It is always bittersweet when a project ends that involved a long-time investment and connected you to many different artists, art works and unusual experiences. I have been following most of the 13 fiber artists of Maryhill Museum’s 2022 Exquisite Gorge II project for almost a year, traveling to their studios and residencies from Ashland to Kennewick, and many places in-between. (Here are all of the profiles that I ended up writing, all in one place.)
Tammy Jo Wilson, Owen Premore, Amanda Triplett with student collaborator.
Bonnie Meltzer, Lynn Deal.
Chloë Hight, Xavier Griffith, Carolyn Hazel Drake and Husband.
Magda Nica, Ophir El-Boher.
Kristy Kún, Francisco and Laura Bautista.
I’ve gotten to know them, admire them, envy them – and most of all I got to think about diverse approaches to create artistic representations of sections of the Columbia River and the Gorge. They were at the heart of the project that connected 11 installations of enormous creative range along the Maryhill Museum Driveway this weekend, a festive celebration by and of community, the many involved area partners to the artists who contributed selflessly and substantially, and the many visitors who came to admire the work.
I also realized how much work is involved behind the scenes, the sweat and labor we never get to experience when we just go and visit an exhibition. There are practical challenges, strokes of bad luck when people are forced to drop out, or promised help fails to materialize. We also do not get to see all the time invested in travel to and from the community partners, the extra cost required by tricky materials, or the realization that some design ideas are brilliant but not able to withstand the weather elements, notoriously fickle in the Gorge.
My fears that the final event after such a long, interesting and difficult run might be anti-climactic were unfounded. It all came together with visible joy and enthusiasm – I will let the photographs (mostly) speak for themselves.
Louise A. Palermo, Curator of Education, was a driving force, in more ways than one. Her connection to and support of the artists and her involvement with the community partners, let alone organizing the technical specs and details of the final event, were moving the project forwards. There was literal driving as well – long stretches to facilitate my visits with the artists, hauling the frames for the installations to and fro, and eventually driving the forklift that brought the finished art works out onto the museum drive.
Multiple volunteers helped in ever so many ways, sustaining the yarn bombing, the poppy project, manning the various booths that helped introduce visitors to different ways of manipulating fibers. At the day of the event, many helpers managed to set the frames in place and secure them on rails that had also been built by friends of the museum.
Cindy Marasco, who saved me from starvation with an ice chest full of goodies, guarded my gear and was all around wonderful to talk to when we hung out in the shade when I had to rest, and her husband Ryan Mooney, who built the tracks.
Chris Pothier and Dylan McManus.
Visitors enjoyed the activities on hand, including a sheep shearing demonstration by M&P Ranches,
Merrit and Pierre Monnat of M&P Ranches
and a story walk created by the Fort Vancouver Regional library and the Klickitat County Book Mobile.
Here are some of the other activities on offer:
Judy learned felting!
Most of all, however, visitors congregated around the finished installations, admired the incredible range of what was shown, and listened to the individual artists giving short talks explaining their process.
They eagerly photographed the QR Code that linked to detailed information for each piece, clearly engaged.
Many visited the museum itself, at one point in time registering over 350 visitors simultaneously, approaching limitations.
Wilson and Premore Frontispiece, seven crocheted mountains on top of the sturgeon, aquatic plants printed, and quilted fabric from Premore’s grandmothers who lived in the region.
Here are some details from the installations – to experience the full beauty you have to visit yourself – they will be in display for over a month starting now. Or you can take a virtual tour here with a short video produced with the help of canine Daisy…
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A parade of hats was a feast for the eyes, elegant protection from an increasingly hot sun – remind me to get one of those for future occasions!
with people seeking shade for picnics or the delicious food sold by a Mexican caterer,
and dogs happy when they eventually found some shade as well.
In other words, a great success, for the museum, for the artists, for the many in the community who contributed in so many ways.
It all goes back to the river. The land that has seen hope and heartbreak, new opportunities at the cost of displacement of those long here before colonial settlers arrived. It struggles with fires and floods, with economic inequality, competition for access to ever diminishing resources of water and fish, with questions of what a future might hold and who will be privileged to enjoy that future without having to leave home or traditional vocations. The art installations reminded us of much of that.
Equally so, Saturday’s celebration showed the resilient spirit that unites many of the people of the region: a pride in and connectedness to the river, well aware what an incredible resource it is and how it deserves protection. May art be a guardian of that mission.
Details of work by Meltzer (front) and Kún (back felting.)
Three cheers for an institution – the museum – to help us remember all this through the Exquisite Gorge Projects.
Cant’ wait to see what Exquisite Gorge III will hold.
“…a collaborative fiber arts project featuring 13 artists working with communities along a 220-mile stretch of the Columbia River from the Willamette River confluence to the Snake River confluence. The project, again initiated by Maryhill Museum of Art and following the original one by printmakers in 2019, takes inspiration from the Surrealist art practice known as exquisite corpse. In the most well-known exquisite corpse drawing game, participants took turns creating sections of a body on a piece of paper folded to hide each successive contribution. When unfolded, the whole body is revealed. In the case of The Exquisite Gorge Project II, the Columbia River will become the ‘body’ that unifies the collaboration between artists and communities, revealing a flowing 66-foot work that tells 10 conceptual stories of the Columbia River and its people.”
Section One: Oregon Society of Artists–Artist: Lynn Deal Section Two: Lewis and Clark College–Artist: Amanda Triplett Section Three: Columbia Center for the Arts, The History Museum of Hood River County and Arts in Education of the Gorge–Artist: Chloë Hight Section Four: White Salmon Arts Council and Fort Vancouver Regional Library–Artist: Xavier Griffith Section Five: The Dalles Arts Center and The Dalles-Wasco County Library–Artists: Francisco and Laura Bautista Section Six: The Fort Vancouver Regional Library at Goldendale Community Library–Artist: Carolyn Hazel Drake Section Seven: The American-Romanian Cultural Society and Maryhill Museum of Art–Artist: Magda Nica Section Eight: Desert Fiber Arts–Artist: Ophir El-Boher Section Nine: The Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation–Artist: Bonnie Meltzer Section Ten: ArtWalla–Artist: Kristy Kún Frontispiece: Tammy Jo Wilson (project artistic director) and Owen Premore
You cannot define electricity. The same can be said of art. It is a kind of inner current in a human being, or something which needs no definition. – Marcel Duchamp
HYDROPOWER. WIND POWER. SOLAR POWER. WILLPOWER. – All of these topics loomed large when talking to Bonnie Meltzer, the last artist I visited in the context of Maryhill Museum’s 2022 Exquisite Gorge II project. She chose to focus on power generation and transmission, a creative move that captures a defining element of the Columbia Gorge landscape and the river as a whole, both visually and economically. It is also a timely topic in an era when calls for renewable energy have become more urgent in light of the impending climate catastrophe. And a potential reference to the obstruction from the fossil fuel industry that is not willing to yield profits regardless of scientific data pointing to the damage wrought on the planet. In the line-up of 11 works by different fiber artists, Meltzer’s sculpture features Section 9, located close to Pendleton with The Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation as her community partner.
Bonnie Meltzer with EG II sculpture and community members who helped with beading – 3 photographs courtesy of the artist
The installation consists of crocheted, fabricated and collaged representations of wind turbines and pylons towering over the river, lined by tumbleweed. The towers command visual attention, directing our focus to power lines feeding our incessant demand for electricity.
It is surely no coincidence that electric power and art have often been metaphorically entwined. Most of us cannot claim to fully understand art and electricity’s unpredictable ways, their danger, their ability to illuminate and, yes, to electrify. Clearly they are about transformation, but the details remain a mystery to most. OK, they mystify me. Wired currents, inner currents – I am with Duchamps here, at a loss for a definition, though I am sure a decent engineering or physics education could fix that at least for half of the pair.
Bonnie Meltzer
THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN electrical power and art is in some strange ways also embodied in the various art museums, galleries and Kunsthallen that used to be power plants and are now housing art, often art directly related to electricity either as subject matter or to the use of electric devices in the areas of light art, some even producing electricity as well. The most famous ones are probably the TATE MODERN,
which was the former Bankside Power Station in London, England and the Nanshi Power Plant that was subsequently renovated to house the “Pavilion of the Future,” which opened to the public in 2010 for the Shanghai World Expo.
Germany has at least two such museums, ZOLLVEREIN KOHLENWÄSCHE(Former Zollverein Coal Mine) in Essen,
andE-Werk Luckenwalde, outside of Berlin, which actually still generates power and claims self-sufficiency,
The newest of the bunch of converted power plants, which I would love to see if travel is ever again a possibility for me, is the Kunsthalle Prahawhich opened in Prague this year with – who’d guessed it –a show about electricity, Kinetismus: 100 Years of Electricity in Art, tracing the history of electricity in art over the past century, to rave reviews.
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MELTZER AND HER FASCINATION with electric power fits right in then. She surely has the creative spark of defining some of the symbols associated with power in interesting ways, having them pulse enough in crocheted constructions of metallic wire, plastic strands, reflective beads and luminous odds and ends that the resulting landscape becomes electrifying.
The issues of environmental impact, pollution and heritage protection are also not new to her, she’s been long ahead of the curve. There is a substantive thread across her entire body of work that shows her concern, but also her humorous ways of tackling issues in non-combative, and, importantly, non-didactic ways.
She has assessed various aspects of pollution in her Fossil Fuel series which dealt with coal terminals and transport,
COAL TRAIN: Who Pays crocheted wire and magnetic tape, found objects, paint, collage.
Coal — Not In Any Backyard crocheted wire and fishingline, found objects, paint, collage
the dangers of particular matter and coal dust to both environment and human lungs, a beautiful, delicate installation,
Particulate Matter crocheted fishingline, beads, shells stretched on metal frame
and the issues of greenwashing – “the process of conveying a false impression or providing misleading information about how a company’s products are more environmentally sound. Greenwashing is considered an unsubstantiated claim to deceive consumers into believing that a company’s products are environmentally friendly.” (Ref.)
Clean Coal window screen, net, beads, clothespins
Use of atypical materials, creative juxtaposition and unusual textures abound. For me the most interesting aspect of the work, though, is the use of a traditional feminine craft, crocheting, and objects like beads, associated with women’s jewelry or finery, to communicate political ideas and offer social critique. Take this cape, for example, that the artist modeled with gusto and graceful movement, that looks at the many layers of interactions in riparian zones, at the water’s edge. Pollute one, endanger them all. It was originally crocheted for a performance at Cascadia Composers, Our Waters: Big River to the Pacific.
the combination of her interests and her craft reminded me of the work of the artists and architectural team Jin Choi and Thomas Shine. They have worked with pylons, wind turbines and transformers in their actual dimensions, seeing beauty where others see ugliness in the newly defined landscape. They connect the wind turbines to us by use of the human figures, giants that stand in those nordic landscapes as a reminder that humanity is served by renewable power.
The architects also turned to crocheting for huge environmental installations, so of course I was reminded of Meltzer who has also escaped the realm of pot holders and doilies traditionally associated with that ancient craft, exploring political storytelling with chains crocheted from fishing line or wire, looped, doubled, arranged in the most intriguing ways.
All photocredits: Choi/Shine Architects. This project, Arizona!, was erected in 2019 in Scottsdale, AZ.
Just imagine Meltzer would have the support to work on that scale!
BONNIE MELTZER WAS CLOSE to her beloved grandmother and appreciates the skills she inherited from this gifted fiber worker. Born into an orthodox Jewish family in New Jersey, she practically grew up with a crochet hook in one hand and a crayon in the other, (I quote.) For a girl born in the 1940s into such a traditional community, with parents who did not even have a chance to finish school, it must have been an act of incredible willpower to disentangle oneself and find a personal path that potentially defied norms and expectations. Or so is my guess based on reports of women of similar backgrounds who I met when living in New York City. Meltzer and I did talk about her love for her grandmother, encapsulated in the sculpture shown below, but I was too immersed in listening and simultaneously taking in the visual riches around me to ask a lot of follow up questions.
Sculptural Collage that includes images of her grandmother and another mentor. wire crochet, digital photographs.
Meltzer received a fellowship to the University of Washington, Seattle, WA and earned her MFA in 1971. Her work has been widely shown, throughout the Northwest and beyond, for example at the Hallie Ford Museum and Columbia Center for the Arts. Works are in collections at the University of Washington, Baylor University, National Science Foundation and the City of Portland. Most recently she had a well received installation at the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education (OJMCHE,) Mending the Social Fabric (link to Beth Sorensen’s review at OregonArtsWatch here.)
