1/Edition

Haul of business cards

This year was the first edition of 1/Edition (see what I did there? eh?) at the Metro Convention Center, and, having to do with prints and books as it does, and prints and books being the stuff of my dreams, I had to go take a look. There were a ton of artists, collectives, galleries, bookstores, and more, and it was very exciting to see what everyone was doing!

I ended up getting a couple of - I want to say artist books, but would these be considered "books by authors" or "artist books"? I'm going to go with artist books.

Mini haul of books - there were so many more I wanted to bring home!

There were a bunch more books - part of the first run of a reprint of the Moomin novels, for example, except I really don't need to start reading Moomin from the first print - that I wanted to bring home with me, but I held back because of reasons stated before to do with my bookshelf & my growing collection of books.

Animals with Sharpies by Michael Dumontier and Neil Farber is incredibly engaging, in a tongue-in-cheek way that acknowledges some of the different characteristics of the animals portrayed in the book through the messages they are made to write down. Some of the animals are almost, if not, unrecognizable, which adds another layer of complexity to the images: it becomes a matching game and a test of your knowledge of the animal realm. Admittedly, my own knowledge is rather pitiful, and so some of the animals that are shown in smaller parts remain unknown to me, but the messages remain, baffling the viewer (or at least myself, because I am unaware of the speaker/writer and its relation to what is written) while at the same time providing a window to accessing the contents of the book regardless of the reader's depth of understanding of the animal kingdom. Go get yourself a copy. Immediately.

One Sky Star World Team Alliance by Stefan Marx, on the other hand, consists entirely of illustrations of airplanes that the artist either has been on or saw throughout his travels, or so the person at the Dashwood Books booth told me. The illustrations charmed my socks off, and started my string of purchases at the convention; some of the planes are portrayed in full, some are cut off, while some still feature in a 2-page spread, and that is part of what makes them so lovely: it's not just a collection of illustrations of planes, so much as a collection of the memories and places in the form of planes, the portrayal of which differs depending on the artist at the time.

There was one more book I wanted to purchase very much, although I couldn't justify it to myself then since it's a commercially produced book that I should in theory be able to purchase at a much later date: The Little Mermaid, by Hans Christian Anderson & Yayoi Kusama. I had seen parts of it on Brain Pickings and desperately wanted to read it in full through, say, my local library, but as expected, we don't own a copy. Nor am I saying we should carry it necessarily, considering the sort of book this is and the size of its readership and us being a public library. This retelling of the Little Mermaid takes you to another world with its illustrations, and it's going to be something for me to save up for. I'm going to make room for it on my shelf!

Type Books - because I didn't get The Little Mermaid

And then there were these adorable pins at the Type Books booth (along with the Little Mermaid), so because I didn't get The Little Mermaid, I got myself these two instead. There were a bunch of different designs - one for Magritte and a Bowie one, among others - but these two broke out of that conventional yellow smiley face shape and stole my heart. Dali's going to a friend, and the ice cream (I've been told it looks like poop though) stays with me.

So much for my 1/Edition haul! I completely forgot about Canzine in my excitement for 1/Edition, unfortunately, but I'm hoping I'll be able to make it to the Book Arts Fair at OCAD on December 10! There's also the Antiquarian Book Fair happening at the AGO this weekend (Nov 4 - 6) apparently, so I might drop by there as well to take a look. There are so many book and print events happening about town these days!

TEAM UP! a Printmaking Show

Coming to a gallery near you..

Please come join us for the opening reception! Or drop by throughout the exhibition dates anyway if you can't make it for the reception. I'm super excited to see everyone's work, and to get the final portfolio, of course!

workschoolartworkschoolart

The back of the quilt looks so very calming from this angle

It's been a very busy past couple of weeks right now, and while it's slowed down a little, there's still the undergraduate thesis looming over my head that I need to have done in order to actually graduate. But a couple of exciting things happening/happened:

• I got a position I applied for at the library I currently work at! This is very exciting for me - I've been working at the library for years, but now that this arc of schooling is coming to a close (if all goes well and that thesis writes itself, of course! what do you mean, theses don't write themselves?), I finally applied for the position. While it's also rather bittersweet (changes are underfoot), I am very happy about this step for me! Especially since I will be staying at the current location, which means I get to stay with a group I love.

