021

But what colors result on fiber when these plants and flowers are used as dyes? The answer: A rainbow! Madder root gives reds and pinks and oranges, coreopsis gives golden yellows to deep oranges, weld leaves and flowers give yellows, marigolds give yellows and shimmery golds, and fresh indigo gives light blue/teals (further exploration of indigo for deep blues is coming in 2022). One of the more exciting results comes from a single plant’s dye pot, with yellows, oranges, and pinks varying due to fabric type (e.g. wool, cotton, silk, bamboo cloth). A friend sent a photo of the Bayeux Tapestry, embroidered in the late 11th century, which he had recently seen in person in Europe. It turns out that the ten colors used to illustrate the historic battles on the tapestry are made from just three plants—madder, woad, and weld—and all of these are growing in the Alemany Farm dye garden.

 

 

 

LisaRuth pointing out dye plants for SF Recreation and Parks Dept. summer camp youth during color walk of farm, June 2021

LisaRuth with San Francisco Recreation and Parks Dept. summer camp youth in the Alemany Farm dye garden, June 2021

This summer, for the San Francisco Recreation & Parks Department summer camp kids, I led color walks of the farm’s plants and introduced the dye garden. The walks preceded their dye experiments in the Alemany Outdoor Kitchen, so they were an introduction to the magic of creating color, as they got to see the wide palette that comes from mostly green things. In early October, the dye garden got even more beautiful and colorful: Bonnie Rose made beautiful signs to identify each distinct plant variety to match those in the Medicine Garden. In the middle of the recent October rains, the dye garden itself was a technicolor landscape. The quality of the light and absorption of water made the indigo plants even more red (stems) and pink (flowers). Late afternoon light made the volunteer lupine and the mullein candelabras radiate beyond the purple and yellow of their respective blooms.

 

Also in October, I brought my dye studio to the farm for the workshop “A Rainbow from the Dye Garden” to share the art of using plants, flowers, and leaves to create unexpected color on textiles. Each attendee was given a notebook with instructions and bibliography, as well as a leaf or cone or flower when they arrived. To start, we walked around the farmscape to find each participant’s chosen plant, and see what color they make on fiber. It’s always fun to introduce people to the farm as a color palette, as well as a food growing space, urban vineyard, medicine cabinet, habitat restoration space, and a place teeming with winged ones (the dye garden alone is host to butterflies, bees, moths, hummingbirds, snakes…).

LisaRuth’s farm dye studio for Rainbow from the Dye Garden workshop at Alemany Farm, October 2021. Colors from L to R: madder root, coreopsis flowers, marigold.

Rainbow from the Dye Garden workshop plant dye results on silk and bamboo (with weld standing in for marigold in upper right corner!)

And, using three dye garden plants—madder root, dried coreopsis blooms, and marigold flowers—we harnessed the first three colors of the rainbow.

 

 

 

 

 

Rainbow from the Dye Garden workshop participants hold fibers dyed from fennel, bay laurel leaf, yarrow leaf, loquat leaf at Alemany Farm. Photo by Valerie Reichert

One workshop attendee reported: “I loved learning about native California species* that make good dye plants like manzanita and ceanothus, along with weeds like oxalis and horsetail. And I’m now in love with the beautiful smoky pinks produced by Turkish bay laurel. Reminds me of [dyeing with] avocado [pits]. Also smitten with the oranges and golds I came home with courtesy of the farm’s coreopsis.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

LisaRuth among coreopsis blooms, August 2021

It’s been such a fun project—and a steep learning curve—to create this garden. Journeying this year into planting, growing, and using cultivated dye plants—and sharing it with others—has been so very satisfying! Stay tuned for more workshops in 2022, and opportunities to volunteer in planting and tending next year’s dye plants.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

*Please note: I only do dye experimentation with routine prunings of native plants from the farm and my own garden.

This is the story of the journey of a father-daughter collaboration to create an illustrated poetry book.


