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Finding new Space in Old Craft of Smocking

by | Sep 22, 2019 | Craft, Creative Process, Crochet, ECUAD, ECUAD MFA, Emily Carr University, Exploration, Fabricating, Fibre Arts, Found Materials, Hybrid Thinking, LOoW, Material Exploration, Mathematics, MFA, Origami, Paper Sculpture, Process, Smocking, Space Craft, Tyvek

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Material research using found spun polyester fibre, for an artwork resulting from a year’s conversation with scientists and scholars. (Carlyn Yandle photos)

About a decade ago I stumbled across Latvian-American mathematician Daina Taimina’s curious crochet abstractions. What’s not to love about needlecraft (and needlecrafters) that advances modeling of non-Euclidean geometry?

PictureHyperbolic crochet, by mathematician Daina Taimina. Pic from rixc.org

​I’ve been needling away ever since at the power of domestic materials and methods in making new forms (and new ideas).

Most recently I’ve been fascinated by the sculptural potential of smocking that was once a feature of every little-girl dress before the fantastic elastic plastic age hit.
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Smocking expands and contracts rigid material and turns area into volume. Best of all, it’s a slow-craft, inwardly-focused, rote activity that is an essential thinking tool for me: when the hands are busy (with something other than the damn iPhone) then the mind is free to wander. And where I’ve been wandering around these days is space, from the macrocosm to the microcosm.

​For the last year I’ve been meeting regularly with a physicist and an engineer from the particle-accelerator lab at UBC and two scholars in the field of arts, for a project through Emily Carr University that explores the possibilities of ‘co-thinking’ or ‘hybridized thinking’ between artists and scientists.

PictureCircular patterns of the schematics of astrophysics and nuclear medicine are seen in the UBC particle-accelerator building itself.

After I got over the initial shock of being invited to join the dozen research assistants on this project (having barely squeaked through Math 11 and remaining the problem child at my tax accountant’s office) I realized that I would not in fact be taxed with fully grasping unfathomable ideas of space-time or the confounding mechanicals inside UBC’s cavernous particle-accelerator building. Instead, my role as a facilitating artist includes producing an artwork out of this whole experiment, for a group exhibit later this winter.

​So why not smocking?

PictureMaterial research includes reviewing the history and applications of an ages-old textile technique.

There’s something zingy about using the most basic of methods — tying string knots in fabric — as I grapple with concepts like infinity, black holes, space-time, and a contracting universe. As I play with folding 540 square feet of area into volume, making a shape with no beginning nor end, I wonder about the possibility of doing the opposite of Dr. Taimina: making a model that is looking for the math.

The shape that is taking shape is as convoluted as many of our group discussions, and sits in that unsettling space between pattern and chaos, structure and collapse. It’s as precarious as Leaning Out of Windows, the name of this four-year co-thinking project, yet tempting enough for the possibility of catching some new views.