For several years I've participated in a small works show titled Fiber Fusion that has run concurrently with ARTEAST at The Quilted Garden in Edwardsville. Last year unfortunately the show didn't happen, but I understand this year it will be revived. I'm looking forward to creating something for it. Below is one of the pieces I created for Fiber Fusion a few years ago. You can see other Fiber Fusion pieces and small works I've done by clicking on Silk Books and Small Works at the tab under the header of this blog.
Actually this piece has had two lives. Due to size constraints when first created for Fiber Fusion in 2005 (just after Hurricane Katrina), it was not mounted on the found wood as it is now. I reworked the piece and entered it in a competition at Art Saint Louis. The silk itself measures about 8 1/2" x 11" and is designed to hang on the wall.
Titled Where Is There Another Place, this book has 8 pages torn from a larger piece of very thin silk that was composted and rusted simultaneously. Vintage typewriter keys form the title and page numbers. A seed pod is mounted below. The wood came from old box I dismantled. Following is the artist statement I wrote for The Layered Stitched Assembled Show at Art Saint Louis in 2006.
This little book is an homage to New Orleans, a city I have visited many times in the past and home to a dear friend whose house sits less than three blocks from Lake Pontchartrain. The news that NOLA had flooded after Katrina swept through was heartbreaking. When I began to work with this piece of organically printed silk, every page seemed to suggest an image of breached levees and aerial views of swirling water.
I invite you to lift the pages (very carefully) and "read" about the flood. These are limp and fragile pages with raw edges and loose threads...an apt description of the beloved Crescent City and her people. Time will tell. May she rise again, for where is there another place in the world like New Orleans? Laissez les bon temps rouler
I usually take all photos of my work, but Where is There Another Place was photographed by Joseph Gruber.
I will be in a new place to exhibit for this year's ARTEAST event. I am so excited...and grateful to Alison Reeves, my fellow exhibitor who designs and makes jewelry, for arranging it. Hopefully all four of us who exhibited last year at the winery can reunite for ARTEAST 2010 at the Edwardsville Fitness Studio at 201 Hillsboro Ave, Edwardsville, IL.
I hope the owners don't mind that I've borrowed a photo of the main room from their website. I visited today with Alison who takes classes there and she introduced me to the owners, Sally Burgess and George Johannes who are eager to lend the space to us and get involved in ARTEAST. The space is more intimate than the large high ceilinged room we shared at Villa Marie Winery in Maryville last year, but I think we'll manage quite nicely in the place. The studio is beautiful! Plus there is a small lobby where we can set up refreshments and another room up front that can be used for exhibit space too.
Even nicer is the location...in the heart of Edwardsville, and easy walking distance to many other ARTEAST sites. We'll be just a block from the Edwardsville Arts Center where a large group exhibit will be set up; and a block from Main Street, where several ARTEAST exhibits will take place at various locations.
The winery was a great place last year and the owner did invite us back...but unfortunately in this economy I'm sure she could not afford to turn down paying customers. A wedding reception and party were booked in both available spaces there for the same weekend as ARTEAST. So my little group was forced to find a new place.
Ananas Comosus c2010 by Patricia Vivod was accepted into Fiber: Twenty Ten.
Missouri Fiber Artists (MoFA) is cosponsoring this national juried show with The Foundry Art Centre in St. Charles, Missouri. The exhibition, which was juried from over 300 entries by Kay Khan of Santa Fe, New Mexico, will open MoFA's 2010 conference on Friday, April 16, 6-9 pm. The weekend will be filled with a number of workshops and Khan will be the keynote speaker at a brunch on Sunday. I am really thrilled to have a piece selected for this show. I'll be attending both the opening and the brunch and am looking forward to meeting many other fiber artists.
Ananas Comosus is a shibori rust piece. A long piece of silk was pleated and wrapped around a long pipe and tied in place. As always when I do shibori, I relish the surprise when unfolding the silk the next day to see the resulting shapes and marks imprinted on the fabric. The rust penetrates the pleated fabric easily and the silk is very receptive to the color. The mirror image patterns reveal all sorts of little creatures. A detail appears at the bottom of the page.
The Friends of Art Auction site has been updated with 2010 information. The cataloging of donated items will be done on the 28th and soon after the entire auction catalog will appear online in a lovely slide show so that visitors can get a sneak preview ahead of the auction which takes place Thursday, April 8. As of our FOA meeting last night, 145 items had been logged in with many more arriving tomorrow and early next week. On auction night, a preview time starts at 6 PM with the live auction beginning at 7 PM.