In 2009, my dad came to me with a collection of haiku he had written almost daily about the birds he observed in the backyard and along the river bank of my family home in Washington State. Together we have enjoyed sitting along the riverbank observing the bird activity, and over the years the bald eagle pair and their offspring in the cottonwood trees across the river have become part of the extended family I regularly hear about in our weekly phone calls. He asked if I would illustrate the birds in the poems and would I like to create a book out of it. I decided to use my preferred medium of paper collage to depict the birds. Using a torn paper mosaic style also had the effect of giving a “feathered” look to the birds.


At the time I was helping out a papermaker/book artist/printer with some of her book projects. I began to imagine typesetting the poems and printing the book by hand. Aside from the painstaking process of creating the birds, without any experience in bookmaking, it took quite a while to decide which format the book would take. Consultation with a couple of friends who are book and layout experts helped me get farther along. From the perspective I now have post-completion, I realize that making an artist book is a complex equation of trigonometry, geometry, and algebra combined, with serendipitous discovery along the way. Finding a hardbound book, A Net of Fireflies: An Anthology of 320 Japanese Haiku containing haiku paintings solidified the book’s form. The book was not bound using signatures, instead the folds are on the outside edge of the pages. Utilizing this format offered the convenience of concealing the relief from the typeset pages, as well as the possibility of adding another Japanese book form to complement the haiku: a stab bound spine.


I selected a smooth, off-white Mohawk paper from the incredible selection at FLAX Art & Design, which I cut down to print size and then later cut to half that size for binding. The setting of the type by hand—by me—and printing—by the paper mill—was done as a trade for my creation of a paper mosaic at the entry to the paper mill where the lead type, Kluge printing press, guillotine, and other tools were available to me. The paper mosaic features several types of paper made by the mill: from cotton rag and cat tails. The light blue—and a limited number of dark blue—cover papers of the book are made from denim and cotton rag, made in part by my friend Drew Cameron of Combat Paper Project. The silk thread used to bind the books was hand dyed by me with natural indigo, in vats I had access to as an artist/weaver in the Berkeley Art Museum show, “The Possible” in 2014.

I chose six birds from the 21 species my dad wrote verses about, reluctantly not illustrating a few favorites like the pileated woodpecker, mergansers, and the eagles. Because I wanted the birds to appear as close to life-sized as possible, these three birds were more complicated to imagine as part of the project. I started with the Washington State bird, the goldfinch. Definitely included were other bright birds like the western tanager and Steller’s jay. My father’s favorite, the mourning dove, had to be part of the mix. And a couple with detailed plumage like the northern flicker and cedar waxwing made the cut. A sketch based on photos sourced online became slowly filled in with color from saturated magazine pages. I worked from the bottom up, so the paper pieces would lay on top of each other as the feathers do on a bird. Each dot on the flicker’s white feathers were cut out individually. The original collages were reproduced on Hahnemühle rice paper as high quality digital prints by LightSource SF, whose staff really helped integrate the illustrations into the project beautifully.

Ultimately, all the pieces of the book came together in June 2018, nine years after my dad suggested the idea. There were several life projects that came in between me and finishing the collages and figuring out the complex math of putting the puzzle pieces together. The ultimate wrench in the works: being forced out of my home in 2013 by the wave of economic changes in San Francisco. I believe that if I hadn’t been looking for three years for a home starting that year, I would have completed the project several years ago. Now, cozily settled into a cottage perched on the slope of Bernal Heights, with all my supplies around me and space to create available, I have the ability to assemble and bind the edition.

The book, 28 Days in May: avian observations, by Len Elliott, and illustrated by me, LisaRuth Elliott, is an edition of 50. As of March 2019, 42 of these have been sold or given away. A percentage of the sales was presented as a donation to the Rainier Audubon Society in King County, Washington in January 2019.

As we were discussing the printing of the book in 2013, my dad sent this observation, a 29th poem to add to the collection here:
Curled around feeder,
Pileated woodpecker
Gobbling up suet.

May
1
0

Foraging for Color

I began experimenting with using foraged plants and flowers and food scraps in my own kitchen as natural dye materials in 2017. For regular updates on this, head over to my IG feed: @sfurbanwanderer. For a fiber and textile fanatic who loves color, this was probably an inevitable exploration. I am the kind of person who takes photos like this at museums (from the Vasa Museet in Stockholm) and reads books like this for fun.

