Where Art Meets Embroidery
The exhibition Where Art Meets Embroidery is currently on display at the Pacific Northwest Quilt and Fiber Art Museum (QFA) in LaConner, Washington USA through May 31st. The exhibit, for me, is the culmination of 16 years of classes that I have taken at the Gail Harker Center for Creative Arts. The exhibition includes work from both Level 3 and 4 textile art graduates. My post is about the Level 4 Experimental Stitch and Multimedia, including my work and my classmates. Tesi will be posting at the end of the month about the Level 3 Experimental Stitch student’s work.
When the exhibition opened, we had a concurrent show for the first couple of days that was across the street from the quilt museum. In this part of the exhibition, participating students filled their tables with working notebooks, samples and pieces of artwork that didn’t end up in the exhibition at the quilt museum. Visitors could sit down and browse through the documentation of the process that most people never see with completed works of art. The working notebooks show the thought process, the inspiration behind the ideas and the work that goes into creating a large work of textile art.
Here’s a part of the set up for my space showing a variety of notebooks, samples and smaller stitch pieces. My theme is about the spirituality of trees. It was really interesting to talk to visitors about the process and how some of my pieces were created.
This is part of Nancy Drake’s table showing a couple of notebooks, some canvas work boxes and a flower that wasn’t included in the other exhibition. Nancy’s theme is about nature, leaves and trees.
Here is one of Christina Fairley Erickson’s tables showing some of her Advanced Research in Art and Design. Christina’s theme is about animals of all kinds. The large tall piece in the back is based on a giraffe (if you hadn’t figured that out already).
Now on to the exhibition at the QFA Museum. If you are in the northwest Washington area, I hope you will get a chance to visit the exhibition in the next couple of months. I will be showing only a couple of pieces of work from each student. There is much more to see at the museum.
Each student created a “large” artwork as part of the course curriculum. This is Christina Fairley Erickson in front of her machine stitched horse sculpture. Christina has traveled many times to Turkey to visit part of her family and the floral designs on the horse are based on Turkish inspiration.
Here are a couple of detail shots of Christina’s amazing stitching that has been turned into a lifesize horse head.
Another portion of Christina’s studies were based on eyes of birds and animals. These are two of her stitched pieces of an Indian Peacock Eye and a Military Macaw Eye.
Moira Gutteridge Kloster grew up in East Africa and based her theme on remembrances of her childhood as well as recent visits to the area. Moira mainly works with photos printed on fabric which she transforms with stitch.
This is a closer view of one of her pieces from the wall shot above.
This is a detail of Moira’s blackwork lizard. These blackwork patterns are a way to create various values to give the stitching more depth.
Moira has many photos taken in Africa. The one on the left is based on a papaya and the one on the right is all photos of elephants (and one of my favorites, the elephant footprints).
Lynette Barnes created ‘Forest Floor’ with a variety of machine needle felting, hand dyeing, machine embroidery, burning, fusing and fraying. Her theme is the Pacific Coast Forest Floor.
Here’s a closer view of a couple of small areas on this almost five foot wide piece.
Nancy Drake’s theme was based on the natural world, specifically leaves and trees. The piece above is created with metal and gold threads.
A closer view of the stitchwork and metal elements reveals the abundance of color variety in the metal threads.
Nanci also created this tabard, developing the pattern, hand stitching the design and then machine stitching the garment together. (In the video of my talk at the end of the post, you will see Nanci’s tabard and her hanging leaf sculpture, on either side of me.)
My theme about the spirituality of trees, led me to develop a series of tree spirits. These are two of the stitched portraits that I created. The top one is machine stitched over layers of tulle. The bottom piece was created from nuno felting a printed photo on sheer fabric of one of my original paintings and then adding hand stitch.
The majority of my time spent over the last two years was creating this ten foot tall tree spirit called ‘The Forgotten One’. His outer layers were made with silk, wool and tea bags that were nuno felted and then hand stitched into place on the inner structure. The sculpture comes apart into four pieces so that I could travel back and forth from Montana to Washington with it.
Here are a couple of closer photos to see the face and the texture of the sculpture.
On the first Saturday after the exibition opened, an artist talk took place at the QFA museum. Each student talked about their work, inspiration and theme. The video above is my talk and Gail showing photos of my work.
I hope you enjoyed this peek at our exhibition. If you’re in the area, please stop by and see it in person.
