My dear friend Annalie Young who is a very talented photographer maintains a blog here where she showcases her work; wedding, personal as well as some really great creative stuff (well, it's all creative), like this week's advent calendar which she made herself from her personal stash of origami paper. I love that her blog is full of beautiful images of varying nature, all of which belong to her. Right now my fave is this diptych of a cow she met in the Netherlands at the beginning of the year.
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Over these past few months I've been taking my Anchor/Cradle around the city with me. Yep, on the metro too. It has been part of healing process of sorts, where while I carry it I do some personal processing. Since the Anchor/Cradle is so large and awkward the act of carrying it reminds me to stay focused on the task at hand which is to be continuously introspective (and not to run into anyone (literally)! Which I have. twice.) This is vague I know, partly because it is perhaps too personal and partly because I am still deciding what it means and where it is going. What I do know is that it has begun to make me kind of sad, so I'm putting the project on hold for a little while. Maybe in a few months I will want to pick it up again. For now the Anchor/Cradle sits on my porch where it will soon be consumed by Montreal's winter. Some rusting should occur on the fabric which I like. The working title for this project is Fragments of an Anchor/Cradle. Above is some video documentation of one of my walks. Thanks for stopping by this space :) Janna My installation on St.Viateur street for Journée des bons voisins began with five rolls of receipt paper threaded through my writing desk and five or six chunks of graphite for people to do rubbings of their objects with. In the beginning I sat within the vicinity to invite passers by to participate and explain the process, but near the end I watched from a distance and was surprised that people had no trouble figuring it out for themselves. Not that it's rocket science, but through past installations I've learned that some people don't easily distinguish between a rubbing and a line drawing. Interestingly kids seem to figure out the process fastest. It got longer... and longer, until the wind got to be so much that I had to wrap the paper around the table legs. I'm really enjoying having all this evidence of other people's objects.
Tomorrow I will have an outside installation as part of journees des bons voisins on St. Viateur West. Artists and other participants each occupy a parking space between Jeanne-Mance and St. Urbain. Mine will have a participatory installation in it, kind of like Traces, with a twist. Come visit between 11 and 8. Here is the text from their website to give you an idea of what it's all about: Following the highly successful 2010 edition, ruePublique, formerly Car Free Mile-End, will once again organize les Journées des bons voisins on St Viateur West. The third and final event of the summer will take place Sunday, September 18th, from 11 am to 8 pm. The main objective is to celebrate the best aspects of enhanced public space, as well as to promote Mile-End’s strengths: sense of community, creativity and conviviality. The programming will include bike repair workshops, music, yoga in the street, kiosks animated by community groups, youth and physical activities organized by the YMCA, public art, as well as participation by local merchants. My most recent eco-colour adventure included an epic bike ride with the hubby. Epic, since it resulted in us getting lost in Montreal...or off Montreal rather. We thought we were in Verdun, and when we asked for directions for the city centre of Verdun (for eats) we were given directions off the island--Nuns Island. We were pretty amazed that we ended up on another island without knowing it. It was a long ride to say the least.
On this island was a large patch of dark red leafy plants which I decided would be included in my next cold-bundle, along with some yellow onion skins we have been collecting during meal making. I wrapped the two in dry mordanted silk, wet it and then sat it in a shallow pool of brazilwood dye-stock-solution for a week. This morning I unwrapped it and VOILA! Happy day. Happy Janna From the marche to the jars, I'm loving all the stages of canning. This past weekend we did tomatoes. Here are some of my photos from the process, and below the tomato canning assembly line.
I'm so happy living in Montreal, only a couple of blocks from Marche Jean Talon. So much culture, and so much colour this time of year. Some lovely ladies in my life have recently inspired me to revisit natural dyeing. While visiting the great white north my friend Sasha gave me one her wonderful indigo dyed silk scarves (which I wore all summer and decided I needed more in various colours) and I finally got to see Marja's eco-printed silk garments in person. She has been keeping me inspired all year with photos of her new adventures in eco-printing, a technique which master-dyer India Flint has recently published a book about, Eco Colour (a really great book!).