Mending the Social Fabric
The project, with themes related to immigration, voting, Covid-19, social justice and safety nets, had
“… at its core a parachute with a 314-foot circumference that is encircled by 75 handkerchiefs embroidered with text that amplifies the mending motif. Mounted behind the parachute are textiles from across the globe. The parachute, a symbol of safety, has rips and tears and over the course of the exhibition interactive community building happens as visitors sit and mend the damage.”
The devotion to working with the community is repeated in the current fiber art project, sewing circles of old evolving into collectives giving voice to their environmental concerns.
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MEANWHILE BACK IN THE STUDIO, there is still much to be explored.
Crocheted sculptural work on the studio wall
Golden hands, indeed, given the countless stitching sessions and the work with materials that are pliable, but certainly not as easy as traditional thread. Green thumbs, by the way, as well. Her organic vegetable garden surrounding her cottage is quite productive.
Not the only traits associated with this artist, though. Her desire to build and maintain community is reflected in the many occasions where she works with others, both teaching and accepting help, like for the EG II project on hand. Meltzer jumped in when a previously assigned artist had to drop out of the process for unforeseeable reasons. Rather than having a year or more preparation time, she had a total of 6 weeks to conceive of a design and do the work to have it materialize. Some 20 people of all ages helped, recruited via Facebook and word of mouth, but the bulk of the task rested of course on her, making for sometimes 12-16 hour work days, for a woman who is approaching her 80ies. Talk about willpower! And Sitzfleisch, to use another German/Yiddish term, the capability to stay on task with grit, patience and determination. Seated on your tush.
Her sense of beauty and whimsey is reflected inside and outside house and studio, with small and large discoveries to be made around each corner.
Notable, however, is a curiosity about the world, and openness to look closely and dare to comment without hesitation. The world is often represented by means of various altered globes throughout the artist’s studio and with themes that react to each political moment, from elections to war.
The world might be about to crack –
but the artist is still on top of it all!
You will meet Bonnie Meltzer and all of the other participants in this adventure on August 6th, at Maryhill Museum. There will be plenty of activities, you can watch the sculptures being installed on top of the bluff, help shear sheep, engage in fiber crafts of various kinds. You can talk to the artists and visit the museum that has a lot of other things to offer.
35 Maryhill Museum of Art Drive, Goldendale, WA 98620 10 a.m. – 5 p.m. DAILY
See flyer below for specifics for the festival.
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THE EXQUISITE GORGE PROJECTII
“…a collaborative fiber arts project featuring 13 artists working with communities along a 220-mile stretch of the Columbia River from the Willamette River confluence to the Snake River confluence. The project, again initiated by Maryhill Museum of Art and following the original one by printmakers in 2019, takes inspiration from the Surrealist art practice known as exquisite corpse. In the most well-known exquisite corpse drawing game, participants took turns creating sections of a body on a piece of paper folded to hide each successive contribution. When unfolded, the whole body is revealed. In the case of The Exquisite Gorge Project II, the Columbia River will become the ‘body’ that unifies the collaboration between artists and communities, revealing a flowing 66-foot work that tells 10 conceptual stories of the Columbia River and its people.”
Artists and Community Partners:
Section One: Oregon Society of Artists–Artist: Lynn Deal Section Two: Lewis and Clark University–Artist: Amanda Triplett Section Three: Columbia Center for the Arts, The History Museum of Hood River County and Arts in Education of the Gorge–Artist: Chloë Hight Section Four: White Salmon Arts Council and Fort Vancouver Regional Library–Artist: Xavier Griffith Section Five: The Dalles Arts Center and The Dalles-Wasco County Library–Artists: Francisco and Laura Bautista Section Six: The Fort Vancouver Regional Library at Goldendale Community Library–Artist: Carolyn Hazel Drake Section Seven: The American-Romanian Cultural Society and Maryhill Museum of Art–Artist: Magda Nica Section Eight: Desert Fiber Arts & REACH Museum–Artist: Ophir El-Boher Section Nine: The Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation–Artist: Bonnie Meltzer Section Ten: ArtWalla–Artist: Kristy Kún Frontispiece: Tammy Jo Wilson and Owe
“The arts and humanities have the potential to remind us of past environmental change and positive visions for our environment. What we need, I argue, are narratives of hope…..We need stories that empower us to become thinkers, actors, and activists capable of imagining alternatives in a world dominated by technical and economic constraints. We need ideas that will find their way through the mesh of an ever-tighter net of path dependencies. And we need people who will dare to cut apart some of the meshwork.”
– Christof Mauch. Slow Hope: Re-Thinking Ecologies of Crisis and Fear (2019)
I WAS BIASED, ALRIGHT. My interests in art, botany, and communal work were all captured in the installation before me. How could I not be particularly taken? I presume, though, that a more objective observer would be equally excited by Chloë Hight’s contribution to Maryhill Museum‘s Exquisite Gorge II exhibition which will feature a collection of fabric art sculptures, opening on August 6th, 2022 in the museum’s park. The elegance and geometry of her design, combined with her basketry weaving skill, would draw anyone in, is my bet.
Art has the power to remind us about the state of our environment, past, present and potentially future. It can tell us important stories if presenting the right ideas, tales of warning, but also of hope. Hight is a storyteller who is keenly sensitive to issues of place and our history within it, but also of potentialities. Warning and hope.
Her tale begins with the frame that surrounds the sculptural elements she created. The frame is black, and not just any old black. It is black from having been burned with a torch using Yakisugi/Shou Sugi Ban, a traditional Japanese method of preserving wood by applying fire. She then rubbed it with charcoal, ground into powder and blended with pine tar and beeswax. The artist collected the charcoal on the site of the 2017 Eagle Creek fire, part of her section of the Columbia river that begins near the Harphan Creek tributary and ends near the Tumalt Creek tributary, with many draining tributaries including Eagle Creek from its headwaters at Wahtum Lake.
These three photographs courtesy of the artist.
The wildfire, started by a careless teen playing with fireworks, burned more than 48,000 acres in the Gorge and Mt. Hood National Forest. Hikers needed to be rescued; people lost homes and were evacuated. About 121 miles of national forest trails and the businesses of the area were affected during the three months’ duration of the fire and then some. Trails were subsequently endangered by landslides and closed. It is only recent that you can hike there again.
The vulnerability of the eco-system at the juncture between urban areas and the wilderness is evoked with this frame, reminding us of the impact deforestation and climate change had on the magnitude of the fire. But so is resilience: blackened wood still stands, and areas are now open so that charcoal, an important material for man and nature, can be collected and used. Both perspectives, catastrophe and renewal, are integrated into the narrative.
INSIDE THE FRAME flows the river, banked by gently curved steel rods fabricated in collaboration with MacRae Wylde, a local sculptor. The rods provide a metal loom with the metallic material representing the man-made industrial infrastructure along the Columbia River, rigid and constricting. The curvature of the form, on the other hand, echoes the fluidity and resilience of water, a river that seeks its way regardless, created from wood and plant material weavings that represent many botanical species of the Pacific Northwest. Again a juxtaposition of elements that integrates both sides of an environmental story.
The weaving techniques are varied, some shapes hinting at scales and/or fins of fish, so elemental to the river and the people who have lived here for millennia. Some parts contain designs reminiscent of traditional basketry. All are made from plants that play essential roles both in the ecosystem of the region, and the culture of its inhabitants. Diverse techniques, including stake and strand weaving, twining and plaiting introduce texture and patterns. Variations in color, effects created by choosing appropriate plant materials – Himalayan blackberry (Rubus armeniacus), willow (Salix), European beach grass (Ammophila arenaria), iris (Iridaceae), day lily (Hemerocallis), and cattail (Typha) – from roots, bark and leaves, mirror the shading and dappled effect of light streaming into the local forests or shimmering on eddies or wavy water. Darkness and brightness, opposing forces here as well, provide the artist’s rendering of a region with ample tension and beauty – and us with ample opportunity to recognize shades of a landscape we so revere.
One of her formative experiences, she told me, was an internship with Vancouver B.C. based artist Sharon Kallis who focuses on environmental art and community engagement and is the founding Executive Director of EartHand Gleaners Society. Hight was fascinated by and adopted parts of Kallis’ approach to site-specific installations: using material found in the immediate environment, from tended or invasive plants as well as discarded materials in fields and gardens. Making due with what already exists is, of course, a profoundly sustainable approach.
Weaving in the water of the river – Photograph courtesy of the artist
There is an additional advantage, though. Much of the material that is ripped out of our gardens and fields are prolific plants that are not indigenous to the region, but brought to us and considered invasive. Think beachgrass, English Ivy, or Himalayan Blackberry. Rather than demonizing these species, Hight approaches them as something that can serve a purpose. She embraces the abundance of these superspreaders for making functional items, once you know how to treat the plant parts best suited. An irritant, if not a danger, now shaped into something useful, integrated into the ever changing biological melting pot.
Materials collected and displayed for the project
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I HAD PREFACED my observations with the words of Christof Mauch, a fellow at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, an international, interdisciplinary center for research and education in the environmental humanities located in Munich, Germany, because I believe they fit very well with what Hight is engaged in. The center focusses on research in and education about plant humanities, a term that is relatively new, when the approaches it covers are historically pretty established. Think of all the humanities disciplines that have engaged with plants: Anthropology has explored health and biomedicine in different cultures. Environmental archeology has looked at factors that influenced the fate of civilizations. Art history has studied the many glorious plant illustrators who helped science moved along. Plant collections have helped establish taxonomy systems and seeded our modern Botanical Gardens. From philosophers to poets, landscape designers to neurobiologists, questions about plants and their relationship to people have occupied us – now more than ever, I think, given the worries over biodiversity, environmental sustainability and conservation. Biocultural institutions help find answers.
Artists like Hight are telling stories about the places we live in by teaching us about the plants they contain, how to identify them and how to use them. Her small sampler of the most common plants she uses for weaving, cording and basketry is sweet and functional.
It triggered a flood of childhood memories in me. We had large prints of several botanical illustrators hanging in our house, Maria Sibylla Merian (1647 – 1717) among them,
Anne Pratt Flowering Plants Plate 234 Reed Mace, Bur Reed
My mother, who held a PhD in Agricultural sciences and was a master gardener, used them to teach us early about plant parts as much as plant identification, but their beauty alone instilled a lifelong connection. I see Chloë Hight as a great fit for this lineage of women educators, artists and botanists, with an added sense of practicality for schlepping around but a small booklet to have it ready for show and tell!
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BIOCULTURAL COLLECTIONS – representing the interchange between plants and people – are, of course, not restricted to artistic renderings of our flora. They contain objects made from plants, tools used to process them, medicines derived from plants, and anything else, like archival materials and historical documents, that help us understand both the botany of a particular place and its culture – the art, history and societal traditions of the people who used these plants. There are many of them: The Biocultural Collections Network has over 215 member institutions including botanical gardens, herbaria, natural history, anthropology, and cultural history museums, which span the globe. (Ref.)
One of their major goals is to educate people about plants so they understand the role they play in our world then and now, how important conservation is, and what needs to be done to preserve access to sufficient quantities of food. Which brings us back to our artist.
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HIGHT IS ENGAGED in teaching at a variety of levels and across domains. She has an interest in preserving and relating ancestral techniques related to fiber arts. She is keen on helping student identify plants and understand their uses. For the EG II project she worked with 7th graders in teacher Adam Smith’s class at Hood River Middle School, using the cordage they produced with her instructions as part of the Exquisite Gorge II sculpture. During the activities she also linked to the 7th grade curricular studies of riparian plants and ecosystems. In previous years she had helped middle schoolers at HRMS to understand the causes and implications of the Eagle Creek Fire. Here is a small film the students produced, including a focus on the fate of the plants. Impressive!
Executive Director of the History Museum of Hood River, Anna Goodwin, on left, with the artist.
When I visited, she was teaching cording to people who had signed up for a workshop with The History Museum of Hood River, one of her two community partners for the project (the other was Arts in Education in the Gorge.) The museum is worth checking out next time you come through Hood River. Small, but informative about local history. They were in the process of putting up objects from their archives relevant to Hight’s piece.
Once the workshop started, Hight explained that cordage was one of the first human fiber technologies that has been practiced across cultures around the globe. It can be an essential skill for everyday survival – think bows, bow-and-drill-friction fires, fishing lines, securing of shelter, and eventually all the ropes needed for sailing ships across the oceans. (A detailed overview of the history of cordage in the Americas can be found here.)
She talked about the process of gathering the materials, splitting, prepping and drying them, and later,when it comes time to use, making them pliable again by immersing them in water.
