Identifying and accessing natural materials and recycling discarded ones is definitely a strong trend in contemporary fibre art, which in all its forms is pretty popular Uruguay generally, and Montevideo in particular, and this is the time of year for more exhibitions reviewing student’s work. I love going to fibreart or textile art exhibitions, and this one, currently showing in my own barrio/suburb of Montevideo, is a small but very enjoyable one.

This collective exhibition is by artists who have been learning how to combine stitchery with basketry and soft sculpture techniques while using natural plant fibres and salvaged remnants of older and antique textiles under the guidance of prominent Uruguayan fibreartist Silvia Umpierrez. The works on show feature various plant fibres gathered within Uruguayan environments, including leaves and dried flowers attached to some of the small works in frames or shown on embroidery hoops. I don’t know if those plant parts were applied while still green and pliable, or whether they underwent some preservation processes before being used, but whatever the answer, the result is these works are all various shades of brown, with some subtle touches of principally earthy colours added by using stitch and some layered fabrics. The course of study obviously included layering fabrics, rust dying, burning edges of materials, and a variety of stitches to add texture. I selected these following photos to show the scope of students’ explorations of the techniques they learned.

There were several delightful soft sculpture animal forms under the title “Exstinctios”, the task being to use plant fibres to create some of the world’s extinct animals. Whether my interpretation of some of them was correct or not, they are delightful, and I’m pretty sure in this photo I’m seeing a diprotodon and possibly a kind of dinosaur.

The current trend to recycle and mend began at least 25 years or more ago and one of my favourite artists anywhere is El Anatsui. There are many people today creating their art by recycling salvaged materials, and proudly enjoy all the virtue signalling associated with it. The question of whether salvaging a material and using it necessarily adds extra artistic value beyond it being a well made ‘craft project’ is one I’ve long pondered, and wrote of on this blog in 2010.  Such endeavours as these artist’s creative pieces, and my own creative works are frequently dismissively labelled as craft, that is, something less than ‘art’, a world wide difficulty which is slowly changing through the endeavours of prominent artists like El Anatsui. When I look at how I work, and the materials I like to work with, I sometimes feel a twinge of guilt that I’m not doing enough to ‘save the planet’. I mostly use new fabrics, and worse still, they are quite often man made fibres, plus I definitely favour polyester threads and synthetic batting/guata in my own fibreart. On the other hand, as I routinely mend shoes, garments and other things where possible, I re-use packaging materials and conserve water and electricity, I can cope with this level of ‘guilt’ in my art making!

This exhibition is showing a Dodeca Gallery, San Nicolas 1306, on Mondays to Fridays from 4pm to 10pm. Artists will be in attendance on Wednesday 27th November at 6pm. If you arrive during those times, and the gallery is not open, wander in and around the film and television school – a kindly student looked up from checking her phone and found someone for us. It is a known issue that they find it difficult to have someone there all the time, but if it were my exhibition I’d make sure someone was present at the hours listed on the school’s website 🙂

Through my textile souvenirs, I’m revisiting Peru today. One of the most wonderful textile souvenirs I’ve ever collected is this lovely arpillera from the markets in Aguas Callientes, the town nearest Machu Picchu. I’ve written about it previously so will focus on other things today.

It’s wonderful wall hanging, but I try to focus on practical textile/fibre art I can use when we get home. This table runner from Cusco, Peru is an example. While without doubt it was produced for the upper end of the tourist market, such things also offer insights into the best of local craftsmanship. In common with most cultures, weaving and embroidery go together, and Peru artisan markets and shops are a bewildering delight.

Those colours fit our decor perfectly, and I’ve used this table runner more or less continuously since our Peruvian trip in 2008. Raised in Australia to always hand wash anything made of wool, I had reservations about putting it into the delicates cycle of the washing machine – but eventually took the plunge several years ago, held my breath, and it came out beautifully. I take great care of it, and it needs washing only every 3-4 months. I hang it over the clothes airing rack before putting it back on the table, as there’s no way I’d let it find its way into the drier. If I didn’t take care to circumvent her, my wonderful cleaning lady would have it have it thoroughly washed and felted in no time flat 🙂

Writing about this souvenir had me searching for information about the chain stitch so widely used in the Ayacuchano area around Cusco, and I found this video explaining and demonstrating the plain simple chain stitch punta cadena and its variations punta crespo which are used to form fillings and textures, and all of them are used with stem, straight and satin stitch. There’s an academic paper to delve into, too, if your spanish is up to it, on how the Spanish colonisation broought European influences to indigenous textile making over time.