• I am currently part of a Juried BFA show at Gallery 1313, Queen St. W., Toronto! From what I understand, all of the participants are graduating students. The reception is this Saturday, March 19, from 3-6. This was very last minute (I only found out I was going to be in it last Wednesday), so I haven't had a chance to go see it myself just yet. This was a very pleasant surprise though, since I had been working on my own things not really too much a part of the print studio per se. (I was the one-student textile department beginning and probably ending with me once I graduate. That being said, I incorporated my work into my print practice to work alongside it, so I was technically still in the print studio...) My quilt & the accompanying book, The Plainest Weave, are currently in the show.
• In addition to #2, I am also very proud to have been chosen to be a part of the Toronto Printmaking Coalition Exchange Print! More details on that later, but the exhibition of all the exchange prints will take place June 8 - July 3 @ Graven Feather, Toronto. I am happy to say that I am done my part for that, and while there was a hiccup or two along the way (as with much of print, really), I'm incredibly pleased with how they turned out. They came out better than the vision I had in my head when I started - love when that happens. I still have to deliver them to the organizers, but they're almost out of my hands now, hurrah!
• More applications are due soon that I have to work on! 2 that I can think of right now, but that's not counting all the applications for gallery space & a grant that I've already sent out, in addition to the one for the job posting above (nevermind the fact that I also went for the interview).
• THESIS. That's coming up. And while I have everything I need to write it up, there remains the fact that I have to actually do it. So I've been summarizing all the articles all over again, because I've forgotten much of what I read & wrote last semester when we had to submit proposals, and piecing things together. I think I'm at a good place right now for that though. And I do so want to graduate. I'm pretty done for now. A master's would be great... in a year or maybe three.

Most of this happened last week. Add a reception into that also. And the interview for the job. And Open House preparations for the Visual Arts department at York. It's been a long long week. It's been real fun, but I'm glad it's done with, and that most things are settled now.

In other news, I'm looking at my reading list this month, which has not flagged from January & Feburary (forthcoming). This is great! And we're only just 2/3 of the way through the month, which means there's time yet to be going through the pile of borrowed items and try to return some.

Guess what? I did end up needing that lifeline!

Also! After a couple of false starts, I've gotten past one section of my scarlet billows dress and started in on the next yarn. I'm really hoping once it's done it'll transition smoothly from one to the other, especially since I've only seen it in one lighting condition... I did end up needing to use the lifeline I cast through that increase row, which made it all worth it. And the chevron cardigan is done, done, and done! I haven't taken any pictures yet, but I have worn it out and about and gotten compliments, and I like the way it looks, but it's in sore need of some pockets. I'll be dedicating an entire post to that hopefully soon, but just a little sneak peak (in words): madtosh, while I love working with you, apart from the fact that you're superwash and I now have my reservations about that, I'd really appreciate it if you STOPPED BLEEDING ALL OVER MY OTHER CLOTHES. Unfortunately (fortunately?) it really only bleeds where there's also moisture, which means wearing it on a warm day + long day = can't take off the cardigan cause it's a 'lil obvious. I've tried soaking it in some vinegar & a couple more soaks to get rid of excess dye, and it's blocking out again now, so we'll see. I did soak it too long and the black buttons started to bleed onto the surrounding yarn, but hopefully it won't be too obvious. Madtosh. Whatever am I going to do about you?

Jane & co.