Clearly the participants had fun, working hard but also together – community in action, under the blossoming, sweet smelling Linden tree in the backyard of the museum.
Actually basswood (Tilia Americana,) a native genus within the Linden family. One of the many things I learned that day, grateful that I got to meet all these interesting, knowledgable, creative people associated with the EG II project. It will be a joy to see the sculptures connected, soon now.
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THE EXQUISITE GORGE PROJECTII
“…a collaborative fiber arts project featuring 13 artists working with communities along a 220-mile stretch of the Columbia River from the Willamette River confluence to the Snake River confluence. The project, again initiated by Maryhill Museum of Art and following the original one by printmakers in 2019, takes inspiration from the Surrealist art practice known as exquisite corpse. In the most well-known exquisite corpse drawing game, participants took turns creating sections of a body on a piece of paper folded to hide each successive contribution. When unfolded, the whole body is revealed. In the case of The Exquisite Gorge Project II, the Columbia River will become the ‘body’ that unifies the collaboration between artists and communities, revealing a flowing 66-foot work that tells 10 conceptual stories of the Columbia River and its people.”
Artists and Community Partners:
Section One: Oregon Society of Artists–Artist: Lynn Deal Section Two: Lewis and Clark University–Artist: Amanda Triplett Section Three: Columbia Center for the Arts, The History Museum of Hood River County and Arts in Education of the Gorge–Artist: Chloë Hight Section Four: White Salmon Arts Council and Fort Vancouver Regional Library–Artist: Xavier Griffith Section Five: The Dalles Arts Center and The Dalles-Wasco County Library–Artists: Francisco and Laura Bautista Section Six: The Fort Vancouver Regional Library at Goldendale Community Library–Artist: Carolyn Hazel Drake Section Seven: The American-Romanian Cultural Society and Maryhill Museum of Art–Artist: Magda Nica Section Eight: Desert Fiber Arts & REACH Museum–Artist: Ophir El-Boher Section Nine: The Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation–Artist: Bonnie Meltzer Section Ten: ArtWalla–Artist: Kristy Kún Frontispiece: Tammy Jo Wilson and Owen Premore
You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile the world goes on. Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers. Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again. Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting – over and over announcing your place in the family of things.
MAYBE IT WAS the state of wistfulness prompted by the fact that my 6-month project of interviewing the artists of the Exquisite Gorge II project is soon coming to an end. Maybe it had to do with entering yet another world new to me, a world filled with appliqué stitching joined with ceramics. What claimed my focus, intellectually and emotionally, was the idea of transitions. Good thing, too, since it is one of the reference points of Carolyn Hazel Drake‘s artistic vision. In dual ways, no less: the meaning of transition is conceptually expressed in her work, but exceptional attention is also given to the transitional points that connect the many small pieces in her larger installation.
Maryhill Museum’s Exquisite Gorge II project links multiple sections of the Columbia river, represented by as many artists, to each other, forming a giant sculpture made out of individual artworks. Drake’s section 6 covers the stretch of the river that ranges from the Deschutes River to the John Day River, including The Dalles Dam, one of four dams built along this stretch of the Columbia between the 1930s and 1970s that displaced Native American communities and wiped out traditional fishing grounds. Celilo Falls, called Wyam, “echo of falling water” or “sound of water upon the rocks,” in several native languages, had existed for 15.000 years, the river providing salmon, the staple diets for the Tribes, the land a place to live, gather and worship. The historical, political and environmental implications of the erection of the dam and the destruction it wrecked, were enormous.
“HOW DO YOU TELL A STORY that is not necessarily your own? How do you capture a landscape that did not always belong to you? How do you document reality without appropriating someone else’s history? These questions pose themselves to any artist, anthropologist, historian who is aware of the limitations of their own perspectives.” I had written these words in relation to Section 6 when interviewing the assigned non-Native artist for the first Exquisite Gorge Project 3 years ago. They apply now as much as then. Carolyn Hazel Drake gloriously rises to the challenge just as Roger Preet did in 2019.
The story that she tells reflects the transitory nature of the river, constricted by dams, the flow that is constrained or enhanced by external forces, the bi-directional migration of the birds that come and go, always in transition. The beauty of the landscape’s colors is captured in a muted scheme that matches the solemnity of remembering the losses of the Tribes, incurred by forced relocation. It is about the river, its fate as well as its strength, the despair imposed on those who call(ed) it home and the resilience that nature confers.
MUCH RESEARCH, both on site and in the literature, preceded the design. Exploration of palette, gathering of materials, choice of fabric to go into a “river” of linked/divided pieces covered with abstract representations of the flight of geese, and lined by ceramic “stones” representing the river banks.
The geese come and go, helping the eye to move along the river, just as they would when observing them in nature.
The stones sway softly, as will the river as a whole when suspended and moved by the wind in the outdoor installation at Maryhill Museum. The somber tones are offset by an occasional striking burst of color. Drake uses Japanese Daiwabo fabrics, yarn-dyed before woven, with nuanced variations. Some are neutral, some muted and some are toned-down, reminiscent of traditional Japanese colors like gray willow (yanagi-nezumi), color of old bamboo (oitake-iro), or time altered celadon (sabi-seiji), leaves in autumn (kuchiba)and the color of water (mizu-iro / suishoku/).
When examining the thought and craft going into the detail work, all I could think of was: Patience, precision and particularity. The dividers of the panels, for example, are sewn into wool fabric that is used to line the woolen blankets produced by Pendelton. Pendelton Woolen Mills has had a longstanding relationship with PNW Tribes since its incorporation in 1909; their first blanket designer, Joe Rawnsley, appropriated tribal preferences for elements in their blankets. The tribal blankets were constructed then as now in the jacquard method, creating woven patterns in a textured woolen fabric. Today they make custom blankets, (not for public sale) “given to honor events on life’s journey: birth, marriage, coming of age, graduation and even death, as well as special celebrations and gifts.” One annual special blanket is created in order to fundraise for the American Indian College Fund. Blankets are produced in Pendelton, but the finishing work is done in Washougal, WA, right at the banks of the Columbia river.
The hand-stitching of the appliquéd work is beyond regular, requiring the patience of a saint.
The knotting of the bands of “stone” is tight and precise with cotton-string dipped into bee’s wax.
The frame was special-ordered by the artist, with wood matched in color to the fabric installation, blending in with shades of muted green.
New frame on left – the provided one next to it.
I cannot begin to imagine what it took to apply the thousands of small dots, with slight color gradations, with a micro-tipped ink bottle after the porcelain beads were made and glazed. As always when I find myself in serene spaces – and Drake’s studio is bathed in serenity, light, orderliness, simplicity and all – my imagination was allowed to run free, absorbing what was in front of me, rather than being distracted.
The many tiny dots danced in front of my eye, grains of sand from the Columbia shores, salmon roe, tears from the trail(s) of tears, even the shorter local trails after Celilo Falls was destroyed, the flocks of geese that disappear into the distance on their migratory journeys. You choose. Then again, why choose at all. Varied reminders of a landscape and its history might be exactly what we need. Each finding a place in the family of things.
Canada Geese I photographed in January
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lim·i·nal
1. relating to a transitional or initial stage of a process.
2. occupying a position at, or on both sides of, a boundary or threshold. – Oxford Language Dictionary
CAROLYN HAZEL DRAKE is a third generation Oregon who acquired her affinity to fabric early on in her mother’s quilting store. She received her BA in English Literature, with a minor in Architecture, and her MA in Education from Portland State University, the first in her family to graduate from College. She taught language arts and art history in Portland’s Public School System for more than ten year and was also a PPS Visual & Performing Arts Teacher on Special Assignment (TOSA); come fall, she will be teaching art at Arizona State University. Also in the fall, she will be artist in residence for two month at the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology. In case you’d wondered how one pulls off a double load, rest assured: she has experience with that! If you look at the number of previous residencies and her role as a member of the Portland Art Museum’s Teacher Advisory Council all successfully integrated with her professional obligations, there is no doubt she will thrive.
The dog and I are, of course, exhausted just thinking about it.
In addition to working with fabric, Drake is nowadays exploring ceramics, particularly smoke firing techniques, and much of her recent work has combined the two in novel ways. One of the things that fascinates her about porcelain or clay is the porous nature of these materials, a mode that allows transition. She is fascinated by liminal spaces, and not just the ones in the geographical world.
Liminal comes from the Latin word ‘limen’, referring to ‘threshold’ or ‘doorway’. Liminal is that which occupies the transitional space at a boundary or threshold, a river being a perfect example of a gateway to new or different locations. Hallways, bridges and crossroads are other geographical locations that link a point of departure with a destination. Liminality is not restricted to a geographic place, though. There can be liminal time, the border between day and night during twilight, for example, or between the old and the new year. Liminal space can also be a cognitive or experiential dimension during times of transitions, when we experience major change, or go through periods of uncertainty. In many religious ceremonies that employ rites of passage, a liminal point is reached in the middle of the ceremony defining a before and after.
I HAD BEEN THINKING about liminal space in a completely different context before I even visited with the artist. There is a fascinating, if strange, development of Artificial Intelligence programs like DALL-E that allow the creation of images from text, having been trained as a neural network with everything art history has to offer – and then some.
“…it has a diverse set of capabilities, including creating anthropomorphized versions of animals and objects, combining unrelated concepts in plausible ways, rendering text, and applying transformations to existing images.”
Let’s say you request a painting of Black men drinking coffee in the snow, in the manner of John Singer Sargent. You utter the words and you get this. Made by a machine. (Well, I got it from reports by Brandon Taylor, a perceptive and witty author whose book Real Life was an impressive debut and who has been playing around with the AI program, posting diverse results.)
Or you ask for a Sargent version of James I and the Duke of Buckingham as a couple.
Or here is a machine generated portrait of the Duke of Navarro by Edward Hopper.
I’m bringing this up because the borderline between AI creations and art made by the rest of us will become more and more porous, it’s early days yet. I am not interested in a discussion of what is “real” art, or if we can ever tell a fake from a human original in years to come, or any such topic. (Nor am I interested in losing more sleep over potential dangers of perfected AI programs – if you dare you can read a basic AI 101 horror tutorial here…)
I am interested in how transitions will unfold between what we embrace and what we reject, and if there are aspects of human creativity that simply cannot be mimicked no matter how many neural nets draw on data from infinite exposure to all of our knowledge sources. Or can they?
Take Drake’s interest in liminal constructs. She plans to use her Sitka residency to create urns and altar cloths, combining, if possible, ceramic and fabric art for both. Urns stand for the remnants of someone who has walked on, transitioning into an unknown place (if you are spiritual,) or into dust (old secular me.) They remind us of humans’ transitory nature, or, by the care that someone takes to create beauty across their surface, that we will keep a memory alive, waiting for the pain of loss to recede.
Altar cloths are used during worship, also devoted to something we cannot fully know, but in whom we invest hope for allowing a transition into a better place. They cover the chalice that carries the Holy elements and the altar itself – should a drop of wine believed to be Jesus’ blood be spilled it will be caught by that cloth, not touching the altar itself. (Ref.)
What I cannot begin to imagine how something so thoroughly, deeply human can be incorporated into AI art. But maybe it can – maybe the sense of unease that is so often associated with liminal places, caves, chasm, empty airports at night, you name it, will find justification when AI turns out to be a match.
In the meantime, we have the quiet beauty and search for meaning that is deeply incorporated into Drake’s art. As real and as resilient as the river landscape that she has sought to depict. No further transitions needed. It is a place to rest.
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THE EXQUISITE GORGE PROJECTII
“…a collaborative fiber arts project featuring 13 artists working with communities along a 220-mile stretch of the Columbia River from the Willamette River confluence to the Snake River confluence. The project, again initiated by Maryhill Museum of Art and following the original one by printmakers in 2019, takes inspiration from the Surrealist art practice known as exquisite corpse. In the most well-known exquisite corpse drawing game, participants took turns creating sections of a body on a piece of paper folded to hide each successive contribution. When unfolded, the whole body is revealed. In the case of The Exquisite Gorge Project II, the Columbia River will become the ‘body’ that unifies the collaboration between artists and communities, revealing a flowing 66-foot work that tells 10 conceptual stories of the Columbia River and its people.”
