Summer reading: New Potatoes, Tilleke Schwarz

Our gardens here are in full-on cornucopia season, and here is Tilleke Schwarz' new book, titled appropriately,  New Potatoes, with an abundance of new work in her complex, layered, free embroidery style. Looking back at 18th and 19th c. Dutch embroidery samplers, she borrows here and there from old motifs, and text samplers. In the 70's she became fascinated with these samplers, and even replicated a Friesian sampler from 1730, in counted cross stitch.   Samplers were the work of  young girls, usually worked in silk on linen,  to teach them needlework, cross stitch,  darning,  embroidery, and how to spell and read.Unsatisfied with replicating the beautiful samplers, Tilleke soon decided to stitch her own designs, following her own ideas.

Her contemporary samplers are fast forward narratives. Her subject is the complexity and chaos of  the digital information glut, which streams toward us at internet speed.   Tilleke slowly embroiders, texts and images that catch her attention, plucked from the stream, slowing the hyper speed to a stand still, using the antique and ordinary art form of the stitched sampler. On her cloths, sometimes hand dyed, she layers images from her everyday life, in hoopless, embroidered stitches: her cat, a toilet, her new washing machine,  and people, with internet text fragments, creating an appealing visual diary of personal and world wide interconnection, which is the new normal.

The opposite of rote work, Tilleke's embroideries are free asymmetries, looping couched lines,  tangled line, a little wild, and beautiful. They are exciting and liberating. She also writes about how she creates the embroideries, her process and composition, and  the difficulty of working as a textile artist, a woman, creating art with a needle. Textile art, and women artists particularly, have always struggled for recognition.

Tilleke's work has been recognized, exhibited in European exhibits, and galleries, and published in many books and magazines. ( I first read about her in an article in the beautiful textiles magazine,  Selvedge).

Her first book, Mark Making, a cross stitch and embroidery thriller,  has long been out of print, but her second book, New Potatoes, is every bit as inspiring.  I have been selling it here in my store, and can ship copies, if anyone would like to have one. The books are paper covers, each signed by Tilleke.
Book+ shipping in the US, $30.  Email susan@avalanchelooms.com if you'd like me to send you one.

Horses, horses, horses with wings

All this energy, all these wings.  This little handwoven coca-pouch from Machu Picchu in Peru has inspired me to weave for many years. It was woven in the 60's, probably on a backstrap loom. I bought it while I was still in school. It didn't cost much, as I remember, but more than I thought I had to spend, at the time, on something I had no use for. I didn't even have a loom, nor did I know that I would be a weaver for most of the rest of my life.

Its purpose is to carry coca leaves, and a small stone, held in an interior woven-in pocket, used to grind the leaf against the teeth when chewing the coca.  The leafs were used ritually, to stimulate thoughts, and also to reduce hunger.  The pouch straps hold the pouch over the heart. The coca leaf has been used in the Andean culture for thousands of years.  There are ancient woven pouches with the same designs on this one.

Though I weave nothing like this, and do not even like horses particularly, the black and white, and the swirling motion of the legs and feet still entrance me.  Such wondrous weaving. It depicts an imaginative state of mind, strong and transcendent emotion, which we humans are capable of, and which we strongly desire to experience.   Looking at this, and drinking good coffee this morning, makes me want to hurry up and do something remarkable.  That is, it makes me feel just fine.

What was I thinking?

No, seriously. What was I thinking about before we left to visit our family out west just 5 days ago? This book and these yarns were on the table. I was thinking about something new. But what?  The show catalog Tradition Transformed, Brown/Grotta, No. 22,  is a favorite of mine. Japanese ideas and  9 contemporary weavers, are represented in a collection originally curated by Sheila Hicks, in 1995, at Brown/Grotta gallery, and exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, in  NewYork,  and to coincide,  Brown/Grotta gallery, 1998.

Chiaki Maki and her sister, Kaori Maki, weavers, are part of this group.  Their work and words are so clear to my mind's eye, and help me to think better about what I try to do, every time I come back to weave in my own studio.  Their elegance alone would be hard to match, but their textiles incite memory, or something less tangible, something not quite remembered.  Can a textile do that?  What a painting or a poem can?  Obviously, it can.  Here are the proofs.

