Three views of icebergs

Break Up (detail)

I've recently finished stitching three iceberg pieces. Break Up, the large 2-D embroidery is at the framers right now. An iceberg tip with two towers is has joined the box of other smallish iceberg sculptures (where it is the biggest in that collection).

Newest two tower iceberg tip

And the monstrous full iceberg with below water base is all stitched up, but my Plan A for mounting it isn't going to work. I like to lie awake at 4am and imagine alternative plans that can be achieved within the budget and timeframe. Suggestions more than welcome.

My iceberg base lolls about still unsupported

With all this bergy goodness in my life at the moment I was excited to hear Gabby O'Connor on Radio NZ National's Arts on Sunday programme talking about her beautiful iceberg art. I wish I had time to get to Wellington for a look at it in City Gallery, the photos on her blog are amazing! Her iceberg base is over 12m long and made out of tissue paper on a geometric structure. Stunning, grand, gorgeous! I'm in love. I hope my Wellington readers will go along to her show and then tell me all about it ( E!)

Beautiful ugly

Here's my finished Spoil pile. One third of the mining installation for exhibition in Melbourne in August.

Colours for crevasses

Choosing colours to make into crevasses.

Work in progress (Icebergs)

After finishing my giant iceberg last month, I still have an appetite to make more, to keep exploring the forms and finessing the technique. Icebergs are much quicker to make when I'm not including the 70% below water. So these are just the tip of the iceberg.

Work in progress (Australia)

Eight weeks until my August deadlines start tumbling onto me. Juggling multiple projects in every waking moment. Here's one of them, part of the Melbourne installation.



PS I am managing to update the Response blog more often, check that out too.

Response

A contribution from Ampersand Duck, a letterpress printer based in Canberra, Australia

Two and a half years ago I conceived and launched a collaborative journal project called Response. I made a blank sketch book and invited friends and strangers to contribute a page or two. The book has finally returned to me, with collage, printing, writing, drawing, and paper crafts inside its covers.

Inside the book's front cover are the directions for participating in the journal project.

Response has its own blog, and I will be posting photos of the entire collaborative journal over the coming weeks, along with my own responses to the project. It is extraordinarily exciting to have completed a collaboration involving 10-13 people in 5 countries! The final stage of the project will be to edition the book so all the contributors can have a copy to keep. After that, I might make another blank book, to send out into the world as Response II.

The first pages were created in Melbourne in 2009.

Illusions of edibility

I'm working on another mining industry pun piece, but this time the visual puns seem to be foodie. The stacks of gold coins above look suspiciously like macaroons. And the collection of yellow and gold threads I'm using to make them keep catching my eye as though I've left a mandarin peel on my work table (even though there's never any food on my work table, a rule I am foolishly more lax with around the computer keyboard)



Another element of Spoil, the mining installation I am working on (showing in Melbourne in August), is a big pile of toxic waste: the photo above is a peek at its peak. However, I am adding height to my layers of gloomy grey blanket with hidden lashings of fluffy cream roving, and every time I walk past the yet to be stitched pile with its layer of white wool on dark blanket my mind nags at a vague memory of making cream-filled layer cakes. It seems more like a remembered cook book illustration than an actual cake memory but I just can't pin it down.


Despite my temptingly tasty hallucinations I have no inclination to start making actual representations of food from textiles. So many crafters already do that so well; of whom the most admirable is Gretel Parker. The fabulous real and pretend cupcakes at her book launch are second only to the story of the wonderful party which moved me to tears.

A beautiful break up

This week my iceberg-making has shifted from a close-up full-length 3-D model berg to an aerial view, looking down on the break up of an ice sheet.

Unless you've been hiding your head under a rock (like most politicians apparently), you surely know that if, or more likely, when one of the really great ice sheets at either pole begins breaking up, that's the tipping point at which sea levels are expected to rise dramatically and sea temperatures to shift decisively enough to oh, I don't know, reverse the Gulf Stream or something and then we'll really see climate change, oh boy.

It's not something to look forward to, my beloved Antarctica breaking up and melting away. But we'll no doubt watch it on Google Earth and You Tube and it will be breathtakingly beautiful as well as a terrifying portent of doom.

What I particularly enjoy about making this piece is that I carry around the individual bergs in a little bag and can stitch on them anywhere, any time. And now that I am starting to attach the finished bergs to the background and stitch in a cold, deep ocean between, there are many happy hours of nice and easy flat blanket stitch. After wrestling with two major sculptural pieces, this one feels like a breeze.

Iceberg Baby

Coochie coo: dandling the upside down iceberg on my knee

People keep asking me what I'll be working on next, now the island is finished. The question seems strangely irrelevant, though I appreciate the interest expressed. Truth is I started working on the next thing the next day and that's almost finished now plus I've got another major project half finished, a third one just beginning and a clamouring sketchbook full of pieces that I intend to chew through as fast as I can this winter.