Artists and Community Partners:
Section One: Oregon Society of Artists–Artist: Lynn Deal Section Two: Lewis and Clark University–Artist: Amanda Triplett Section Three: Columbia Center for the Arts, The History Museum of Hood River County and Arts in Education of the Gorge–Artist: Chloë Hight Section Four: White Salmon Arts Council and Fort Vancouver Regional Library–Artist: Xavier Griffith Section Five: The Dalles Arts Center and The Dalles-Wasco County Library–Artists: Francisco and Laura Bautista Section Six: The Fort Vancouver Regional Library at Goldendale Community Library–Artist: Carolyn Hazel Drake Section Seven: The American-Romanian Cultural Society and Maryhill Museum of Art–Artist: Magda Nica Section Eight: Desert Fiber Arts & REACH Museum–Artist: Ophir El-Boher Section Nine: The Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation–Artist: Bonnie Meltzer Section Ten: ArtWalla–Artist: Kristy Kún Frontispiece: Tammy Jo Wilson and Owen Premore
A shoutout! An accolade! Kudos! Applause! Today’s photographs are dedicated to all who have worked behind the scenes to participate in, prepare for and support Maryhill Museum’s Exquisite Gorge II project in ways large and small.
Maryhill Museum
Beyond the involved community partners there are staff, there are people who host artists in residence, there are folks who compute and design the technical specs of the structures under the windy conditions of the bluff, there are drivers willing to transport the frames. Three Cheers!
Their numbers pale, though, in comparison to the number of people who, across the nation, have become involved in contributing to another part of this fiber art celebration: the yarn bombing of the museum site and creating remembrance poppies for Stonehenge, a World War I memorial that is part of Maryhill Museum.
Crafted squares echoing Romanian folk patterns decorate the outside of the museum, repository of many donations from Queen Marie of Romania, delivered during her visit for the inauguration of the museum in 1926. Queen Marie’s gift of Romanian textiles provided the basis for a collection of Romanian folk dress that now includes 400 items. The creation below was still to be hung at the museum entrance when I visited.
I think Queen Marie (2nd from left) would approve!
Yarn bombing on trees and structures in the surrounding park also pick up the Romanian folk theme, as well as that of poppies to which I will come shortly.
Louise Palermo, Curator of Education, putting finishing touches on the yarn bombing.
Traditional Romanian dolls celebrating spring, called màrtisors.
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Imagine being a committed pacifist, a Quaker, desiring to build a utopian Quaker community in the middle of nowhere, setting a faux French mansion on the top of a windy bluff towering above the river, and not a Quaker shows up. Imagine tearing down an inn you built in a small hamlet that burned, in order to establish a full-sized Stonehenge replica as a memorial to the futility of war. All based on the wrong idea that you somehow took home from a 1915 visit to England, that Britons used Stonehenge as a spot for bloody sacrifice to the Gods of war.
Imagine the realization that local stone is not up to the task and so you improvise with slabs of reinforced concrete, made to look lumpy by lining the wooden forms with crumpled tins. That’s Sam Hill for you, the visionary and founder of Maryhill Museum, a man who promoted modern roads across the Pacific Northwest and who made a fortune with utilities and railroads. Unstoppable in pursuing his dreams, a strange brew of steely pragmatism and utopian ideas. Providing us with a remarkable legacy.
Stonehenge was the very first War Memorial to World War I in the United States, finalized in 1929, with an altar plaque dedicated already in 1918. Hard for me to find echoes of pacifism in the original plaque:
To the memory of the soldiers and sailors of Klickitat County who gave their lives in defense of their country. This monument is erected in hope that others inspired by the example of their valor and their heroism may share in that love of liberty and burn with that fire of patriotism which death alone can quench.
Back to our unsung heroes, though: the nameless volunteers. They have knit and crocheted countless poppies, remembrance symbols for the fallen, poppies which are now attached, sown on by hand(!) by yet another group of supporters onto netting covering the stones around Stonehenge. Needed to defy the harsh winds on top of the promontory.
Vonda Chandler, a long standing volunteer at Maryhill was a major support and inspiration for this project, at least one name I was able to glean. Another was Gavin McIlvenna, the Society of the Honor Guard for the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier-founding President, who sent an email to the President of the Daughters of the American Revolution, receiving coast-to-coast responses, and some even from Belize.
The museum posted on Facebook as did Maryhill’s Curator of Education, Queen of the Poppies, Lou Palermo, activating a wide-flung net of contacts in the museum and crafts world. Bravo!
Lou Palermo, Curator of Education, Maryhill Museum
This is the current state of affairs, with more packages and boxes arriving daily, a treasure trove of fiber art, poppies filling each parcel. All in need of unpacking and mounting….
The symbol of the poppy has its origins in a poem written by one of the soldiers in the Great War, Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, a brigade surgeon.
The war-ravaged landscape of Western Europe sprouted these flowers, really a plant classified as a weed, red like the blood that had been so senseless spilled. And the emotional impact of the words, soon published in both Europe and the U.S., had people on both sides of the Atlantic decide to wear fabricated poppies as a sign that the fallen would not be forgotten.
In Europe, Anna Guérin organized French women, children and veterans to make and sell artificial poppies as a way to fund the restoration of war-torn France. Here is a detailed, moving description of her single-minded efforts with archival photographs of many of the original creations. Millions of people in the United Kingdom, Canada, France, Belgium, Australia and New Zealand don the red flowers every November 11 (known as Remembrance Day or Armistice Day) to commemorate the anniversary of the 1918 armistice.
On this side of the Atlantic we had calls for remembrance as well, although people wear the poppies on Memorial Day, the last Monday in May. Moina Michael, a professor at the University of Georgia at the time the war broke out, vowed to wear red poppies and to produce and sell them for proceeds supporting returning war veterans. Michael’s autobiographic writings and a time line of the adoption of the symbol across the world can be found here.
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I was looking around at the landscape so beloved by Sam Hill, Mt. Hood visible from Hill’s last resting place slightly below Stonehenge. Thinking about the fact that wars, and the horrors and loss they inflicted, are not a thing of the past. They have continued across the world, often in places foreign to us and thus more easily ignored but for the soldiers and their families who fought them. Got physically or psychologically maimed in them. Died in them.
We now see a war again, on Eastern European fields that sprout poppies, in Ukraine. Even that war, just a few months old, has already slipped from our attentional radar, as much as we are preoccupied with political upheaval and judicial assaults closer to home.
As the outpouring of fiber art poppies for the museum project confirms, that is not the case for the many volunteers for whom these symbols likely have personal significance. They honor the dead. They miss the dead. They cannot escape the trauma instilled by war that trickles down across generations. Louis Menand’s words come to mind, describing what significant memorial art does:
“It doesn’t say that death is noble, which is what supporters of the war might like it to say, and it doesn’t say that death is absurd, which is what critics of the war might like it to say. It only says that death is real, and that in a war, no matter what else it is about, people die.”
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On the walkway leading up to Maryhill Museum’s front doors you can spot a sculpture by James Lee Hansen. The bronze is part of his Missive series, which depicts tektites, small meteors, on the front, with some abstract embryonic form on the back. The series incorporated ideas from a book, Immanuel Velikovsky’s Worlds in Collision(1950), which advanced the theory (scientifically debunked since) that cataclysmic events in our solar system changed Earth’s orbit and axis and caused numerous catastrophes that were recounted worldwide in mythology and religion. The sculptor himself wrote the stanza above, talking about a missile. (He has a book New Totems and Old Gods a well as another one, Missive Poems, related to this series.)
James Lee Hansen Missive (1976)
I don’t know about missiles bringing life. Perhaps they might, if arriving from outer space. Seems to me they bring death, and death only, when launched by our own planet’s warmongers. The many, many contributors to the poppy project for this year’s Exquisite Gorge II project remind us of this.
Let their remembrance be a force for peace.
Let the rememberers be recognized.
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THE EXQUISITE GORGE PROJECTII
“…a collaborative fiber arts project featuring 13 artists working with communities along a 220-mile stretch of the Columbia River from the Willamette River confluence to the Snake River confluence. The project, again initiated by Maryhill Museum of Art and following the original one by printmakers in 2019, takes inspiration from the Surrealist art practice known as exquisite corpse. In the most well-known exquisite corpse drawing game, participants took turns creating sections of a body on a piece of paper folded to hide each successive contribution. When unfolded, the whole body is revealed. In the case of The Exquisite Gorge Project II, the Columbia River will become the ‘body’ that unifies the collaboration between artists and communities, revealing a flowing 66-foot work that tells 10 conceptual stories of the Columbia River and its people.”
Artists and Community Partners:
Section One: Oregon Society of Artists–Artist: Lynn Deal Section Two: Lewis and Clark University–Artist: Amanda Triplett Section Three: Columbia Center for the Arts, The History Museum of Hood River County and Arts in Education of the Gorge–Artist: Chloë Hight Section Four: White Salmon Arts Council and Fort Vancouver Regional Library–Artist: Xavier Griffith Section Five: The Dalles Arts Center and The Dalles-Wasco County Library–Artists: Francisco and Laura Bautista Section Six: The Fort Vancouver Regional Library at Goldendale Community Library–Artist: Carolyn Hazel Drake Section Seven: The American-Romanian Cultural Society and Maryhill Museum of Art–Artist: Magda Nica Section Eight: Desert Fiber Arts & REACH Museum–Artist: Ophir El-Boher Section Nine: The Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation–Artist: Bonnie Meltzer Section Ten: ArtWalla–Artist: Kristy Kún Frontispiece: Tammy Jo Wilson and Owen Premore
Stick with me, folks, even if the mere mention of “scientificdata” makes some of you want to shut your ears and avert your eyes. It’s going to be a playful, wild dive into the patterns of wind and water, electricity and pollution, geological formations and human experience around the Columbia river basin. All brought to you by yet another innovative artist, Amanda Triplett, and her team of Lewis & Clark College students involved in Maryhill Museum’s Exquisite Gorge II project, tackling the translation of numbers into pictures or something one can see – data visualization – with remarkable creativity.
Italo Calvino’s words about translation applied to his own work being translated into many languages, exposing his work to the world beyond Italy. One of his seminal books, Invisible Cities, focused on the reverse, bringing the world to someone who lacked access despite being the ruler of endless countries. The Venetian explorer Marco Polo told the emperor of Mongolia, Kublai Khan, about the truths found in his realm, translating foreign concepts into a form that could be easily grasped and universally understood.
We are looking at bridge building then, crossovers between different worlds. In some ways one can think of the domains of science and art in this way as well, as two different countries with different languages that need translation. Two realms in need of connection.
All photographs of individual small fiber sculptures are from the tapestry wall that is part of the project process. Participants were encouraged to “play” with recycled fabric bits and pieces.
Science is a domain ruled by methodic, structurally constrained exploration of data intended to add to a knowledge base that might explain our world. That knowledge base is organized in the form of testable predictions derived from our hypotheses of how our universe functions.
Art is a domain that frequently wants to explain the world as well, rather than just depict it. But the approach is much less regulated. No immutable rules as seen in the scientific method, no constraints on what counts or doesn’t count as fact, no limits to emotional engagement or manipulation. In (admittedly overly) simplistic terms, science wants us to know and understand, art wants to make us think and feel.
Both tell a story, constrained by rigid rules for science, open to unlimited embellishment for art. The language they use to tell their story is shaped by those factors. So how then do you translate from one to the other? And, importantly why would you want to do that in the first place?
You might argue that science and art embrace complimentary ways of viewing reality which are not a substitute for each other. Yet translating scientific data into something other than numbers, or even into art, when done successfully, has major advantages. For one, it might reach many more eyes and ears than any old scientific paper, given the sad fact that a lot of people have negative associations to scientific data or a fear of approaching them. They might not trust them, or they might not understand them, given the lack of science education all around. They might not have the patience to wade through them, or they might not have access in the first place, given that so much has to be gathered to depict a complete story. Importantly, something we can see rather than just reading about it, might deliver much more of an emotional punch which in turn could translate into engagement with the issues, or action. If a picture is worth a thousand words, think what sculpture might do to a million numbers…
This was the impetus for Amanda Triplett’s approach to interacting with her college students, colleagues and assorted scholars when devising a plan to translate the scientific data collected around the Columbia river and NW regions into a visual language. (Her contributors can be found listed below.) She utilized the many resources available on a college campus, access to the folks from environmental sciences, data librarians, tech support and so on, and in the process made connections between the various fields, translating various “languages” into an artistic narrative.
The Edging Plate for Last Year’s Exquisite Gorge Print Project, with Lewis&Clark Artists also covering Section 2, From Mile 110 to McGowan Point
The artist in front of a gallery wall depicting the accumulated data and cut patterns
The process as it unfolded can be currently seen documented on the walls and displays of Lewis & Clark’s Ronna and Eric Hoffman Gallery. (It’s up until July 28th. Open Monday-Thursday 10:00am-2:00pm except July 4th.) It is still an active workshop, with fiber details being created, and the final sculpture put together. Really worth a visit, parking on the empty campus is easy and free, and public transport available.
