Art report / Denmark 1

When I visit a big-time museum I always like to look for fiber.  The fiber art you find in such venues hardly ever looks like any fiber art you would see at a dedicated fiber show in the U.S.; more inscrutable, often more casual in construction.  Many times you'll find fiber constructions made by artists whose major reputations are in other mediums.

Here's a major work from the Statens Museum for Kunst (the Danish National Gallery) in Copenhagen, by Yvette Brackman, a Danish-American sculptor.  It's a series of five cloaks or garments, made in 2014, titled The Troublemaker, Father America, The Chorus, The Good Mothers & Hitler-Stalin.  Inexplicably I have photos for only four of the five, and don't know which is which.

As you can see from the details, the construction is indeed on the casual side.  The pink and green one is drooping, without any interior structure to hold the layers flat.  The blue and white one looks like it was folded into a box for storage or shipping, and put directly on the wall without a touch of pressing.  The red and black one appears to have its smaller shapes fused on, with fraying edges.

To my eye, the way these pieces are slapped together is so distracting that I have a hard time focusing on the meaning.  When I do, I'm still mystified. 

I recognize the fragmented shapes on the red and black one as bits of swastikas and sickles (that must be the Hitler-Stalin cloak) and I suppose the meaning is that totalitarian regimes, whether left or right, are all the same.  I suppose the yellow cloak with the strange maroon joined sleeves is The Good Mother -- are her arms permanently joined to cradle her child or because she's locked in a straitjacket?  I get no clues from the other pieces, and I feel as though each cloak might be stronger displayed by itself instead of in with the others. 

I hate to not like fiber work when I see it in a mainstream museum venue, but this batch left me cold.

Fixing the curvy quilt

I wrote several weeks ago about a quilt that I sold after it had been hanging in a medical office for several months.  I was unhappy to see that it had warped away from the wall, as much as four inches out.  Clearly this was something that needed to be fixed before it went off to its new owners.



Thanks to all my blog readers who made suggestions!

After much thought, I decided to sew three additional sleeves horizontally across the quilt, with slats that extend practically to the edge.  A trip to Home Depot introduced me to a new product that I had not been familiar with -- PVC plastic lattice.  I decided that would be better than wood because it's not acid.  It cut like butter with my little pull saw, but the cut ends, of course, were white, which would be jarringly visible in the sleeves.

I suppose I could have experimented with paint, but my default mechanism for fixing things always involves the sewing machine.  So I stitched one end of the sleeves shut, and made a little flap on the other end to tuck in and conceal the white slat.

The quilt reached its new home yesterday afternoon.  I hope it's happy there, and that its edges will hug the wall in perpetuity.

At the craft store

I was teaching a workshop on hand-stitching over the weekend and had to provide all the materials, so I went to the store to pick up a new supply of embroidery needles.  When I think that centuries ago, a woman might own only two needles in her lifetime, I feel a great culture shock.  I go through needles by the dozens; not that I lose them, but they mysteriously distribute themselves among my various sewing kits, pincushions, pin dishes, embroidery bags and so forth, and occasionally go to live with my friends and family.

I picked up a couple of packs of needles in the sewing department, along with some fabric, and then went toward the yarn/embroidery section to get a new bag of floss.  And to my surprise, found the same embroidery needles in a different color package, with a different logo -- and a considerably lower price.

That's right, in the sewing department, 12 needles for $2.49; in the embroidery department, 16 needles for $1.79!

In the immortal words of Smokey Robinson, you gotta shop around.

Found poetry 25

"Tuscany in yellow"

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This one is harmonized to yellow.