As I began to learn to weave over a decade ago, I realized how many more skills there were to learn to take step after step deeper into the understanding of the materials you are working with and where they have come from. Some—like dyeing and spinning yarn and using complex patterning like ikat or batik—seemed pretty far out of reach, but things I thought I might get to sometime down the road.

Aside from having great access to indigo vats when I was weaving as part of “The Possible” at BAM/PFA in 2014, I am mostly self taught in all my areas of creative work, so I slowly poked around in various places to begin to work with natural dyes on my own. There are a few people I follow on social media who have offered easy baby steps into the world of understanding the process, and the two who made it seem too easy not to try were Rebecca Desnos (using avocado pits and skins, and later soy as mordant) and Karen Hess’s Local Dialect (oxalis flowers).

Oxalis flowers growing at Alemany Farm, April 2018.

It just so happens that I love avocados, and oxalis flowers love the hillside I live on, so I have easy access to both. And neither of these two dyestuffs require preparing your fiber with a mordant (which allows easier bonding of the color with the fiber), so I could jump right in without having to understand too much of the chemistry at the beginning. That would come later.

I am also an urban farmer at Alemany Farm (since 2010), where I often work with first time volunteers who get very excited about growing food there. One of the things I love about working at the farm is introducing the many OTHER things that the farm offers—like a complex and buzzing ecosystem of pollinators, the many native plants we grow not for consumption, the plants that are edible but don’t look like food, etc. So when I started foraging and using the invasive weeds of oxalis to dye yarn, I enthusiastically shared the end product with my fellow farmers. The folks tending to the medicinal and herb garden have been growing traditional dye plants like madder for some time now, so it’s not a new concept to have dye plants on the farm. I did get into the Alemany greenhouse recently to start some zinnia and flax seeds, and repot some indigo starts, but my angle is definitely to look at what is already in abundance in front of me and using that.

I was asked to give a workshop on using natural dyes, so another volunteer, Musette, and I gave an introduction to using natural dyes in May 2018. The workshop, Bring Local Color into Your World: Using Natural Dyes, took place at Alemany Farm in San Francisco, and I covered using foraged plants and kitchen scraps, and Musette talked about using madder and other dye plants we’ve cultivated in the medicinal and herb garden specifically for the purpose of dyeing.

Here is a bit of a chronicle of my various experiments in using natural dyes. I am not a person who is in love with using pink or yellow in my textile creations, but something about the beauty of the sunsets lately made me imagine I’m pulling the sunset energy inside.

My initial experiments included dyeing with avocado pits and skins, oxalis flowers, coffee grounds, eucalyptus leaves, and fennel. Here are some of the results.

OXALIS FLOWERS

AVOCADO PITS

EUCALYPTUS LEAVES

COFFEE GROUNDS

STRIPES
Collages from The 100 Day Project by LisaRuth Elliott
October 3 – October 16, 2015

518 Valencia Street
San Francisco

Opening reception Saturday, October 3, 2015, 6:30 – 9 PM

blue flow day 22/100 14.5 cm x 19.5 cm

blue flow
day 22/100
14.5 cm x 19.5 cm

From April 6 to July 14, 2015 I took on a daily collage making practice, part of a worldwide call to create called The 100 Day Project. For each of those 100 days I made one work on paper in a series. I chose to make collages of stripes. Each day I came back to the process of randomly creating, in a spirit of play, finishing with 100 unique pieces.

The entire collection will be on exhibit for two weeks in October 2015.

Drawing upon papers collected in my travels, found along my path, from maps, and some from magazines and other publications, I often started each piece with nothing more to go on than a particular strip of paper I found interesting, and worked with a sense of discovery from there. The process of gluing paper into a pattern of stripes was not dissimilar to the way I approach my textile work, the way I like to weave on a loom, letting my instincts guide my choices, not having a plan or preconceived notion of what I want it to look like.