Hand-dyed, hand-woven, hand-sewn

Unfortunately not the best photo, but as I don't have access currently to a lighting studio, this will have to do. This is the project I had been working on all of last semester: a hand-dyed, hand-woven, and hand-sewn quilt! It was my first time quilting anything at all, so of course I had to go all out and do it as much from scratch as I could, right? Stitching together all the layers of the quilt sandwich took me a good 3 nights of hand-sewing, stitch by painful stitch (I didn't have a thimble the first night and drew blood after using my finger to redirect the needle upwards enough times), as I found out that quite unexpectedly - although I should have foreseen it - the quilt sandwich was too thick to go through the sewing machine, for one, and, when I tried, it got stuck and threatened to destroy the quilt blocks!

I'm not sure exactly how much yarn I used for this, but I'd hazard a rough estimate at approximately 7000 yds of laceweight & 2000 yds of fingering weight for all the fabric I wove up. Granted, there was a small pile of scraps at the end that were either too small to use, or that I didn't have to use since the block was already large enough. The centre of each block was woven in BFL using my Coccodrillo, and the surrounding strips were woven on Sandy using superwash merino. All the yarn save the undyed parts were dyed using Greener Shades dyes. All the structures required only 2 shafts, and there are 3 blocks of each weave structure in the quilt. It took me a good month or two to finish this in its entirety.

I made the quilt to accompany a book - The Plainest Weave - I made for the same project. I had had the idea since the start of the term, but just writing and rewriting the draft took a while, and I was making changes even as I was printing the first side of the pages.

Once I get better pictures of everything (probably closer to March, when we have our department's Open House and there's better lighting), I will be updating my website. And in the meantime, if anyone is interested in purchasing this & the accompanying book, feel free to send me a message, the only caveat being that I still need everything until March at least.

woven into fine print

hand-knitted & hand-sewn clothing, from woven into fine print (2015)

I never know whether I should keep this blog completely separate from my online art portfolio, especially when there's considerable overlap in the material, but here's a shot from my first solo exhibition that featured the 4 linen & linen blend pieces I made for my line'n'form series.

I'm primarily a printmaker - I work in intaglio and woodcut relief - but I'm finding that there are so many parallels to be drawn between the processes with which I engage; that there are many similarities to be found between the printmaking and the textile work I do, whether I think of it in terms of "fine art" or as making myself something I would like to have. I hesitate to say "craft" because that carries so much weight, and also because it sounds to me almost inferior by definition to "art", which is something I do not want to endorse, as I think craft exists in its own right apart from art, rather than along a hierarchical continuum, if you will, with it.

On that note, I'm currently reading A Theory of Craft by Howard Risatti. I also really want to read Thinking Through Craft by Glenn Adamson, but it's always borrowed whenever I go to the library. I could put it on hold, but I also have about 10 other books out already, all on the subjects of textiles, art, and craft, so it seems like it'd be in bad taste for me to simply hold onto it when others want to read it also. I recently finished The Craft of Zeus, which talks about the role weaving takes in ancient Greece (and Rome). It explores the way the actual process of weaving was used as a metaphor for politics, how weaving existed within language, both poetic and lay, and other topics I can't remember off the top of my head. There's quite a number of pages that have been marked for revisiting and note-taking before I return it to the library, and I'm now patting myself on the back for getting those book darts on impulse.

One of the things I really want to know is: from what I understand, the Fates spin the weft thread that determines your life (your fate/destiny/whatever you may), weaves it through the (white) warp, and cuts it to finish off your life - whence do the warp threads come? what are they made of/spun from? on that matter, what is the weft spun from? why white? It almost feels as though the warp is determined, beyond the Fates, and represents the web of existence as it is - even the Fates cannot lay their hands on that. What they can do, then, is determine how each person is woven into the fabric of the world, how they are affected by it, how the warp is effected by the person, and how much of those interactions to allow. Hence the weft. I have to do a lot more research on the topic before I can draw any real conclusion about this though. If anyone is knowledgeable about this subject, I would appreciate it a lot if you would guide me in the right direction in terms of reading material (or if anyone has the answer, with or without the research references, that'd be cool too!).