“All translation is a compromise – the effort to be literal and the effort to be idiomatic.” — Benjamin Jowett
The first steps included which data to look for and to grasp what data visualization implies. It is basically the practice of translating numbers into a visual context, so they are more easily understood and allow us to find patterns or trends or outliers, things that do not conform with what we understand to be the norm.
Here is a simple example: if you look for advice on when there are the fewest number of visitors at Portland Art Museum so you can safely visit, or be least disturbed, all you have to do is go to Google Maps. They offer a picture, a bar graph that shows you in simple form what otherwise would involve reading through hundreds of statistic on daily visitor rates and density. And that still would not allow you to decide in the moment, which is the advantage of these interactive live maps provided by the institutions, coded in red bars. Voila, this Friday at 11 a.m. was the best time to visit.
Google Jam Board from Brainstorming Session
There are tons of ways in which data can be presented visually. Bar graphs, scatterplots, heat maps, box plots, line graphs, pie charts, area charts, choropleth maps and histograms all serve particular purposes. The participating students in this project all learned about these tools with the very concrete goal in mind how to represent the information about the Columbia river region in yet a different modus: using fiber to create art. Due to the pandemic, the initial months of the project took place on zoom, with Google jam boards collecting and displaying information that might be relevant. The digital brainstorming centered on representing data, but also concerned ways of understanding how traditional use, or mis-use, and abuse of data can influence how we see the world.
Once back in person, the group listened to experts, had discussion sections, took a field trip to the river and Bonneville Dam for data collection, and learned from presentations by the Columbia River Keepers about the current state of affairs of environmental facts, woes included. It became clear that all things are interconnected and cannot be judged in isolation. Dams, as just one example, provide hydro-power and regulate shipping. A good thing from a consumer perspective, but they also destroy fish habitats and spawning abilities, affecting not just salmon populations but also the cultures of Native Americans on whose land dams were built and who depend on salmon for existential and ceremonial reasons. Water use, as another example, benefits agricultural businesses, but stands in competition with river health and fishing rights in times of increasing droughts.
But how to translate this into fiber art?
Here are three examples that were generated by the project participants:
1. Energy across Oregon and Washington is drawn from multiple sources in varying amounts. Hydropower, harnessed by the dams, generates about 48%, natural gas base load is next (18%) and in descending order coal, wind, natural gas peak load, nuclear, biomass and solar are filling our needs. Each energy source is color coded.
A distribution of these resources, as seen in the pie-chart data visualization was knitted or crocheted with the exact amount of stitches and colors representing each percentage, surrounding a lightbulb representing electricity use.
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2. Solid pollutants like fishing lines, mesh bags and other odds and ends were collected from the river and fabricated into a sculptural configuration (photograph below)to visualize what sickens the water and fish. The pebbles beneath represent parts of the carbon cycle. Carbon sinks, like forests and oceans of a certain temperature, absorb emitted carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, yet are increasingly depleted. Carbon sources, on the other hand, like the burning of fuel stored in fossils, and maintaining large livestock operations, are continually in use or even increasing, despite the havoc they wreak on our climate.
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3. Other participants looked at the composition of the river, including the geological history of the Columbia River Basalt Group which consists of seven formations: The Steens Basalt, Imnaha Basalt, Grande Ronde Basalt, Picture Gorge Basalt, Prineville Basalt, Wanapum Basalt, and Saddle Mountains Basalt. Many of these formations are subdivided into formal and informal members and flows. One proposal, in the process of being beautifully executed right now, was to make a topographic map.
And then, of course, there is the river itself with its eddies and currents, its waves and flow, carefully constructed with recycled fabrics, salvaged upholstery, some wool, the center piece of the display.
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“Translation is not a matter of words only: it is a matter of making intelligible a whole culture.” — Anthony Burgess
I met Amanda Triplett 2 years ago when I first wrote about her work for Oregon Arts Watch.
“TRIPLETT HOLDS A B.A. in Art and Art History from Sarah Lawrence College in New York. Starting out as a performance major, she soon switched to visual art, mostly focused on drawing and other works on paper. She credits the fact that she was raised in fabric-rich societies like Egypt and Taiwan, with parents later living in India, with her eventual settling on fiber sculptures. Her intention to work with discarded materials found the perfect source: Shortly after she moved to Portland from California in 2016 she was awarded one of the artist-in-residence spots at Glean, “a juried art program that taps into the creativity of artists to inspire people to think about their consumption habits, the waste they generate and the resources they throw away.” They work in partnership with Recology Portland; Metro, the regional government that manages the Portland area’s garbage and recycling system; and crackedpots, a nonprofit environmental arts organization.”
She most recently exhibited at Shift Gallery in Seattle and is currently working on a project, Morphogenesis, on weekends as an artist in residence at Mary Olson Farm and White River Valley Museum in Auburn, WA.
I was not surprised to see her work now includes an important educational aspect: marrying together aspects of art and science, putting the A into the STEM fields, echoing what is going on in the larger world with the arrival of STEAM. STEAM is an educational approach to learning that uses Science, Technology, Engineering, the Arts and Mathematics as access points for guiding student inquiry, dialogue, and critical thinking. The hoped-for end results are students who feel at home in scientific fields as well as the arts and use both approaches to enhance their problem solving and functioning in an increasingly data-oriented world. (Ref.)
Reports on the fruitfulness of collaboration between scientists and artists are more and more coming into view, and much is written about how creativity is a common denominator in the thinking of both professions.
In fact, two years ago, The Smithsonian turned to art to get out a message that scientists had been clamoring about loudly – and in vain – for decades with their tools of data-driven messaging. The exhibition, Unsettled Nature – Artists reflect on the Age of Humans, delivered information with an emotional punch, much of it sensitive photography of man-made ecological disasters, but also Bethany Taylor’s woven tapestries of varied ecosystems. Art was used to communicate the gravity of our planet’s situation established by scientific inquiry.
Bethany Taylor
Science organizations have started to acknowledge the important role that art can play, with some even holding juried art contests like, for example, the Materials Research Society, (MRS) with they annual Science as Art competition. Pictures are in the link – some pretty incredible!)
What I admire about Triplett’s approach is her ability to keep the interconnectedness of the two domains, art and science, in focus, but also remain dedicated to the language of her own field. Even with translation from the science end into the visual arts realm, there is a focus on playfulness that is a hallmark of her artistic practice. One that she shares with her students, encouraging them to experiment with tactile materials of all sorts and, importantly, try out how it feels to break the rules. There is a non-quantifiable, and in some ways non-translatable aspect to making art, one that centers on pleasure.
Not the pleasure of a satisfactory scientific result, or the pleasure of having had the right ideas now confirmed by the data, not the pleasure at one’s cleverness of designing a brilliant experimental design.
Instead it is the pleasure of the tactile exploration of fiber, seeing a fantasy or an imaginary construct come into existence, the freedom to bend the rules, to bring your very own creative impulses into the open. It is pleasure in the process, not linked to outcome. To this purpose, all participants are encouraged to create something with fiber, bits and pieces that can be selected from a basket. The growing display on the walls of the Hoffman Gallery are proof positive how playfulness translates into beauty.
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“The best thing on translation was said by Cervantes: translation is the other side of a tapestry.” — Leonardo Sciascia
We’ll see the final sculpture, the translation tapestry, in August at Maryhill Museum. Or the other side of it, as the case may be. In the meantime, here is my own data collection during the interview, trying to weave stories out of snippets. Then there’s my data visualization with fiber remnants, translating interconnectedness, flow and play. In the spirit of Lewis Caroll’s remarks:
“When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, `it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”
“…a collaborative fiber arts project featuring 13 artists working with communities along a 220-mile stretch of the Columbia River from the Willamette River confluence to the Snake River confluence. The project, again initiated by Maryhill Museum of Art and following the original one by printmakers in 2019, takes inspiration from the Surrealist art practice known as exquisite corpse. In the most well-known exquisite corpse drawing game, participants took turns creating sections of a body on a piece of paper folded to hide each successive contribution. When unfolded, the whole body is revealed. In the case of The Exquisite Gorge Project II, the Columbia River will become the ‘body’ that unifies the collaboration between artists and communities, revealing a flowing 66-foot work that tells 10 conceptual stories of the Columbia River and its people.”
Artists and Community Partners:
Section One: Oregon Society of Artists–Artist: Lynn Deal Section Two: Lewis and Clark University–Artist: Amanda Triplett Section Three: Columbia Center for the Arts, The History Museum of Hood River County and Arts in Education of the Gorge–Artist: Chloë Hight Section Four: White Salmon Arts Council and Fort Vancouver Regional Library–Artist: Xavier Griffith Section Five: The Dalles Arts Center and The Dalles-Wasco County Library–Artists: Francisco and Laura Bautista Section Six: The Fort Vancouver Regional Library at Goldendale Community Library–Artist: Carolyn Hazel Drake Section Seven: The American-Romanian Cultural Society and Maryhill Museum of Art–Artist: Magda Nica Section Eight: Desert Fiber Arts & REACH Museum–Artist: Ophir El-Boher Section Nine: The Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation–Artist: Bonnie Meltzer Section Ten: ArtWalla–Artist: Kristy Kún Frontispiece: Tammy Jo Wilson and Owen Premore
Section 2 Group featured today:
The Exquisite Gorge Project II: Fiber Arts: Section 2 features the work of the following Lewis & Clark student artists:
Brynne Anderson, Melissa Even, Margo Gaillard, Jones Kelly, Haley Ledford, Ella Martin.
More folks who have been apart of the process and supported the project:
Tammy Jo Wilson, Visual Arts & Technology Program Manager, Professor Matt Johnston, Art History, Professor Jessica Kleiss, Environmental Studies, Professor Lizzy Clyne, Environmental Studies, Justin Counts, Educational Technology Specialist, Mark Dahl, Director of Watzek Library, Ethan Davis, Digital and Data Science Specialist, Parvaneh Abbaspour, Science and Data Services Librarian, Rachel McKenna, Art Department 3D Technical Support, Kate Murphy, Community Organizer, Columbia Riverkeeper, The Columbia Fiber Arts Guild, Lewis & Clark Students: Katie Alker, Francisco Perozo, Gwenneth Jergens, Ava Westlin, Sarah Bourne.
Some collaboration has to take place in the mind between the woman and the man before the art of creation can be accomplished. Some marriage of opposites has to be consummated. The whole of the mind must lie wide open if we are to get the sense that the writer is communicating his experience with perfect fullness.” ― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
Virginia Woolf’s words above referred to the role one’s gender plays in the act of creating art and the need to stop thinking about it in order to find a voice that is not trapped in bias. They equally apply, I thought, to the problem of making art when more than one person is involved: a marriage of opposites has to be consummated when you are coming from different directions and want the work to preserve the authenticity of each collaborator.
A complex, complicated task, particularly if the partnership extends beyond the work on hand – try sharing an artistic partnership and being actually married to each other, as is the case for Tammy Jo Wilson and Owen Premore, my most recently visited artists for the Exquisite Gorge II project.
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THE EXQUISITE GORGE PROJECTII
“…a collaborative fiber arts project featuring 13 artists working with communities along a 220-mile stretch of the Columbia River from the Willamette River confluence to the Snake River confluence. The project, again initiated by Maryhill Museum of Art and following the original one by printmakers in 2019, takes inspiration from the Surrealist art practice known as exquisite corpse. In the most well-known exquisite corpse drawing game, participants took turns creating sections of a body on a piece of paper folded to hide each successive contribution. When unfolded, the whole body is revealed. In the case of The Exquisite Gorge Project II, the Columbia River will become the ‘body’ that unifies the collaboration between artists and communities, revealing a flowing 66-foot work that tells 10 conceptual stories of the Columbia River and its people.”