I've been donating one or two pieces each year to the SIUE Friends of Art Auction for the last ten years beginning when I entered grad school. Three years ago I was invited to join the board of directors for FOA which organizes the auction. Since 1980 proceeds from art donations have funded the visiting artist program bringing scores of local, national and international artists to the campus in every area of art. The money has also gone to fund an art scholarship, prize money for undergrad and grad shows, a high school art competition and the auction competition, the Lovejoy Library fund, conferences, travel stipends, student art organizations, the Mexica project, and ARTEAST.
Grad school was a fantastic experience for me, coming after 25 years of teaching art at the high school level. The experience was greatly enhanced by the incredible number of visiting artists I got to meet so I will gladly donate to support the cause.
I'm donating the piece pictured above. I've also posted the image under the event calendar for the auction at the right. The piece is called Sunfish (c 2008) It measures 77" long by 45" wide. Hanging brackets allow the silk to float away from the wall about 4". The blue comes from elderberries, the other colors and design were made with the rust process.
BTW, students, alumni and friends of SIUE Art & Design and artists in the community are encouraged to donate. Original art donations are juried the day of the auction. Students can compete for 5 prizes totaling $1250 and non-students have a chance to win a $200 prize!
The entire auction catalog will be online sometime after March 28 at www.siueFriendsOfArt.com. I'll post the updated link when it is up and running for 2010. You can also view the donations at the 6 PM preview the night of the auction. The live auction will start at 7 PM.
My new outdoor studio was finished in June 09 and christened in the midst of the heat wave of the year. It was miserable being slathered with both sunscreen AND mosquito repellent. A little mist from the hose occasionally was a life saver.
Moving the workplace away from the house meant also moving the rust collection. It took several days to clean out the shed and organize some sort of system for storing and easily retrieving items for use. I bought a garden cart which is capable of holding 1000 pounds. Absolutely great going downhill from house to shed! Quite a task going uphill again as I discovered when I began other summer projects such as my first vegetable garden and collecting all the piles of bricks I had under various trees left behind from when I was doing mostly composting with my silk. Bricks were used to weigh down the cocoon of plastic around the fabric.
In the studio I placed the utility sink and another small work table alongside it on the west wall making it handy to the long hose that I stretched down the slope from the house. The studio was designed with a walk through area. I can pull my garden cart in from the west in case rust items are too heavy to carry. My neighbor installed a step on the east so I can access the yard or walk to the clothesline.
Near the end of October my husband visited the studio in late afternoon to shoot some pics of me at work. In the photo above, in the foreground is a table with several shibori wrapped pieces bundled in plastic. The large rectangular contraption is a decorative slab of iron with other heavy items being used to weigh down a pair of tights I'm attempting to rust with flat pattern objects. The other table is being prepped to lay out another scarf. I can walk completely around the big tables which makes it very easy to work. My neighbor attached PVC pipe to the legs to raise the height of each which has saved my back from considerable stress.
When the humidity is low as it was on this day, the wet silk must be covered so that rusting can proceed before the fabric dries. I use large ziplock bags for scarves wrapped on short poles.
As I write this, I have a portable heater on in the office and I feel like I'm freezing. But here I am in shirtsleeves on a breezy 60 degree day handling wet silk. I dont' recall minding the chill. Go figure.
Last spring after a neighbor cleared a large pile of brush away in order to re-roof and paint my garden shed for me, I began eyeing the bare spot of ground behind the shed as a potential place to work. At the time I had work tables and a utility sink on the patio and buckets, boxes and piles of rusty items laying all over the yard behind the house. The view out my sliding door from the dining room looked embarrassingly like a junk yard. I consulted the handyman neighbor with my ideas.
One thing led to another as they say. Three tons of dirt (to level the playing field) and two tons of lake gravel later, along with 100+ feet of railroad ties, five posts, 32 running feet of lattice fencing and a dent in my wallet, I had myself a beautiful 16 square foot outdoor studio with an airy privacy fence. Follow the progress below.
I decided on a gravel floor rather than a deck for the studio as the whole process of rusting is messy and wet. I can spill anything here without fear. Landscape cloth was laid down first before the gravel went in to prevent the possibility of anything growing up through the rock. The gravel is easy to stand and walk on. The only drawback is keeping it clear of falling leaves and walnuts. The rake wouldn't cut it. Had to use the leaf blower several times as the season wore down. Walnut trees are the first to lose their leaves starting in late summer!