When I was weaving as a student at the Rhode Island School of Design, I experienced a moment in which I disappeared, and only the weaving remained. The piece that was born of that moment was fascinating, beyond any description. Such a moment is the very heart of my creation.   Chiaki Maki



                                                                

other texture, other design

Sometime yesterday, a female rosebreasted grosbeak flew into my glass kitchen window, and fell to the ground, dead. Sad to see, but so beautiful. Just after this picture was taken, someone on the porch was seen with feathers about the mouth and whiskers, and the dead bird had mysteriously disappeared.

button, button

I've been looking through my button box this morning. My collection of small buttons used to fit in a tea cup. Here are glass buttons, vintage plastic, Mississippi mother-of-pearl, and 2-hole
bone underwear buttons (my personal favorites). Looking through my mother's button box was a favorite activity of mine when I was a child. These buttons survived the shop fire, and are still my treasure.

the poppy president

Jean brought me poppy heads! She's bringing more. It's poppy doll time again.
Tarja Poppi-nen, popular second term President of the Republic of Poppy-land: her platform,
equal opportunity & education for everyone, healthcare for everyone, an end to world hunger!

Peonia Season

Spaced warps and gauze weaves: what intrigues me is the space between the warps, the empty places. The idea is to see through, transparent weaves, or small windows, to what is behind or beyond the surface. I weave and watch, then try to materialize what I imagine comes next. The threads coming over the back beam, through the heddle eyes toward me are fertile ground. When you stand on a bridge, do you like to look upstream, or down?

Earth tonic

Spring cress
Rock spring
Spring head


It occurred to me that when I weave a rug I am actually making a path, through the days it takes to weave it, through the ideas I keep and the ones I discard, and finally, a path on the floor, every time I or anyone else walks on it. A path shows where someone else has been, and is an invitation to try it out, to see where it goes.

I was raking grass and weeds, clearing the path up to the spring where the watercress is in season again, beautiful and delicious. I have a crazy appetite for it. In the aftermath of the flood last summer, there are all kinds of branch tangles and obstructions. There are shredded plastic bags, crushed beer cans, styrofoam cups, mud filled milk bottles and pill bottles trapped in the branches and litter. The stream is a warp, and I am untangling a haphazard weave of fence wires and debris.

If I was a little girl this would be play, to make paths through the weeds, fish stuff out of the creek, and sweep the ground under the swamp trees to make houses. When I accidentally stepped into water that filled up my shoe, I knew it was time to go home. Little leopard frogs leap from the creek bank and plop into the algae, and I know there will be schools of tadpoles in these pools, then peepers. Peppery watercress salad for supper tonight, and a feeling to make something good on my loom.

Thief!

I have a small piece of Josef Frank wallpaper, Paradise, in black, that I brought back from Sweden two years ago. It is my prize. Josef Frank is a giant. The piece has been pinned to my wall since then. I always meant to weave something using the colors, but never did. Or, thought I never did. Here is pillow I wove, and moving it aside to make room for something else on the work table, it landed just below the paper scrap. Just then I saw what I had done. But I clearly remember that I thought I was making it up as I wove it.

If I close my eyes, I cannot tell you what colors I am wearing today. I can't remember what color car my neighbor drives. I've dreaded that someday I'll be called as an eye witness to a crime committed. Beard? Conjoined twins? Maybe.....

A skeptic about how we can unconsciously borrow from another artist's work, I saw that I had taken every color. True, I had planned to use the colors, someday, but was unaware at the time
I made it, that I was doing it. Art is ideas, colors, textures, forms, and thoughts, streaming into other forms. We all borrow ideas from everywhere, even from ourselves. It is impossible to distinguish exactly where one idea ends and a new one starts.

It is fruitless to try to go against this grain of creativity running through all creation. Minds are meant to commingle, ideas coalesce. It's called imagination, and it rules.