Elements refers to the natural world--earth, wind, fire. The work done collectively by this particular group of artists, myself included, has exploited metal, clay, fiber, paper, and taken inspiration from nature through photography, painting, collage, surface design and sculpting. I would enjoy talking about my work with you at the opening. Hope you can make it over to Edwardsville on July 23rd, 6-8 pm. Main Street Art Gallery is at 237/239 North Main Street.
Two of my pieces in this show come from a single length of silk composted in summer 2006. I originally discussed this bit of cloth in a previous post and recently decided that the skirt must go. The ripper took out the seams and the silk has been reborn as wall art. A detail of one of the pieces is on the postcard above. I'm trying something new for this exhibit...mounting some of my silk over felt covered stretched canvas to show off the surface designs. I'll also have a large free hanging rusted piece on display.
Jacoby Arts Center 6th Annual Juried Exhibition opens tonight -- July 9 -- with a reception from 5-8 pm. The show runs through August 8, 2010. One of my small pieces, Organic Bailout, was selected for the show.
This piece features both rusted and composted silks along with a piece of rusted vintage dishtowel fabric that had been my mother's. I did a lot of free motion quilting and embroidery on this piece which measures only 11 x 8.5 inches.
For those you in the area who plan to attend the opening at JAC, you can gallery hop over to By Design. Lillian Bates has turned part of her fiber arts and wearable boutique into a full fledged gallery. Her first show opens tonight too with a reception from 5 to 8 pm. The show is called Varied Perspectives.
Lillian features my scarves, t-shirts, tights and other wearables in her boutique.
Only saw fireworks on TV this 4th of July. Too tired to get in the car and drive the 3 miles to see the display in town. Spent the holiday at the home of friend Elizabeth Adams Marks and got a preview of her new paper collages.
So beautiful. She and I will be in the Elements show together that opens later this month at Main Street Art Gallery in Edwardsville. The pressure is on. Lots to do. In the meantime I made my own fireworks of sorts with little rusty stars on this silk/rayon blend.
I washed the soft gray scarf seen in yesterday's post and the color is warmer now with some pinkish tones. Interesting, but I wish I could hang onto the cold gray tones. I have hard water. I neutralized the rust with baking soda then washed by hand in Ecover. Will take some experiments to discover why the color shifts. Not much I can do about the hard water. Not sure it is the culprit as I do a thorough rinse of the rusted silk outdoors with the hose immediately after the reveal and nothing changes then. I scanned approximately the same area as before.
A few days ago I wrapped this 60" long scarf on one of my rust rods. (BTW, this is a scanned detail.) I rolled one direction then overlapped the next layer going the other direction and still had scarf left for a partial third layer. The rust does a remarkable job of penetrating the layers, In this case--with pleating, there were 12, but the timing and the 3rd layer resulted in a much lighter toned design in parts of the whole length of silk.
The soft grays come from used tea bag dust, which reminds me I have hundreds of tea bags in a sack that need to be emptied. I have not yet washed this scarf and I suspect I'll see some color shift when I do. I'll post the washed pressed scarf for comparison later.
Stripes were created by an auger. This is a 72" scarf so a portion on either end had to be folded over before being wrapped on the 4' long iron piece which resulted in the chevron pattern.
Another hour or so and I might have had to kiss this silk good bye--at least for wearing. I nearly forgot to unwrap the goodies. Humidity was high and the results are strong. Silk satin is difficult to photograph--too much shine--and the scarves never want to lay very flat, so I threw these on the scanner and just did details. All but the last one will be at the EAC gift shop soon.
I've spent a good deal of time lately in the garden getting the tomatoes and other veggies in the ground as well as planting flowers. I just made a list of all the shows I have on the calendar this summer and fall and scared myself silly tonight! Thought I would post some scans of scarves to prove I've actually been working in the studio too. This is a detail of a pocket square 17" on a side before rusting. It was done in the shibori method. Quite a bizarre design isn't it? More new work to see in the next post.