Working on the project and constraining myself to an exploration of stripes, my perception of the world around me changed. Already in the first week, I began to see and photograph stripes everywhere. Soon, my friends and family started taking photos of stripes they saw in the world and sending them to me. People gave me ephemera to use: maps downsized from the local science museum’s entomology department; scraps of decorative origami paper; prints on paper made from military uniforms; the wrapping for a birthday gift became several different pieces. I was the recipient of a treasure trove of an illustrator’s unwanted scrap files.

The project—as a daily practice—opened up my creative process in ways I hadn’t known previously, when just fitting creating, or making, into my life when it was convenient, after hours. I recommend it, and hope you can come join me on Saturday, October 3 to see the 100 pieces and hear more!

#100daysofstripesbyLR   *   @sfurbanwanderer   *   #the100dayproject

phidelia day 10/100 14.5 cm x 19.5 cm

phidelia
day 10/100
14.5 cm x 19.5 cm

red hot day 79/100 14.5 cm x 19.5 cm

red hot
day 79/100
14.5 cm x 19.5 cm

retracing lines day 18/100 14.5 x 19.5 cm

retracing lines
day 18/100
14.5 x 19.5 cm

Apr
9
0

Weaving in Action.

Here’s a photo chronology of the projects we’ve worked on thus far at the Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive “The Possible” textile studio weaving workshops. I might find a moment to say more about the past couple months, but I’ll let the weavings tell the story for now.

I started a new project today, or rather, I picked up the threads of a project I first seriously took on in October 2009. I’m weaving at the Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive.

Quick history: Over 4 years ago I bought a plywood laser cut backstrap loom from Travis Meinolf, aka Action Weaver. Having seen his weaving projects, I had mostly been inspired by his approach to craftmaking as an alternative to high art and capitalism. I got a chance to do some basic weaving under his guidance at the Museum of Craft and Folk Art (RIP) in SF in October 2013. After that I was hooked. You can see some of the projects I have done using that loom on my Textiles page. They’re very humble. Over the years I’ve been gifted lots of yarn, thread, implements, and even an upright loom by a friend’s mother (thanks Bente!), and I’ve had fun weaving and knitting with the colors. As my inspiration and range grew, I was somewhat impatient about the limitations of a simple backstrap loom. I began to experiment with making patterns on that loom, knowing a floor loom and more complicated projects would come my way when the time was right. My latest project on the backstrap involving patterns I actually started plotting out in November 2010 (yikes!) and it’s still in progress. I decided to create a log cabin design.

I reconnected with Travis Meinolf in November 2013, as he and his family had recently moved back to the Bay Area from Berlin and were looking at doing a project in 2014 at my friends’ Berkeley space, the Subterranean Arthouse. He proposed building floor looms and having us learn that process from start to finish, ultimately crafting our own looms, and also weaving six yards of fabric that would be his payment, but would really be set out on the street for those in need of a free blanket.

My inquiries about the project at the end of January prompted Travis to instead invite me to help out with one of his current projects of building five looms at the Berkeley Art Museum (BAM) as part of the current exhibition “The Possible.” Here’s the write up of the show:

The Possible is a radically new model of exhibition, a framework for constantly evolving artistic experimentation. We invite you to get creative with guest artists and fellow BAM/PFA visitors in a series of Sunday workshops that are at the heart of this interactive exhibition. The Possible incorporates a series of interrelated spaces for creativity, collaboration, learning, and display, and is anchored by four main studios: a ceramics studio, dye lab, print shop, and recording studio.

Travis’s piece of it with the looms is a roaming part of the show, as the floor looms are collapsible and built to be mobile.

Today we worked on getting one loom created, and my role was to fashion 80 string heddles to complete the 240 needed for this first loom. I also paid attention as he crafted various parts of the first loom—the beater, the treadles, the front beam, the warp beams, and the heddle bars. I brought a rainbow of yarn to donate to the project that had been gifted to me. What a perfect place for all those colors to land!

