Coral: Fabric of the Reef – Karen Dodd

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UK Tour Day 3- Horniman Museum & Gardens

Karen Dodd’s “Coral:Fabric of the Reef” installation

Karen Dodd’s “Coral:Fabric of the Reef” installation

When I plan my trips, every once in a while I throw in a ‘ringer’ – some place I may have heard obscure reference to, I’m unsure about what I’ll find and decide to try our just for kicks.  It’s also good to plan some things which might really appeal to my husband Randy, who’s sweet and tolerent enough to accompany me on my textile exploits.

I read the description of the Horniman Museum and Gardens as a “quirky Victorian collection of artifacts” and thought it sounded like a unique adventure.  Not only that, but they also have an aquarium, which appeals to both Randy and myself, having both studied marine biology in our pasts.

The Color Wheel Summer Bedding Garden at the Horniman Museum & Gardens

We arrived a bit before the museum opened, so first toured some of the elaborate gardens, including this “color wheel garden”, which was planted to complement one of their current special exhibitions “Colour: The Rainbow Revealed.”

 

The original Arts & Crafts style museum

The museum was founded in 1901 by Frederick John Horniman. Frederick had inherited his father’s Horniman’s Tea business, which by 1891 had become the world’s biggest tea trading business. The cash from the business allowed Horniman to indulge his lifelong passion for collecting, and which after travelling extensively had some 30,000 items in his various collections, covering natural history, taxidermied animals and birds, cultural artefacts and musical instruments.

Victorian era natural history exhibitions seek to explain and confirm Darwin’s theory of evolution.

 

The original museum was designed by Charles Harrison Townsend in the Arts and Crafts style.  The collection now exceeds 350,000 objects.

After viewing the gardens, their lovely aquarium, and the interactive colour exhibit (geared towards children), we moved on to the natural history gallery.  We were greated by a fabulous sculptural textile collection by artist Karen Dodd.

Pinpoint by Karen Dood From Coral: the Fabric of Life

Pinpoint by Karen Dood

Karen’s work explores the beauty, fragility and vulnerability of coral and coral reefs.  Some of the pieces are brightly colored, showing the vibrant interdependent reef life.  Other pieces are subdued, representing the destruction of the reef and lifeless coral skeletons.

Karen uses hand-dyed and discharged (colour removal) wool blankets, which are folded, twisted, felted, wrapped & bound, and stitched.  The discharging of colour, corresponds to the bleaching of coral in our oceans, as the coral comunities die.  She uses fragmentation, shadowing, felting processes, stitching, and holes or gaps to increase the textural nature of each piece, while representing the loss, deterioration, and (hopefully) possibility of regeneration of the coral reef.

Pinpoint, detail

‘Crinkle Return’ by Karen Dodd

‘Crinkle Return’ by Karen Dodd

‘Crinkle Return’ detail by Karen Dodd

‘Crinkle Return’ detail by Karen Dodd

‘A Stitch in Time’ by Karen Dodd

‘A Stitch in Time’ by Karen Dodd

‘A Stitch in Time’ detail by Karen Dodd

‘A Stitch in Time’ detail by Karen Dodd

‘Lighting the Shadows’ by Karen Dodd

‘Lighting the Shadows’ by Karen Dodd

Check out https://www.karen-dodd.com/ Karen’s website to see more in this incredible series!

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More Procion MX Dyeing

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Wow… another fantastic day of mostly working with Procion MX dyeing at the Gail Harker Center for Creative Studies.  To be completely honest, I’m pretty tired… this can be hard work.  So, I’m going to keep it short and sweet tonight, and just put up some images and descriptions of the processes and projects we worked on.

First, our hand-dyed embroidery threads are totally luscious!  Here they are drying in our classroom.  We had to rinse them out and then set the color in hot water with Synthropol today.

We then started dyeing wool-rayon felt, which we’d cut into pieces prior to class, and will be making into hand-stitched books.

Felt with dye poured on (wet)

The felt totally soaks up the dye… you have to pour it on and it looks horrible and dark for the most part.