The big iceberg that I started making in January, then put aside for a couple months of single minded island making, will be done with stitching by bedtime tonight. There's still a whole problem to solve about mounting it, but there will be no more needle pulling thread through the soft fat layers and that is what signals 'finished' to me. Because now I have turn to some other bit of blanket to get my embroidery fix.

Every major piece I work on feels like my 'baby' especially when the end of making is hoving into view. But this big iceberg is more babylike than anything I've made since my daughter was tiny! It's about the size, shape and density of a swaddled infant. Resting on my lap as I stitch, it's not as heavy as a baby, but the maternal feelings are resonant with their object nonetheless.

More like a swaddled husky pub in correct orientation , or maybe an albino piglet?

The tortoise speeds up

Followers of this blog will know that the slowness of my making practice is a key meaning of my work. Slowness means intentionality and slowness sets my art apart from slick and machine made things.

And yet, slowness is a rod for my own back. To put it bluntly, the price of savouring slowness is a limit on the quantity of pieces I can complete. The growing backlog of projects I want to work on stretches out for years. Slowness limits my opportunities to collaborate, to pursue commissions, to exhibit more and even to sell my work because there just isn't very much of it being produced. It makes it difficult to price my work appropriately and so what does sell pays only a couple of dollars per hour.

But deliberate slowness has been a protective mechanism. Psychologically, if not physically, I am still recovering from the six years when my dexterity and creativity was severely compromised by OOS, even though the symptoms have been minimal to non-existent for at least eight years.

I always worry that I'll 'get in trouble' for spending so much time on handcrafts, that my body will betray me again and I will find myself once more helpless, dependent and frustrated at my inability to express myself. So a commitment to slowness helps ensure that I pay attention to my body, keep it relaxed as I work, take time to stretch and alternate stitching with other activities, and balance work with rest and play.

In this context, my decision in mid-March to finish No Mine is an Island in time for a 4 May deadline felt dangerous and scary. I had been meandering along with the island at my usual relaxed pace for a month or so when the deadline was announced. Suddenly I was forced to assess how much was left to do and decide whether to try finish the piece in time, or just to give up on it for that purpose.

I estimated 36 days in which I could do substantial work, and at least 38 days of work required. Yikes! But, I really wanted the island to meet the deadline and there must be a margin of error for my rough estimation. So if I put aside all my other stitching projects (iceberg and ice floes) not to mention most other non-stitching, non-survival, activities and nothing went wrong, I might just make the deadline.

Immediately I put the island project into high gear, and everything else out of my mind. But for most of those six weeks I wasn't confident that I would succeed. The deadline was inflexible, my commitment to making high-quality handcrafted art could not be compromised and so the speed of my making had to change but without risking my health and ongoing capacity to work.

At about two weeks out from the deadline I started to feel confident I would make it, and in fact I had a couple of days to spare at the end as well as some relaxed social time-out in the last week. But for most of those 36 days I wasn't sure either about making the deadline or maintaining my body's health. The fact that I managed both, and that the piece is as strong and beautiful as I hoped, taught me a lot.

I learned that processed foods are not always the work of the devil, and that I can live with more mess and dirt that I thought. I learned I can satisfy my need to read without stopping my stitching, and the loudspeaker is my favourite function on my phone. I remembered that I can push myself through boredom and tiredness to keep working. I found out that I can replace some of my sleeping hours with minutes of hard exercise, for a similarly refreshing result. I learned I can trust myself to work hard and fast. I can trust myself to look after my health. And in the past few days I've learned to reward myself for hard work with extended joyful celebrations with friends.

Finally, as I return to the big iceberg and ice floe projects I put aside to pursue the island and its deadline, I realise that I have new, more efficient, work habits that mean everything I make can be produced more quickly now. As long as my preferred medium is hand-embroidery and needle felted blankets I'll always be one of the slowest artists on the block, but now I'm a little faster than I used to be.

No Mine is an Island

The artist's statement for No Mine is an Island

"Look across the surface and down a mine that bleeds toxic tailings into the sea. Look within, beyond the obvious, behind the scenes. There is a complicated story underlying every thing we buy and all that we reject. The consequences of our consumption extend far, and sustain long, beyond our individual use.



We cannot fence off ourselves from each other, or from the air, the earth, the waters of our world. Whether careless or deliberate in our choices, whether in denial or awareness, we do not stand alone.


Let there be no mistaking: each imperfect stitch of cotton thread was made by hand, every layer slowly needle-felted from recycled blankets and un-spun wool. My materials are plants and animals but my finger tips became calloused from hundreds of hours pushing needles of steel, tempered from iron, mined from an earth left as scarred as my skin. "




No Mine is an Island includes a pallisade of 36 embroidery needles that I've bent or broken in the past 18 months of blanket stitching blanket sculptures. The needles are almost invisible unless you peer really closely at the rim of the mine at the centre of the island. My callouses are invisible too, but much treasured. Stitching is so much easier and less painful now that I have hard leathery fingertips.

