This topic popped up a couple of times this week.
First, I had the pleasure of meeting Doreen Bayley of Colonia UY. who came for a studio visit early in the week. Hers was one of the works I most loved in the “Enmascaradas” exhibition currently showing here in Montevideo, and we both had works selected for the first two glass+textile exhibitons, but we hadn’t met at either of those openings, and both missed the Enmascaradas opening. My own entry for the III Salon ArteVidrioTextil, opening February 4th next (Maldonado) is ready, and Doreen said she’s making one but has struck a snag, however there’s bags of time to finish her 25cm x 25cm piece before entries close on December 1st.
While she viewed my recent 2D works we had an interesting discussion about how we each approach making our art. Doreen said she doesn’t draw her ideas for her basketry creations out first, but assembles her materials and they then take her on the path to producing what she has in mind – to which I’d add guided by artistic ability and experience. She told me how angry and offended she’d been when some Big Name teacher or professor who proclaimed the importance or virtue of drawing, had really berated her in a public discussion when she revealed she didn’t draw anything, period. I don’t blame her – that was either his arrogance or ignorance, because as artists it is our own decision on how we design and produce our art. As the saying goes, there’s more than one way to swing a cat!
My regular readers know my own process is something similar, and that I very often arrange my design in grids. I showed my visitor a pair of 20cm pieces that are very diagrammatic, in a grid design, commenting how years as a geography student left me with the useful habit of quickly capturing ideas in brief, clear diagrams, as shown below –
I began making fibreart in the form of creative embroidery up to 1988, when having relocated to the USA I spent a year or so learning about and really enjoying making traditional American geometric patchwork and quilting. In the english speaking world particularly, modern and quiltmaking is descended from both geometric patchwork and appliqued quilted bed coverings, though quilted textiles for practical purposes are found in most other cultures too. In the USA in the 70s, Art Quilts emerged as an art form using the traditional needlework techniques employed in that history. In the last fifty years the whole notion of ‘art quilt’ has been added to by new technologies that artists encountered and embraced. Some of these have become familiar to many of us, including digitally designed pattern printed on demand to fabric for the artist/esigner to use in his art; the application of paints and dyes to produce surface design in the studio; machines that cut out fabrics and other materials to computer aided designs, and of course commercial fabrics have been changed with new technology, too.
Without going into detail on my opinion of how the word ‘quilt’ is really a negative factor in this artform’s struggle to be accepted as ‘art’, let me say that just like many other places, in Uruguay only painting, drawing and sculpture are regarded as ‘art’. Everything else, including all fibre related activities such as weaving, all kinds of embroidery, basketry, leatherwork, any form of knitting, knotting or crochet, and of course quilting, plus the many forms of glass work, ceramics, woodwork and the many iterations of metalwork – all lie somewhere on the busywork-handcraft scale. They’re certainly widely admired when featuring original designs and being well made, but nevertheless all that stuff is crafts, artesanías or ‘manualidades’.
My time in the traditional quiltmaking world was very brief, and I found it perfectly easy to abandon the concept of making a pattern to follow, but plenty of prominent art quilt makers do design and make their own patterns to follow, either by drawing out to scale, or projecting a line drawing to sheet of paper on the wall which they then number and label before cutting up. What is important is the final result, not how you got there.
In my next post I’ll go into the second time this subject popped up on my radar.