Artists and Community Partners:
Section One: Oregon Society of Artists–Artist: Lynn Deal Section Two: Lewis and Clark University–Artist: Amanda Triplett Section Three: Columbia Center for the Arts, The History Museum of Hood River County and Arts in Education of the Gorge–Artist: Chloë Hight Section Four: White Salmon Arts Council and Fort Vancouver Regional Library–Artist: Xavier Griffith Section Five: The Dalles Arts Center and The Dalles-Wasco County Library–Artists: Francisco and Laura Bautista Section Six: The Fort Vancouver Regional Library at Goldendale Community Library–Artist: Carolyn Hazel Drake Section Seven: The American-Romanian Cultural Society and Maryhill Museum of Art–Artist: Magda Nica Section Eight: Desert Fiber Arts & REACH Museum–Artist: Ophir El-Boher Section Nine: The Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation–Artist: Bonnie Meltzer Section Ten: ArtWalla–Artist: Kristy Kún Frontispiece: Tammy Jo Wilson and Owen Premore
The Exquisite Gorge project has the notion of collaboration built in. The various artists all work together on bringing about the final product, a representation of the river and region comprised of many individual works of art. However, during the process they are completely independent of each other, as is the case with any Exquisite Corpse venture. You blindly link into a collectively assembled chain, your individual creation perhaps guided by a rule (entrance and exit of the river at a specified height location in the sculpture, in the current case), but certainly not derived from direct interaction with the other contributors.
The artist couple and Lou Palermo, Maryhill Museum’s Curator of Education, in the Oregon City workshop.
The project also is heavily indebted to what the community partners bring to the venture. In some cases it is a true artistic collaboration, when community members participate in the act of creation, like the members of the various fiber art guilds, the individuals who help crochet and knit for the yarn bombing, the Lewis&Clark students involved in fabrication. In other cases collaboration consists of providing venues for education, hosting artist talks, putting up workshops, supplying all kinds of supports – the project would not work without all the libraries, the art centers, cultural societies, tribal leadership and, of course, sponsors and granting agencies involved – all deserve outspoken recognition for being partners in art.
and everyone…. when it all comes together, it works. Glimpses from the workshop.
It is different, though, when you try to bring two minds, two artists working in different media, 2D and 3D respectively, together to make a single piece of art. By all reports, the process was long and hard for today’s featured artists, yet, from everything I have seen so far, quite fruitful.
It probably helped that the partners shared artistic projects before, though these were often curatorial. Wilson and Premore co-founded Art in Oregon, for example, a statewide nonprofit that intends to “foster culturally rich regional communities through partnerships, advocacy, and investment in artists, businesses, educational spaces, and community spaces.” It has become an invaluable resource: their ArtShine.org website provides a platform for OR artists that extends beyond the metro area, including regions like Lincoln County. You can search for artists by region, by name, by type of media. The curated database, to which artists can freely apply, is like a digital gallery that allows people interested in purchasing or displaying art to contact artists directly, a tool to connect artists to community.
Wilson and Premore also co-curated individual exhibitions, the 2019 An Artistic Heritage in Lake Oswego and You are Not a Robot in 2020 among them. The latter was intended for the Lakewood Festival for the Arts but had to be put online due to the pandemic.
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Tammy Jo Wilson grew up in Madison, WI, and received her BFA from the Pacific Northwest College of Art and her MFA from San Jose State University. I met her in 2019 when I interviewed her as a participating artist in the first Exquisite Gorge project, at Lewis&Clark College where she has worked in the art department as the Visual Arts & Technology Program Manager for the past thirteen years. I subsequently wrote about her curatorial work here.
In the meantime Wilson was also appointed as Arts Commissioner for the City of Oregon City in September 2021. In 2021 she made a splash in the Oregon art landscape with her curation of the exhibit Black Matter, which features work by a dozen Black artists, with a variety of media: mixed media pieces, sculpture, digital prints, portrait and narrative painting, photography, and more. Oregon Arts Watch’s David Bates ranked the show at the Chehalem Cultural Center in Newberg among his favorites of the year. The traveling exhibition can currently be visited at A.N.Bush Gallery at the Bush Barn Art Center in Salem, OR.
Her own artistic output has not suffered, despite her various occupations. Her most recent solo show, Figure Ground, in the Roger W. Rogers Gallery of Willamette University this spring, was well received. In our conversation she explained how her approach to art unfolds from within, a visual voice that emerges to the outside as a representation of the internal emotions. Organic structures and surrealistic landscapes reflect that.
For the EG II frontispiece she decided to focus on the aquatic plant life that provides protective cover and/or nutrients for fish in the river, duckweed included. Duckweed can be supportive of fish populations and has been of great interest to scientists trying to find more productive, resilient ways to grow food in times of climate change. But the plant is also known as invasive when not properly managed. It deprives the water of oxygen, killing both fish and beneficial algae. It readily absorbs certain toxic metals helping to clean polluted environments, but then it is toxic itself and requires safe environmental disposal, which is costly. Figure ground reversal here as well, depending on what aspect of the plant you look at. Edgings of the plants will be printed on gauzy material that will flow through the frame like the Columbia river water, reminding us of the fragility as much as the resilience of nature that has been exposed to polluting forces for centuries.
The “water” will immerse a life-sized sturgeon, sewn by Premore, and surrounded by river stones covered in moss, fabricated from a substrate felted with raw wool, another important element in a region that has seen an increase in sheep ranches supporting the local economy.
Owen Premore grew up on a farm in the Willamette Valley, near Eagle Creek. He was surrounded by nature, but also by adults who modeled spatial thinking (architects and engineers were immediate relatives) as well as crafting – he learned to crochet as an eight-year old, taught by his Italian grandmother whose own mother had been a textile artisan, well versed in the difficult art of tatting.
He received his BA from the University of Oregon and his MFA in Spatial Art from San Jose State University, where he and Tammy met. Next he spent a decade or more at OMSI, curating and installing some 13 traveling exhibitions, some as large as 6000 square feet. The job required extensive travel where he lived in hotel rooms for weeks at a time, with his only escape from the stress of the day found in needle arts at night. Many of the crocheted works originated from those times, often depicting the fare at his disposal, from diners to hotel bars. Ready to stay closer to home, Premore has been the Directing Curator of the Art About Agriculture Program at Oregon State University since 2018.
His focus on interactive installations, often with kinetic and auditory components led to enormous skills in building environments with salvaged ore prefabricated materials, providing museums and galleries with technical support. His workshop contains pretty much every tool know to man(kind,) with metal and wood working stations that enable Premore to create his sculptures. His work has been exhibited in several group and solo shows since 2002, most recently at Joan Truckenbrod Gallery in Corvallis.
Where Wilson works from the inside out, Premore’s artistic process often functions in the opposite direction: taking the impressions derived from the environment and letting them feed his creative thought. For the EG II project he traveled along the Columbia river, looking a various sites, lured by the fish hatcheries and the fish ladders at the Bonneville dam. He became fascinated with the white sturgeon, its incredible size, the biggest fresh water fish in the world. These creatures can live up to 150 years, they are beautiful – and dangerous to your health. State health officials recommend that you limit your intake of river fish to a few meals a month because these bottom feeders have ingested so much polychlorinated biphenyls — or PCBs – that the levels in their flesh is exceeding official screening values. Man-made pollution endangering environment and subsequently ourselves. Man-made obstacles damming the river, trapping wild fish to ever shorter spawning journeys.
It is the blending power of things, aquatic plants that protect and harm, fish that nourishes and poisons, that is captured in the installation. It is fiber art as much as environmental commentary, blending a sense of awe with disquiet.
For me the immediate association of envisioning this huge fish in the frame (I only saw a model on a worktable nearby) was that of another, iconic work of art, that had a dead shark trapped in Formaldehyde, slowly rotting until replaced by another specimen, also killed for the purpose, Damien Hirst’s The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living.
Like much of Hirst’s work, it lent itself to outcries, the absurdity of selling a (second) killed creature for $12.000 million to collectors, expressing the obscenity of the contemporary art market. Here’s a fun book that delivers details: The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art, by Don Thompson. “A Dead Shark isn’t Art!” filled the headlines after Stuckism International Gallery offered a parody.
Why did it come to mind, other than a fleeting visual parallel, when thinking about a carefully sewn fish, stuck within fabricated aquatic overgrowth, surrounded by felted stones? It was the symbolism of a trap, a trapped fish and a thought-trap, inviting us to figure out its meaning and significance. In fact, Premore had shown Lou Palermo, Maryhill Museum’s Curator of Education, and me a small fiber installation of a trap earlier during our visit, part of a series of mixed media works, that had already alerted me to the concept of trap.
Red Trap 2, 2012 Natural and synthetic yarn, synthetic filling, Polyethylene, mono-filament, mahogany, rubber.
On Left: Blue Trap, 2008 Natural and synthetic yarn, synthetic filling, Polyethylene, monofilament. On Right :Red Trap 1, 2008 Natural and synthetic yarn, synthetic filling, Polyethylene, mono-filament
And of course, they were things trapped all over the place, some mysterious, some identifiable.
Between that trap and Premore’s kinetic machines that use all kinds of repurposed materials and his sense of playfulness, I was also reminded of Marcel Duchamp’s Trebuchet. Duchamps, who loved puns, called a coat rack that he had nailed to the floor, after forgetting to mount it and constantly stumbling over it, trebuchet – a trap. The term is similar to the word trebucher, a classical chess move where a pawn trips an opponent’s move. And certainly that “trap” on the floor trips up the viewer. Of course the (creative) act of choosing a prefabricated object, ignoring its utilitarian function and giving it a title that implies new meaning, was the beginning of the move towards conceptual art – Readymades paving the path for what we are seeing today.
Original Version: 1917, New York lost coat rack nailed to floor assisted readymade no dimensions recorded
Replica, Milan, 1964
Much has been written about couples comprised of famous artists. How their intellectual exchange influenced their work, how their relative standing in the art world kept one of them in the shadows, often undeservedly so, how competition affected their creativity. In no particular order, Camille Claudel and Auguste Rodin., Dora Maar or Francoise Gilot and Picasso come to mind, or Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz, Lee Miller and Man Rey, Dorothea Tanning and Max Ernst. There were Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, and Paula Modersohn-Becker and Otto Modersohn.
Of more immediate interest are couples who actually worked together on creating a shared (vision for a) piece of art. There are famous ones like Jeanne Claude and Christo, or Yoko Ono and John Lennon. Or some new to me, like Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla, who met as art students in 1995 and have been creating politically engaged conceptual works ever since. The way they describe their creative process is perhaps not so far from how Wilson and Premore proceed (speculating here, folks!):
“…they arrive at their concepts by ‘throwing out ideas and free-associating’. However, Allora admits that there is a downside to having two minds working on a project: they argue a lot.” (Ref.)
There are artists Sue Webster and Tim Noble, who often work with trash, literally, shaping piles of refuse into the most amazing shadow representations, frequently of themselves. Obviously not averse to materials signifying the opposite, either. Unless that is sarcasm, telling by their website, not out of the question…
Left: THE GAMEKEEPER’S GIBBET, 2011 Solid sterling silver gilded in pure gold, metal stand, light projector — Right: REAL LIFE IS RUBBISH, 2002 Mixed media, light projector.
Shana and Robert ParkeHarrison have been together for over 20 years, making riveting art based on shared interest in dance, printmaking and photography, focused on the evolution of the anthropocene and our impact on the environment.
First of May (2015)
Red Sun 2022 photolithography
Then there is MINIMIAM, comprised of photographers Pierre Javelle and Akiko Ida. Their name is a play on words by combining miniature and “yummy” (in French, it’s “miam”). Their installations consist of food that’s inhabited by tiny people who interact with it like it’s a real world to be lived in. Obvious, why this work came to mind, right?
P’TIT-TOUR (2003) – Bike. cycling. Tour de France. donut. pastry. cake. sweet. coffee. sugar. race. team. sport. spoon. pink. icing.
I do appreciate wit! And I guess the collaborative process in developing art is closely aligned with the process of making a long-term relationship work: it can be demanding, contentious, vexing, inspiring and, let’s be honest, occasionally exhausting. But ultimately it is astoundingly rewarding.
“If you are not willing to see more than is visible, you won’t see anything.” – Ruth Bernhard (1905-2006).
Ruth Bernhard’s words tugged at my brain during my most recent encounter with one of Maryhill Museum’s Exquisite Gorge II artists. Bernhard was a pioneer among women photographers best known for her abstract images of female nudes. The artist created a portfolio of work across her lifespan that politicized the private long before the public feminism of the 1970s. Mentored and adored by some of our photographic greats, Ansel Adams and Edward Weston, the German photographer tried to make us see what is often not visible, pushing the viewer away from the typical objectification of nude models towards an empathy that allows some tenderness to emerge, but also visions of female desire.
Being willing to see more than what is “visible” is important for both, the viewer of a particular work of art and the one who creates it. This is especially true if the art is informed by anthropological and historical considerations, as is the work of Lynn Deal who will provide a fabric sculpture for Maryhill Museum’s Exquisite Gorge II exhibition this summer.