The next two things are in the bright colours which by far dominated everything on sale. Glorious riots of colourful textiles abounded in street markets and all the shops selling local artisan made goods.

I know, I’ve claimed to focus on practical things I can use at home – but I now confess I have never used this red bag for anything 🙂

There were about 20 artists on yesterday’s SAQA JAMs YAK zoom call, and we discussed a number of topics, including the pros and cons of larger and smaller sized works, and different views on presenting or displaying our fibre art, including the thorny old one of whether to mount and frame textile works, under glass or not. There are so many acceptable options these days, which can appeal or not, depending on what field you’re coming from, and where you’re showing your work is a factor, too.

In the context of this discussion, I mentioned a juried fibre art exhibition held in the late 90s, I think by WAFTA (West Australian Fibre Textile Artists) in Perth, Western Australia – at least I think they put it on. I will never forget one piece in that show I found quite astonishing to see it hung it using several grommets along the top edge which were looped over a few nails in the gallery wall. They were positioned so that it buckled a bit, deliberately not sitting flat against the wall. In addition the edges of the canvas were just cut and left raw, bereft of any kind of finishing off that I recall. Looking back it was a bit innovative, maybe ground breaking at the time, and although I can’t remember the surface design, I’m sure that it probably was entirely appropriate, as I now see I myself was more focused on technique rather than its message, because that was where my own art was.

In the late 90s I was 100% into freehand cut, machine pieced quilted works with bound or faced edges. With top quality workmanship all my threads were skillfully, neatly and carefully finished off as I diligently buried all knots between layers – they didn’t even show on the back of a work, and still don’t on any of my backs. After all, I learned good sewing and embroidery skills from my mother, grandmother and domestic science teachers at school; and as a teen I often successfully sewed myself outfits using the more demanding Vogue Designer patterns. In the late 80s my earliest contact with quilted textiles had been with the exacting requirements of traditional pieced geometric patchwork. Much of that changed when I met freehand or improvisational piecing. in an art quilt workshop by Nancy Crow – after which whatever I made was less precisely structured but still neatly finished off.

Considering some of my own recent work, and images in my Pinterest collection, an informal, unfinished look is something I have been working towards for some time…. and it isn’t always easy to carry out on purpose. But it does fit with me seeing any kind of Life as a continuum between start and finish points without any set length or pattern. A life can be long or short, and it can be a smooth continuum, but it is more likely to be untidy in places, occasionally punctuated by upheavals or mistakes at some points along the way. Fabric marked by stitches is a statement or an exploration of something on the artist’s mind, and, just like a life, a stitchery can have messy stops, starts and changes of directions, stitches or threads along the way.

My favourite artists whose medium is stitch include Roberta Wagner (“Much of my recent work has a feeling of age reminiscent of memories and buried treasure”), Shelley Rhodes , Rieko Koga (“She expresses her universe through threads and needles, working spontaneously.”) , Anitta Romano (“It is above all a question of inscribing time in matter, of transforming time into matter”) Carolyn Nelson (“…by hand, torn, layered, stitched, embedded…” To this list I’d add Cristina Llambi, the artist whose exhibition I recently loved. All of them stitch their ideas free of any sign of tradition or technical rules, and that freedom brings an air of spontaneity and sensitive response of the stitcher to his/her environment.

It’s no secret to my readers that I love hand stitching, and as I move along I do so rhythmically with a result that the marks tend to come out in a pretty regular way:

There are times when I have delighted in stitching a regular kind of pattern leaving out anything that disturbs it. I’ve written before on primal shapes – squares and triangles in particular, and how grid layouts represent systems of order, like societies, or a body of knowledge, or a record of the passage of time. A couple of my recent works have this theme –