Unwieldy and unfinished — fitting for this pandemic project
When my nerves are frayed and it feels like the social fabric is unravelling I feel the urge to amend the situation, often by actual mending. These hands do much less flailing when they’re taking up…
Risky business: Self-supporting visual artists share survival skills
For the second year in a row, I’ve been leading artists’ talks as part of the Eastside Culture Crawl . One of the three Talking Art panels this year took on the wooly business of trying to live…
VIDEO tour: ‘Joyful Making in Perilous Times’
Click HERE for a 10-minute journey through the methods and motivations behind this MFA thesis. (Film made by Ana Valine, Rodeo Queen Pictures , August 2020)
Joyful Making in Perilous Times
Where is the joy when you’re living in a time of a global coronavirus pandemic and a local toxic-drug epidemic? What is the use of making when your city is seized by global investment-real estate…
Homemade masks are not all about you
We who turn to rote hand-making activity to quell our anxiety have been knitting, sewing, embroidering, crocheting and needleworking up a storm. My go-to, like countless others stuck at home, is…
Tripping on this troublesome rug
In the final critique of my final work in this second-to-final semester of graduate studies, I could see that there was going to be trouble.
Hoping for heat in this log cabin
I have this idea for building healthy community in this pretty/cold city through hand-making. It’s a process of making peace with ourselves and connecting with others, transforming individualized…
Finding new Space in Old Craft of Smocking
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…
We’re taking on capitalist forces, one stitch at a time
Back when I was still transitioning from workaday newspaper editor to mainly work-for-free artist I applied for a Nexus card. “Whaddaya you do for a living?” asks the clerk in her American drawl,…
‘Foundlings’: Kids’ works of terrible beauty
Everyone is feeling that relentless creep of plastic that is threatening to consume us, the consumers. I felt myself drowning in the tsunami of stuff over this past year of grad studies at Emily…
Attraction, repulsion wrapped up in one sculpture project
At first I thought all this must still be debris from the Japan tsunami. But that was eight years ago and the surf in my remote neck of the woods keeps throwing up snarls of monofilament netting,…
A useless thing with many functions
The brilliant part about being an aging female is your growing self-acceptance. Maybe this is because you don’t feel that ever-present gaze anymore so you’re not feeling as judged. Or maybe…
My needling starts with a need to build community
The other day I did this because it really needed to happen. All that gleaming new-campus architecture, surrounded by other gleaming buildings and gleaming buildings yet-to-come was begging for a…
Pretty, and pretty toxic denim inspires new work
There ought to be an international law against the dirty business of jeans manufacturing. It poisons waterways, mainly in China , prompting environmental groups to raise the alarm against the…
Materials matter, and Those of loved ones gone can live on
Materialistic. People say it like it’s a bad thing. But there’s not necessarily anything selfish or hoardy or wasteful about feeling deeply connected to materials. If we all started being a little…
Wild, brilliant colour is rocking my concrete-grey foundations
Modern science calls it bunk but I am fully on board with chromotherapy , an alternative medicine branded by the labcoats as a pseudo-science. The preferred term is photobiology now, an…
A beautiful craftivism in a flowery part of the world
I’ve made it my mission to shake things up by injecting the handmade domestic — doilies, quilts, sweaters and rugs — into austere, authoritative spaces and places, from pristine galleries to…
Talking to spiders and caressing kettles not so crazy
I have a love-hate relationship with spiders. I will jump out of my skin if I find a big hairy mother in my bedsheets like anyone else but if I come across a particularly elaborate spider web, I…
How that one spark can turn into a raging fire of creativity
Since it’s camping season this is an appropriate object-metaphor for how you can go from creative flatlining to flourishing: my Biolite campstove . I impulse-bought this ingenious little stove…
Nature shows us that after devastation comes renewal
The 91-year-old CEO of the Commonwealth did not deem 2016 another annus horribilis but it was one for the political history books. It seems only fitting that these dark days broken up by…
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