Rinsing out the felt

After allowing it to sit for a few hours, we rinsed it out and also set the dye with Synthropol.  Since the felt soaks up so much water, we had to carefully wrap it in towels to help dry it.  You don’t want to press or agitate it very much, or it starts the felting process.  We then left it to completely dry overnight.

Felt dyeing

Rinsed felt for hand-made stitch books, laid out to dry

We also worked with painting dyes on sketchbook pages.  We do these in 2-page “spreads” so that they will go together when the book is opened.  We then fuse pages together, to make the pages stiff and able to be stitched on.  We started working on a few pages by drawing a design on them, then punching holes through the paper with a darning needle.  We then can easily put our stitches through the holes.

Some sketchbook pages painted with dye

I believe we’re done with the dyeing now… on to more stitchwork tomorrow!

A two-page spread for a sketchbook, painted with Procion MX dye

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For great ideas on freemotion quilting, check out Leah Day’s FreeMotion Quilting Project

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Scope Creep

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Large Unfinished Feltwork at Tieton

Have you ever heard of scope creep?  Sounds like some kind of peeping tom that uses a periscope, doesn’t it?  Well, it’s actually where the intent and expectations of a project keeps increasing.  Perhaps I just have big ideas… but I’m finding myself being really excited about the prospects of the Tieton exhibition.  For instance, the large felted piece that I mentioned yesterday?  I started thinking about a documentary on Mongolia I’d seen and how they would felt large pieces by pulling the roll behind horses.  Here’s a link that has some info on the Mongolian felting tradition, as well as a YouTube video of the steps of the process.  Well, I’m a horsewoman… I recently sold my horse but still ride and know lots of people in the equestrian community.  One of my contacts has a Friesian farm in the Yakima area, not terribly far from Tieton, where they have big beautiful black horses that draw carriages.  Shouldn’t be too hard to drag a roll of felt, then, should it?


Will and Teresa Bron with two of their lovely Friesians

I also got to thinking about a fiber group whom I read about in Quilting Arts Magazine (June/July 2012).  They are from the Netherlands and create all sorts of outdoor installations.  You can see some of their work on their Windkracht 10 Blog.  We also have had a wonderfully colorful addition to many of our outdoor spaces here in the Seattle area… yarn bombing.  Just google yarn bomb Seattle images.  Here again, Tieton would be a perfect place to do all sorts of wonderful outdoor fiber art displays.  So, the scope of this exhibition may just be creeping up a bit more.

I’m thinking that it might be too much to ask of our CQA artists to also do the outdoors pieces, so perhaps I’ll just write an open call for artists in Washington… that shouldn’t be too much extra work, right? 

Tieton would also like to have lecturers and classes available from fiber artists during the show run.  So, I’ve opened this up to CQA artists as an opportunity, but I may need to open it further, if I don’t get enough response.  Well, I suppose I could pull a class together before next May….

Oh, and I’m thrilled that Mighty Tieton, having their own print studio, has offered to make a catalog of the exhibit!  All I need to do is provide high resolution images of all the artwork, artist statements, information on each piece, and write a curators statement.  No problem!

As you can see, it’s easy to commit and commit, and then not take time to do your art.  I’m committed to make a piece (or more) for this show.  But as artists we need to weigh out our commitments and look at our overall goals.  I do believe that putting this show on in style will be a positive experience for my artistic career.  But the major sticking point that I struggle with is in making enough art.  Making enough to be good.  Making enough to develop my artistic voice.  Making enough to feel fulfilled.  As I work through my goals for the coming year, I’m looking at committing to making a small art piece (5×7?) each week.  However, I struggle with whether that will stop me from making my larger pieces.  I have a partially-completed quilt (OK, who doesn’t) on my design wall that is about double-bed sized… I don’t want to stop making something just for the sake of some promise to do a small piece every week.  And I’m not sure I have time for both.  Well, I guess I will think it through some more before I write out my goals and plans for 2013!

Eastern Washington Seed Pods

Here’s my favorite inspiration from my day!  The sunshine and shadows on these seedpods was lovely with crisp air filled with the smells of all the dried grasses and grains. 

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