Turkey 2010...influencing my art

I asked a young woman (visiting from Pakistan) what the biggest difference was between her country and ours. "Oh, there is no sense of history here!" At the time, we were in Philadelphia, one of the most historic cities we have. But I understood: I had been to Turkey. Turkey is a country where small shops are operating in the ruins of ancient Roman arches:

History is a breathable presence here. The ancient is everywhere. Old walls built with even-older temple fragments. The daily market adjacent to the Grand Bazaar. At the time, the city was trying to dig a subway....very slow going, because of all the archaeological material. My sister and I stayed in a lovely hotel that shared a wall with an ancient domed structure.

Each generation had appropriated the past for it's own uses, and erased what it didn't like:

I'd seen statues with broken noses, but some of these had their faces chiseled away. Carved in stone did NOT mean permanent. At Ephesus, I saw a mosiac floor...and in the corner, the older mosaics still underneath. 

 I became viscerally aware of history at a new, deeper level....and it affected my art. As always, I was carrying some small pieces to work on. These 2 were handkerchiefs with embedded objects, which I had been stitching down. Now I started cutting away - 'looting' my art, in the same way that so much history has been looted.  

When I returned home, I finished these 2 and mounted them over frames. Then I started on a big piece, Looted Artifacts (57"h x 37"w):

I used the same thermofax screens as the ones used for Formal Argument: directions for knitting, crochet and mending. Printing them with discharge paste allowed me to get lighter letters on the darker fabric. So...we have here a field of printed knowledge overlaying various objects related to that knowledge, and by cutting out the objects - by looting them - the knowledge has been vandalized. The remnants of 2 architectural personas are falling to ruin in the foreground.

I also tried a looted version of Domestic Markings (2009),  but I used a dark gray  top layer, which doesn't have enough contrast. If I get a second life-time, I'll re-do it.

As of today, my blog goes to 3 x per week: Monday, Wednesday and Friday. And now, I'm heading down to my basement dye studio, to spend the day listening to NPR, drinking iced tea and slowly painting thickened dye onto cotton...hey, that's my idea of a good time!

Formal Argument 2011 (37"h x 32"w)

String, Felt, Thread: The Hierarchy of Art and Craft in American Art by Elissa Auther spells out the bias of the art establishment. She explains how an artist who started as a sculptor and transitioned to textiles will be perceived as more artistically valid than someone who evolved from quilting to textile art. It's the sort of book I can't read at bedtime because I will not be able to sleep, just lie there seething.

After reading it, I sewed it. If you haven't read it, please consider this piece a wearable book report. It is a textile argument, constructed on top of an old tuxedo: a formal argument, both in logic and dress.

Maybe because I had recently seen a show at the Metropolitan Museum on ceremonial clothing, I knew this had to be a garment. I googled 'ceremonial garments' and that got me started (I found a great image of Prince Charles, which explained what all his badges and medals represented).   

A very nice lady had given me this old, gray woolen jacket, seen here with my banner. Over the years, I've built up a collection of thermofax screens with directions for crochet, mending, knitting or information about archaeological textiles. I printed these words on dyed cloth, and sewed together various patchwork bits.

Then I found the perfect old tuxedo jacket at a garage sale - it even fit me! The gray jacket was out - the tuxedo was in. All I had to do now was sew on all the bits and patches that I had created.

Lots of medals, awarded for DETAIL, SKILL, DESIGN, BY HAND, STITCHES (embroidered onto an old girl scout badge for sewing). The epaulets are impossibly over-the-top: I just kept making them thicker and thicker and used parts of old leather work gloves to finish them off. I had to have them. With all this business about concepts and legitimacy and hierarchies...I wanted to add some indication of the actual WORK involved. 

The embroidered letters read "Oh my - there's a concept embedded here!" Couldn't help being flippant.

  Formal Argument, displayed on a dress form with a black tuxedo shirt, was featured in FiberPhiladelphia 2012, where Elissa Auther   (who wrote String, Felt, Thread: The Hierarchy of Art and Craft in American Art ) was the keynote speaker.