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THE EXQUISITE GORGE PROJECTII
“…a collaborative fiber arts project featuring 13 artists working with communities along a 220-mile stretch of the Columbia River from the Willamette River confluence to the Snake River confluence. The project, again initiated by Maryhill Museum of Art and following the original one by printmakers in 2019, takes inspiration from the Surrealist art practice known as exquisite corpse. In the most well-known exquisite corpse drawing game, participants took turns creating sections of a body on a piece of paper folded to hide each successive contribution. When unfolded, the whole body is revealed. In the case of The Exquisite Gorge Project II, the Columbia River will become the ‘body’ that unifies the collaboration between artists and communities, revealing a flowing 66-foot work that tells 10 conceptual stories of the Columbia River and its people.”
Artists and Community Partners:
Section One: Oregon Society of Artists–Artist: Lynn Deal Section Two: Lewis and Clark University–Artist: Amanda Triplett Section Three: Columbia Center for the Arts, The History Museum of Hood River County and Arts in Education of the Gorge–Artist: Chloë Hight Section Four: White Salmon Arts Council and Fort Vancouver Regional Library–Artist: Xavier Griffith Section Five: The Dalles Arts Center and The Dalles-Wasco County Library–Artists: Francisco and Laura Bautista Section Six: The Fort Vancouver Regional Library at Goldendale Community Library–Artist: Carolyn Hazel Drake Section Seven: The American-Romanian Cultural Society and Maryhill Museum of Art–Artist: Magda Nica Section Eight: Desert Fiber Arts & REACH Museum–Artist: Ophir El-Boher Section Nine: The Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation–Artist: Bonnie Meltzer Section Ten: ArtWalla–Artist: Kristy Kún Frontispiece: Tammy Jo Wilson and Owen Premore
Deal, born in England, was raised in New Mexico and spent much of her adult life in Oklahoma and some years in Texas. Her interest in fabric and design dates back to her childhood and eventually brought her to the Pacific Northwest, a fertile region for fiber artists, where she joined the Columbia FiberArts Guild. Deal’s background in all things fiber is rich: she earned a BA in Design and Human Ecology from the University of Oklahoma and received her MA there as well, then worked in various roles, director, curator, exhibit and education director and site manager among them, for the Metcalfe Museum, the Tulsa Historical Society and the Texas Historical Commission among others.
Antithesis (2001) The traditional layers of quilting are reversed, the ties are purposefully elongated rather than traditionally short.
Once she realized that clothing and costume design, the typical occupations for many interested in working with fabric, were not for her, Deal focussed on researching and exhibiting domestic textiles at the intersection of private creation and society’s structural conditions. That exploration included studies of cross-fertilization between women crafters who belonged to different classes and races in the 19th and 20th century South of the U.S.
A specific area of interest was the quilting of a Louisiana plantation owner, Cammie Garrett Henry who opened Melrose Plantation to visiting writers and artists, making it an important community during the Southern Renaissance—a period of intense artistic production between World War I and the end of World War II. Henry, a White woman, incorporated motifs and techniques from indigenous Hawaiian work into her quilting. The quilts of her Black domestic servant, Clementine Hunter, on the other hand, started to display motifs that described the architecture and daily views of the White plantation world around her. Hunter, mostly admired for her folk art paintings, became one of the best known artists of Louisiana. Rather than staying away from what would today be termed “appropriation,” these women integrated various cross-cultural elements that enriched their work.
Parallel Paradigms (2016) A piece contemplating reproductive inequalities and risks.
Deal’s artistic practice is clearly informed by both the historic techniques and configurations she immersed herself in, and the way a deeper view of the world could be communicated in crafted work. Her wall hangings and sculptures do require intense visual exploration, since an immense load of detail work sometime delays the appreciation of the larger picture. So much to look at, in terms of varied materials, methods of stitching, application, patterning, and color.
She loves it all, the spinning, weaving, sewing, embroidering, dying, carding, and quilting. No technique is left behind – nor are types of materials; wool, tulle, silk, cotton, beads and buttons, silkscreens panels, odds and ends abound. What emerges are stylized portraits of a world as perceived, “wool her paint, stitching her brush, fabrics her inspiration,” as she phrased it. Seemingly innocuous titles invite the viewer to go beyond the plethora of detail and explore possible meanings. Here is a perfect example: At the Party.
At the Party (2016) Excerpts
The quilted scroll shows the appliquéd figure of a young Black girl or woman, dressed up, hair beaded, behind a wrought-iron fence, covered with Mardi-Gras beads and seemingly random cotton loops, once used to make potholders by domestic workers whose hands were not to be idle. The prominent fence, however happily colored and skillfully embroidered, excludes the figure, puts a barrier between viewer and subject, and can almost be perceived as a small cage. No amount of magnolia pinks and stereotypic New Orleans’ festive cheer with its abundance of beads can ultimately obscure the reference to slavery and racial segregation.
Looking beyond the easily visible, of course, is required.
Similar insights reveal themselves, when you contemplate some of the other, unfortunately timely topics:
Or here, a recent sculpture by the artist, Keen Waters (2019) alluding to the fragility of the river eco systems, the harm induced by dams to fish runs, pollution at the bottom.
Keen Water (2019) Excerpt.
For the Exquisite Gorge II project, a rich silken river, stitched with metallic thread reflecting light, will flow underneath a canopy of colorful gauze leading from sunrise to sunset, forming the letter M to honor Maryhill Museum. On the bottom, fabric covered container lids will remind of the plastic pollution ubiquitous to our waterways.
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I consider Lynn Deal an heir to an age-old practice of, however subtle, political expression through the crafts. Traditionally relegated to the female domain, a domestic chore or diversion, craft was always perceived to be a lesser cousin to the fine arts. True even if and when it enhanced the social status of the patriarchs displaying the incredible handiwork of their female household members, whether in French castles, American plantations, English country manors or churches, producing true works of art like the Bayeux tapestries. If you looked closely enough, however, it had a voice.
The combination of textile arts and politics is nothing new then. In the last decades, it has become a defined movement known as Craftivism,popularized byBetsy Greerand groups like the Craftivist Collective, founded by Sarah Corbett. The goal is to use craft to change or improve on what is wrong with our world, a goal clearly contained in Lynn Deal’s artistic pursuits, to create with solidarity and respect, to provoke thought and help women to express themselves in ways that might include producing in private spaces, on a small scale, rather than commercial production.
The artist and carding tool, carded wool.
Cooperative work is included – with many eyes and hands creating statements that can range from environmental concerns, to feminist issues, to anti-war unity. The medium of knitting or crocheting is entering the public space, with yarn bombing or other kinds of textile decoration. So is quilting, and in some instances embroidery. (Ref.)
Marianne Jorgensen Pink M.24 Chaffee Tank (2006) (Protest against the war in Iraq – the pink covering consists of more than a 4000 pink squares- 15 x 15 centimeters – knitted by volunteers from Denmark, the UK, USA and several other countries.)
Craft has historically been a mode of direct action. Take one of the earliest examples, the 19th century Female Society of Birmingham, whose members sewed innocuous “work bags” (traditional holding your embroidery needles and sewing) which they filled with anti-slavery literature and sold across Britain (over 2000 of them!) The materials were carefully chosen – East India silk, satin and/or cotton – materials that were thought not to be produced from slave labour. Each bag contained a card that stated the choice of materials and asked the new owner to boycott slave labour goods. With the proceeds the women supported the anti-slavery movement in the 1820-30s. (Ref.)
The late 19th century women’s suffrage movement used handcrafted banners and embroidered sashes, with the Arts and Crafts Movement interacting with the women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) in Europe, in the campaign for the right to vote. The same could be found among the women of America’s National Woman Suffrage Association, founded by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony in 1869. They began to fight for a universal-suffrage amendment to the U.S. Constitution and used symbolic colors (yellow for light, white for purity and purple for loyalty) on their hand-crafted banners.
Nashville Equal Suffrage Association 1920 ( Source Tennessee State Museum)
There are also many versions of quilts made to protest social issues, from Georgian slave Harriet Power‘s story quilts,
the work of slave descendants at the community of Gee’s Bend in Alabama, to the 1980 International Honor Quilt, instigated by Judy Chicago, that honored mythological and real women as well as women’s organizations in its 549 quilted triangular pieces.
International Honor Quilt (University of Louisville/Hite Art Institute (2013)
Lynn Deal’s studio
There is also the incredible quilting work by Gina Adams, a descendant of both Indigenous (Ojibwe) and colonial Americans. She produced a series of quilts (2015) called The Broken Treaty, cutting out the letters of entire Broken treaties–these were pacts written by the United States and Canadian Government and signed by Native American Tribes — from calico cotton, the fabric that made White Americans very wealthy. The letters are placed on weathered antique quilts that were made during the time the treaties were signed.
Embroidery takes on new forms in the hands (and from the creative brains) of contemporary craftivist artists. Australian artist Michelle Hamer, for example, provokes with image of billboards, stitched to great effect. I fear her 2013 work is taking on renewed relevance in our current Supreme Court debacle.
Michelle Hamer (2013) We’re All Gonna Die, Girls.
Craft, fiber and methods of working fiber, clearly have been transformed into a tool of communication with others outside the domestic sphere. Artists use their skills in manipulating fabric and wool to create not just something beautiful, or interesting, useful or simply endearing, but to make us think about what it takes to make our world a better place. In its public appearances, from pink hats worn at demonstrations to AIDS quilts laid out at the Mall, crafts have assumed an important role in American society.
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Upwards Endeavors (2015)
I am fond of beads. As a teenager one of my most cherished possessions was a multi-string bracelet of tiny glass beads, faded pinks and purples. It had been acquired from hippies who proudly proclaimed themselves grave robbers, stealing pieces of the ornamental flower wreaths fashioned from these beads from old French and Italian graveyards, long exposed to the weather and neglect. The frisson of such a violation added to the attraction of a 16-year old, no doubt.
Years later, while traveling through Northwest Africa in 1971, hunting at bazaars for antique Millefiori glass beads (not the fake ones for tourists) that had been part of commercial trade during colonial times, became a game.
Nowadays, jewelry made by a talented friend using Venetian glass, is a source of joy.
I have mostly associated embroidered beadwork with indigenous art, a pillar of Native American tribal design, for example. European colonial settlers brought glass beads, replacing previous beads made of copper, shells or bone. This led to adaptive, often ingenious changes in working with the materials:
“Faced with the challenge of integrating these new materials, women turned to familiar basketry techniques for ideas, adapting traditional basket-making methods to weave beads and native-made fibers into bags, caps, straps, and hair ornaments. Visual evidence for this can be seen in the motifs found on 19th-century woven bead work from the Pacific Northwest, which correlate directly to those used by women on their baskets and flat bags. This presentation will provide examples of loose-warp woven beadwork from three Native American tribes in the greater Pacific Northwest: the Tlingit of Southeastern Alaska, who focused more on embroidered beadwork than loose warp weaving; the Wasco of the Columbia River Valley, who wove beads until about 1915 at which point loose warp weaving techniques were gradually replaced by beading “on a frame;” and the Pit River Indians of Northern California, who created some of the most idiosyncratic objects, shaping their tubular bags in unusual ways.” (Ref.)
Bead embroidery can be found in Japanese history as well, and has played a significant role in African cultural history. Little did I know how much bead work was also represented in European work, even though I knew about the commercial bead manufacturing centers in Italy. Pretty mind-blowing, when you look at examples like these from the Metropolitan Museum of Art collection:
Clearly Lynn Deal has a lot to work with, having found her own ways of integrating beads into her sculptures. They are elements of joy, of playful attention magnets, small messengers of harmony against backdrops of unease. Work that makes you try and find a balance, as it was intended to do.
Then again, Frankie, the pet rabbit, couldn’t care less – having free run of the studio makes for a happy life, no further improvements needed.
We live in this culture of endless extraction and disposal: extraction from the earth, extraction from people’s bodies, from communities, as if there’s no limit, as if there’s no consequence to how we’re taking and disposing, and as if it can go on endlessly. We are reaching the breaking point on multiple levels. Communities are breaking, the planet is breaking, people’s bodies are breaking. We are taking too much. – Naomi KleinThis changes everything.
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Golden sun, ewes and their lambs dotting the landscape, swaths of mustard-seed flowers radiating yellow against blue skies, all after days of hailstorms and dark clouds – the drive down from Portland to a rural hamlet East of Eugene felt like a journey into spring. A red barn inviting, a small river gurgling in the backyard, blue wood hyacinths beckoning under shady trees – it seemed like I had landed in a fairy tale. Mind you, having grown up in a small village, I am under no illusion about the down-sides of remote country living, but in spring there is no more enchanting place to be.