I also spent a little time wandering through the other “studios,” getting super inspired by the natural dye lab particularly with its indigo vat and olive leaf and olive baths. We will have access to these vats for our weaving project yarns, and I have white and natural colored yarn I can’t wait to dye to include in our weaving projects!! I sat on the huge circular Domestic Integrities rug while working on the string heddles, but after awhile I wasn’t very comfortable using my jig with nails sticking out of it in a space where lots of toddlers were rolling around. The whole exhibition was basically a kids’ paradise, and lots of fun for their parents too. There was a scent library near me on the rug, I saw lots of steam coming from the dye vats outside, the ceramics table and print space were well occupied all afternoon, and I ran into Amy Franceschini who will be making beeswax candles in a few weeks as part of the workshops. Amy Trachtenberg is also doing a project called “Minimum Dwelling,” I ran into Ivy McClelland who is working with the Healing Art Project, and the Subterranean Arthouse folks are doing songwriting and folk music showcases. There was really pleasing experimental music from “The Something” music studio wafting down to us. At the end of the day, there was even a local street dance troupe who used the expansive lower floor to showcase their moves against the crafty backdrops.

While unlocking my bicycle outside the museum I heard one kid say upon exiting, “I liked EVERYTHING in there mom!”

I’ll be helping Travis out at least once a week for the duration of the exhibition. Sundays are open workshops from 11 AM – 3 PM, with music and innovations spicing them up each week. Come out and create!

Here are some photos from the first week, with studio shelves all stocked and beautiful and ready to get messy.

In 2011, I was asked to create a piece of art for my friends’ wedding. Sean Burns and Claire Duplantier had asked four artists—Mona Caron, Ona Lesassier, Paz de la Calzada, and myself—to each create something to adorn the site of the wedding, framing the entry to the two lodges at the wedding site. We were also asked to imagine the pieces flanking Sean’s musical performances or beautifying their future home. The buildings, Main Lodge and Heart Lodge, at Saratoga Springs are light cream colored buildings with trim in mustard shades. Simple color banners were envisioned to brighten the buildings and charm the weekend.

Our color choices were:

1) colors in the family of yellow and gold
2) colors in the family of light blue and peacock turquoise
3) colors in the family of orange and rust orange
4) colors in the family of white, cream, earth tone browns
5) colors in the family of purple and mauve

While we did not have a fixed motif, we were working with a folk art theme, and these four motifs recur in many cultures’ symbols of marriage:

1) heart layered on open hand
2) overlapping circles / rings
3) braids
4) pair of birds (most typically owls / doves / or peacocks)

More comfortable with a collaged style (over painting or drawing), I chose to create a piece from found fabric. I had been collaging birds for the past couple years, and brought this theme into my piece. Mona and Ona focused on peacocks, and unconsciously I included a piece of African fabric with a peacock feather design I have had for over a decade. The nest is a handsewn patchwork of small pieces of unhemmed fabric and yarn dangling in a sort of fabric approximation of a woven nest. The birds (based on a goldfinch and a western tanager) are yarn outlines that I very carefully sewed on to the top layer by hand.

I had the chance to share ideas with and work with references to the banner that Paz was creating as well, which was a treat, since her work is smart and gorgeous at the same time. Paz incorporated some of the colors of yarn and pieces of fabric that I used, and her signature hairscape drawing brought a braided image into the mix.

While sewing the final pieces with it laid on my lap before the wedding, it felt to me like I was connecting to a long tradition of making a wedding quilt, bringing in the folk art feeling even more. It was definitely infused with coziness!

When we hung the four banners at the wedding I remarked that mine would be perfect in the (not yet conceived, maybe in imagination, but at least not in body…) baby’s room. Then in December 2012, as Claire and Sean got their baby’s room prepared for his arrival, imagine my delight when I received a photo of my banner on the wall! They worked with the theme of the tree and birds and got curtains that “match.”

Particularly seeing it next to the crib made me smile, because one of the songs of Sean’s band, Professor Burns and the Lilac Field, is called Birds with the first lyric: “I talk to birds…” I think with this decor little Arlo James may just grow up doing so…

Thanks to Michael Rauner, Mona Caron, and Claire Duplantier for the photos.