Hope empowers quirky denim objects
I’ve had this exchange a few times this past week:
You’re so busy. What are you working on?
Uh… hard to say.
It’s hard to put into words this curious crafty endurance with a deadline. Better to just hold up my needle-scarred fingers and gnarled hands. Hand-work stuff. For exhibition.
I’ve had this exchange a few times this past week:
You’re so busy. What are you working on?
Uh… hard to say.
It’s hard to put into words this curious crafty endurance with a deadline. Better to just hold up my needle-scarred fingers and gnarled hands. Hand-work stuff. For exhibition.
I have only myself to blame for spending these glorious foggy-sunny mid-winter days indoors cutting out seams and waistbands from discarded jeans and stitching them into quirky little coils and nodes. But they want to emerge, like characters in a novel that surprise even the author. They want to sprout like spores out of a knotted network of denim created back in the months before the global pandemic lockdown.
Resurge started as a compulsion during the first tempestuous Trump administration and soon after the release of an alarming report on climate change and rising sea levels. I fell into a daily rhythm of knotting and braiding a pile of discarded jeans, for the simple satisfaction of bringing new life to this particular abject material. The work revealed itself as a ground-zero eruption, an unstructured sprawl of frayed tendrils and rivulets of global brand logos in a very West Coast marine palette.
Resurge started as a compulsion during the first tempestuous Trump administration and soon after the release of an alarming report on climate change and rising sea levels. I fell into a daily rhythm of knotting and braiding a pile of discarded jeans, for the simple satisfaction of bringing new life to this particular abject material. The work revealed itself as a ground-zero eruption, an unstructured sprawl of frayed tendrils and rivulets of global brand logos in a very West Coast marine palette.
But now Resurge wants to rise above its heaviness, no longer limited to the floor but installed at a vantage point that suggests topography: a whole new world.
I didn’t overthink the urge to needle up a population of nodes to insert into a tumultuous water-scape. Instead I’m immersed in the material and the method, allowing the swirl of ideas and responses from local and global realities to infuse and entangle. The making is irrepressible, eclipsing my weekly writing time, as I make one benign conical object after another. Soon — hopefully — a critical mass will emerge that must be reckoned with.
I didn’t overthink the urge to needle up a population of nodes to insert into a tumultuous water-scape. Instead I’m immersed in the material and the method, allowing the swirl of ideas and responses from local and global realities to infuse and entangle. The making is irrepressible, eclipsing my weekly writing time, as I make one benign conical object after another. Soon — hopefully — a critical mass will emerge that must be reckoned with.
In 2019, this slippery, shapeless sea of knots held space for more layers of meaning. In 2026 Resurge offers regrowth and resilience, from the fracture. I hope it will resonate in these perilous times.
(Cross-posted at https://carlynyandle.substack.com/)UNRAVEL, Mixed media works by Tatjana Mirkov-Popovicki, Amanda Wood and Carlyn Yandle runs from Feb. 3 – March 14, 2026 at Seymour Art Gallery, Deep Cove, B.C. Reception: Sunday, Feb. 8, 2 – 4 p.m.; “From Conversation to Practice” Program with Amanda Wood, Sunday, Feb. 22, 2 p.m.; “Hearth” social stitching event with Carlyn Yandle, Sunday, March 1, from 2 p.m.; artist talk with Tatiana Mirkov-Popovicki, Sunday March 8, 11 a.m.
Recent Comments