So when I returned to Vancouver for my long awaited month long vacation I began experimenting with this new technique. Oh what fun it is! Seriously, of all the techniques I've experimented with recently eco-printing has made me the most excited. The process is simple and yet varied so you can get really creative, and the results are always unpredictable and exquisite. Each scarf has little details which change in different light sources (a characteristic of naturally dyed fabrics), so sadly it's really hard to capture these intricacies in photos. Above are a small selection of ones whose beauty were captured half-decently. Click on the photos for individual stories. xo Janna Fragments of Education was an site specific installation where I made graphite rubbings of surfaces around Concordia University with which I created a message in code to reveal injustices in the public education system. I wrote about it here on the blog before it had officially been installed, so now I have photos to share. For the installation I invited people to the coded message (made with pigment prints on cotton) by giving them a card which contained the legend on the front and a fill-in-the-blanks on the back (as seen in the photos - but don't enlarge them if you want to decode it yourself). The website that accompanies this project allows for online visitors to decode it too and has the extra feature of a video hint. Here's a link to the site: http://fragmentsofaneducation.weebly.com/ This is my first Montreal yarn bomb. It's made with a mixture of acrylic and wool yarns (the red is hand-dyed). Can you guess where this is? I'm interested in seeing what the winter weather does to it -- if it stays up that long.
more photos here Anchor/Cradle When an anchor doesn't do its job, it may take on another. Sometimes you can expect things from, and be disappointed by the people closest to you, neglecting to acknowledge the gifts they have offered you. Conversely you may perceive that you have nothing to offer, failing to recognize what you have already given. Anchor/Cradle is a sculpture that I completed in March. It was possibly the most enjoyable piece that I made all year; somehow I was able to complete each step without deciding what the next step would be. So, the process was very contemplative and relaxing. The fabric began as yardage printed with family lines. I then tore it in one continuous strip and bundled it. I contemplated leaving it as a bundle since I loved it so much. I also considered creating a large rosary with the fabric strips but wasn't super happy with the result. So the remainder of the bundle was woven into my welded anchor/cradle structure, with the rosary knots left to hang from the finished sculpture. The metal structure manifested itself in a matter of days. Since I had scrap metal in my locker from a previous project it came together quickly (thank you Concordia for having an amazing welding studio!).
In making this piece I learned that I do not need to know what will happen next in the creative process; to let go of control. Somehow the materials always seem know what to do. The sculpture is about 68 inches wide, 23 inches deep and 23 inches high, not including the neck On my last evening in Ulukhaktok Suzie and Julia took me to the old town where they all used to live before the community needed more space. Every once and a while I'd turn my back to the wind to keep my face from freezing off. But I stuck to the plan, braved the cold and we had a tea party in a blizzard. The next morning they told me that they thought that maybe I was turning around in longing for my warm home. hehe. This is us (less Cora and Diane) right before I left for my flight on the last day. I'm wearing my atikaluk (a-tee-ka-look), a gift Mary made me, and the quiviuk hat the ladies made me on the knitting machine. Some of the ladies in the picture are wearing the hats I made them for the awards ceremony we had had the day before. Ada (far left) was the program coordinator. She often picked me up in the mornings and took me to work on her snow mobile. Even though it was only two blocks away, I was very thankful, especially on cold windy mornings. Sometimes it was as cold as -45 with the wind chill, and you could find people crawling through the blizzard to get to their homes. This picture is of me wearing a polar bear head purse in an Inuvik art store, it has the actual bear nose partially still intact. Can you believe it? This is a rare find even in the Arctic. Although I didn't see any polar bears while I was there, a grolar bear (polar grizzly hybrid) was killed the week before I arrived in Ulukhaktok. It had been going through abandoned houses and was destroying things, so it was definitely a threat to the community. Read about it here and here. Below is a pic of that very grolar bear (taxidermed), in the Ulukhaktok Community Center.
When I instructed Mable to knit 110 rows she stood up, took a firm grasp on the knitting machine carriage and went at it.READ MORE
It's already been three weeks since I left Ulukhaktok! Now that I'm all settled into vacation mode and I've had a chance to think about what I just did, I'm really proud of myself and so thankful to the wonderful people who made this opportunity happen for me. Also I'm missing my students badly! I gained eleven grandmas and aunts in Ulu, and it's sad to realize that I won't be seeing them again any time soon. READ MORE
For their first weaving project most of the ladies wove belts. Here in the arctic these belts are often used to keep a child inside ones parka by tying it around their waste. I can't count the amount of times that I've been chatting with a woman and hear a squeak coming from behind them, not realizing that their child was in their parka the entire time. It's the best way to keep their little one warm. READ MORE
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