Last glimpse of the backside

I'm experimenting with lighting to try and get the colours to photograph. Here the greens are about right, but the blue and red are way off.

My island piece has a name now: No Mine is an Island. I was describing the work to someone* at a party this weekend and they made the pun first, and it seems the Right Title on so many levels. I do tend to assume all puns are bad puns, but surely if there are any good puns this must be one of them.

I have all but finished embroidering the two main components, island and ocean, and next will sew them together before mounting. On this last day before all the workings disappear I thought I'd share with you some evidence of my 200-plus hours of handstitching and felting so far.

I am unreasonably fond of the 'wrong side' of my embroideries. I think in my childhood I was impressed upon with the importance of the back of the work being neat and tidy, and I'm a little proud of my relatively ordered reverse.

The underside of the ocean. This is what the back of blanket stitch looks like.

The centre of No Mine is an Island is the deep crater of the open cast mine which extends below sea level by some 7cm. It may not be obvious to a casual observer but the depth of this negative space seems quite radical to me. In the same way I am eager to share the underside of my crafting, I am also eager to understand and share what is usually unseen: the dirty secrets of extractive industries, what is below the surfaces of earth and sea, and the unintended consequences of what we buy and consume.

My island mine is an imagined and generic representation of extractive industries. The raw red gouge of the mine and its tailings were inspired first by my dream/poem and then by images of iron ore tailings. Arguably not the most toxic tailings produced in mining activities, but irresistible because it looks like the earth is bleeding from a fatal wound.

The underside of my island, with the bottom of the crater appearing as a tower from this angle. In the foreground you can see a little of the felting as it reaches round the edge to the bottom of the plain cream blanket.

*I was a little drunk at the time and can't remember who the punster was, but I'm happy to give credit where its due if reminded!

Island progress

Looking down into the mine. Can you tell that it's deeper than sea level?

This is all I'm doing. It seems like I might finish it in time, if I don't slack off.

Close up of the ocean surface.

The sea is the portable part of the project, though relatively bulky I still take it everywhere in a large plastic bag and pull it out to put in a few stitches whenever I can. The island is still separate and worked on at home: its much more awkward stitching and requires a table and superlative lighting.

Building an island

I am entirely focused on my island project, frantically working towards a deadline, which I am not entirely confident I can meet. I stitch every minute I can find of every day. The rest of my life is uncomfortably neglected and I worry about the consequences but I keep stitching. It's a huge project, and inevitably more complicated in the making than it seemed in the planning.

Each layer of blanket, cut to the contour lines of my imagined island and its deep opencast mine, is needlefelted for colour and increased height/depth. This stage seemed to go on forever and unlike my iceberg sculptures, I couldn't start stitching until every layer was felted.


But finally I began stitching, inside from the bottom of the deep mine, up and then over the hilltops and finally starting down the ridges and gullies that are the sides of my rugged island. The mine's tailings seep down one gully like a blood trickling from a mouth, or lava overflowing from a volcano.

The vivid grass green of my island is very difficult to photograph accurately. Anyone who has flown into New Zealand from overseas would recognise the colour: New Zealand pastures are an impossibly bright green, more intense than anywhere else I've ever seen. This is the colour of my island, not the colours in these photos.


The island is hard to stitch because its 3D, so my needle is usually going in and out at awkward angles, there are tight corners and uncooperative gaps. The sea that it will sit on is easier to stitch, being flat. But it's huge and is the part of the project which most threatens my ability to meet the deadline. But these days I can do flat blanket stitch practically in my sleep, and literally while I read. Only turning a page interrupts my sea stitching, and only threading a needle interrupts my reading (right now, the very compelling Steig Larsson Millenium trilogy).

Munted

Bethwyn and I finished our altered book responding to the February 22 earthquake in Christchurch. We are quite proud of our collaborative intensity and focus which went into the making, and of the finished product which successful captures our feelings as we witnessed the disaster from a safe distance, yet so close in our close knit country.


'Munted' is a wonderfully dry kiwi colloquialism for 'broken' and has become widely used even in formal situations to describe the infrastructure damage caused by the earthquake.


Bethwyn and I offer this collaged book with heartfelt compassion, respect and sympathy for everyone who survived that awful day. It is not our tragedy to describe, but we hope that by bearing witness we can contribute in some tiny way to the recovery process.


We have donated 'Munted' to the Many as One art for Christchurch fundraising initiative being run by Claire Beynon. You can make a donation (in any currency, of any amount) to go in the draw for this book, or one of the other exciting art works and books that have been donated to support earthquake recovery in Christchurch. Please do check out the Many as One blog.