The artist at the Mohawk River in her backyard, with house and studio.
I was visiting with one of the participating artists of Maryhill Museum’s Exquisite Gorge II project, invited to see her studio and talk about plans for a fiber art sculpture to be exhibited on August 6th, 2022 together with multiple other ones, all aligned to celebrate successive parts of the Columbia river.
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THE EXQUISITE GORGE PROJECTII
“…a collaborative fiber arts project featuring 13 artists working with communities along a 220-mile stretch of the Columbia River from the Willamette River confluence to the Snake River confluence. The project, again initiated by Maryhill Museum of Art and following the original one by printmakers in 2019, takes inspiration from the Surrealist art practice known as exquisite corpse. In the most well-known exquisite corpse drawing game, participants took turns creating sections of a body on a piece of paper folded to hide each successive contribution. When unfolded, the whole body is revealed. In the case of The Exquisite Gorge Project II, the Columbia River will become the ‘body’ that unifies the collaboration between artists and communities, revealing a flowing 66-foot work that tells 10 conceptual stories of the Columbia River and its people.”
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Ophir El-Boher somehow manages to combine a multitude of roles, all with a seeming serenity that makes you immediately breathe more easily in her company. She is an apparel designer educated in multidisciplinary design at the Kibbutzim College of Education, Technology and the Arts in Israel, where she grew up. She received her M.F.A. in Collaborative Design, Sustainable Fashion from Pacific Northwest College of Art three years ago. She is also a studio artist, an educator and scholar, and last but not least a social activist concerned with social justice issues in general and ethical-sustainable models of fashion in particular.
El-Boher’s studio is a joyful, bright place, much like its occupant. Surfaces are covered with everything from whimsical postcards, mementos, samples, instructions, to design sketches, philosophical treatises and clothing materials, echoing the multiple perspectives that inform her creativity.
The artist embraces fashion as much as she is aware of the destructive aspects associated with the production of ever more clothes. In our form of economy the textile industry plays a huge role in pushing the economic core unit, the commodity, to keep sales up. One way to seduce people into ever increasing consumption is to lure them with newness, and fashion delivers exactly that novelty, suggesting your social inclusion and/or attractiveness will be enhanced if you follow the trend of the moment. Consumption stimulates production, and the other way round – so what’s to complain about?
Plenty, it turns out, certainly since the first Industrial Revolution which introduced automated cotton, worsted wool and yarn spinning in factories in Europe, where cheap labor (including child labor, with children exempted from compulsory education) was used to spin materials harvested by American slaves. 10-hour work days 6 days a week, work-related accidents and illness-inducing working conditions were the norm. Fashion, once a domain for the wealthy, was quickly discovered to serve profit interests quite well, directed at ever larger swaths of populations, ever more cheaply made for quick discarding, and ever more cheaply sold to larger numbers of people who got addicted to constant change.
This is not all in the past, of course. If you look at the conditions of textile workers in the developing world, where production has been outsourced, you find everything from workers being exploited and harassed, made sick by enormous environmental pollution, to coordinated efforts to drive wages down and minimize environmental consciousness. Numerous non-governmental organizations, like the German FEMNET, that I happen to be familiar with, are currently trying to observe and report on the conditions in textile production. They push for new laws like the European supply chain law adopted by the EU on February 23, 2022 which establishes rules for compliance with environmental and human rights standards in global value chains, with more work to be done to combat gender inequalities and discrimination in global value chains. A sustainability movement, however, has a long way to go.
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El-Boher’s focus is on another aspect of the problem with fashion’s churn to discard the old and buy the new. Her concern can be easily visualized if you think of textiles (and really most of the stuff we buy) as a link in a mode of linear production. The line goes from extraction of the resources needed to manufacture a good, to production, to distribution, to consumption, and finally, to disposal. Eventually the resources we extract will run out and disposal of the evermore accumulating waste existentially harms the planet’s health. Here is a short, clever video intro to the concept. And here is a longer article outlining the many factors that need to be checked to see if clothing can truly be called “sustainably made.”
We can deal with some of this, El-Boher argues, by changing this system from a linear to a circular one, by reclaiming what already exists, and refashioning it into something that has more value: upcycling discarded clothes into new ones, or into different objects, or incorporating them into art.
Upcycle: transitive verb: to recycle (something) in such a way that the resulting product is of a higher value than the original item : to create an object of greater value from (a discarded object of lesser value) – Merriam-Webster Dictionary
I was somehow reminded of the old fairy tale of Rumpelstiltskin, one of the original upcyclers, spinning straw into gold. Remember the story? Miller oversells his daughter to the king, claiming she has magical power. She is locked in the palace, required to spin straw, best used to line the bottom of the bull-pen, to gold, desired to line the coffers of the king. She gets help by a little man appearing out of nowhere, having to bribe him with first a necklace, then a ring, and finally the promise to give him her first-born. King marries miller’s daughter, baby arrives, little man comes to collect and for some inexplicable reason gives her a three day respite to find out his name which would release her from her promise. Spies hear him, again inexplicably, shouting his name around the fire side, and he angrily splits himself apart when he realizes he lost his prize.
Upcycling, re-using in general, is an important first step towards sustainability. (I wrote about the Buy Nothing network earlier here.) However, it, just like our own decision-making as consumers to buy less or buy mindfully from acceptable sources, puts the burden of changing an unsustainable system onto the individual. It cannot be the whole story. The necessary systemic changes are a different, more complicated matter, requiring a close look at capitalism as a causal link in fashion.
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El-Boher is trained as a collaborative artist and revels in her work with other creative minds. She found the perfect match for the Exquisite Gorge II project in her community partner, the Desert Fiber Arts organization in Kennewick, WA. The non-profit guild was founded in 1974 and has served as a center for teaching and experiencing weaving, spinning, knitting, basketry, felting and more. Their goal is
To promote participation in and appreciation for fine craftsmanship related to the fiber arts.
To encourage the development and interest of the craft field within the arts, in education, therapy, marketing, and the community as a whole.
and workshops, equipment and individual and community support have made it a flourishing environment for creative expression. The artist told me that the members of the guild who committed to working with her on the river project were supplying brilliant ideas and practical solutions to the plan that they developed as a team. She is this week engaged in a series of in-person workshops at the Guild that help in creating the varied materials needed for the design. Each one of them more interesting than the next.
The design grew from early conversations about the history of the land and the people around the upper parts of the Columbia. Entire populations were displaced due to damming the river, disrupting existentially and culturally important salmon runs and access to the river also for Pacific Northwest tribal nations (I had previously written about the effects of dams on Native American life here). The landscape was changed and wildlife corridors disturbed with the erection of endless electricity towers and later wind turbines. Countless container freight trains arriving from all over Washington State these days are filled to the brim with trash, destined for landfills in Northern OR, Eastern WA and Idaho, which use the emanating methane gas to produce electricity.
There is a need, then, to tell of the harm, and the scale of it, related to the landscape and its inhabitants, harm done by human agency, best represented by human hands. However, and this is part of El-Boher’s vision, those very hands can be involved in healing as well, crafting an alternative future. Her favorite color, blue, just might reappear in unsullied skies, less polluted oceans and a healthy planet when viewed from above.
The team decided to have natural materials depict the intact natural past and possible future of the region and contrasting it with a view of materials and objects that introduced so much environmental destruction. It does so in a way that, in my view, incorporates ALL aspects of the word “to spin.” The original term referred to the act of spinning a thread from raw materials, a fundamental task of many in the Fiber Arts Guild. A different way to understand “to spin” is to think of it as spinning a yarn, telling a tale, which the team does with visual cues. And the very last meaning of the word, rotating around an axis, is intended to be represented as well. The fiber-art design contains six panels that represent harm and healing on alternate sides, spinning around a center axis if there is enough wind and the mechanics can be figured out.
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Like many Hebrew words, the artist’s first name, Ophir (אופיר,) has different roots, with some sources claiming it refers to gold, wealth, or riches, and other roots denoting a connection to ashes and being exhausted or depleted. “That means that the name Ophir would probably have reminded a Hebrew audience of the fleeting virtues of wealth, or at least the corrupting qualities of material wealth relative to the eternal wealth of knowledge and wisdom.” (Ref.)
Pickled Jeans, my favorite!
Which brings me back to the previously mentioned fairy tale, most famously presented in 1812 by the Brothers Grimm. The story has a much older provenance, though, believed to have emerged in the Bronze Age (4000 years ago!) and can be found across varied cultures from Europe to Asia. Much to unpack and who knows what is right. But one theme is certainly greed, on behalf of all of the men involved, the father, the king, the goblin. Greed for material wealth that can potentially lead to disastrous outcomes.
Another theme is hubris, or overconfidence, cross-culturally often embedded in tales that teach and warn.
There is the issue of sacrifice, often stressed in interpretations of the tale as one that instructs us to appease the gods if we want a good harvest or things to end well in general.
And then there is naming. The goblin offers a way out of the disastrous loss of the child by tying it to something he thinks is unknowable, his name. The tale suggests, though, that you can acquire knowledge, with motivation, due diligence, perhaps a piece of luck contained in Rumpelstiltskin’s overestimation of his own power. What you know, what you face, what you name, will allow self-protection or protection of others. Naming potential evil is the first step to meet its consequences.
This is what this art does: it names. It alerts us to a story, gives us perspective, potentially warns. It spins a tale and offers visions of mending. An indispensable tool in the fight for a more sustainable future.
I know I have cited this particular author a lot lately, but the words apply here as well and seem a fitting pointer to El-Boher’s and her colleagues’ work:
“Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced.” – James Baldwin As Much Truth As One Can Bear (1962.)
“To practice any art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow. So do it.” — ― Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country
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The last time I was surrounded by, no, immersed in dots, was during a visit to The Broad, L.A.’s museum of contemporary art. If you braved the eternal lines for Souls of a Million Light Years Away, you were accorded exactly 45 seconds to explore the experience once you entered a room full of mirrors and LED lights – guard with stop watch on hand standing outside and calling you out. The installation by nonagenarian artist Yayoi Kusama, obsessed with polka dots, fully insisting that we are all connected souls in the world, felt more spectacle than art, ready for the Instagram crowd.
My visit to Xander Griffith, one of the fiber artists for the Exquisite Gorge II project at Maryhill Museum this summer, put me among the dots again, this time made from felt – but the experience could not have been more different, on so many dimensions, length of time and friendliness of interaction included.
Practicing his art might make his soul grow – looking at it sure lifted mine.
Xander Griffith sitting underneath one of his felt “paintings.”
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THE EXQUISITE GORGE PROJECTII
“…a collaborative fiber arts project featuring 13 artists working with communities along a 220-mile stretch of the Columbia River from the Willamette River confluence to the Snake River confluence. The project, again initiated by Maryhill Museum of Art and following the original one by printmakers in 2019, takes inspiration from the Surrealist art practice known as exquisite corpse. In the most well-known exquisite corpse drawing game, participants took turns creating sections of a body on a piece of paper folded to hide each successive contribution. When unfolded, the whole body is revealed. In the case of The Exquisite Gorge Project II, the Columbia River will become the ‘body’ that unifies the collaboration between artists and communities, revealing a flowing 66-foot work that tells 10 conceptual stories of the Columbia River and its people.”
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Originally from Arizona, Griffith is a quick-witted young artist who discovered felt some eight years ago and has pursued working with it with a passion ever since. (He used to do Improv – would have loved to see him there as well!) One of the inspirations came from a chance encounter at the Portland Art Museum when he was visiting Portland from San Diego where he then lived and collaborated with the non-profit arts organizations Sol Diego Arts Collaborative and the San Diego Collaborative Arts Project, working on diverse large-scale creative projects. With no connection to pointillism or any other impressionist artist – Griffith started to work in shipping right after high school, never exposed to formal art training – he was struck by the effects of this painting by Théo Van Rysselberghe.
He started to cut, roll, shape and manipulate prefabricated felt, the kind you can purchase at any craft store, building, with a hot-glue gun, tableaux that contain entire worlds .
There is no shyness around color, partly driven by what is available, partly an expression of the enthusiasm Griffith brings to describing a world containing beauty. He used to buy the acrylic or rayon-wool blend fabrics by the yard. Eventually he could afford bolts, then cartons of bolts, which lowers the risk that the manufacturers change hue or saturation while he’s in the middle of a project.
Nature in all of its variation is a focus of the displays, but you have to look for it – the felt paintings manage to surprise you with a lot of hidden detail, in color as well as form, once you’ve gone beyond the first overall impression of a riot of saturated pattern. The art reveals itself really with successive inspections, making you interact much more actively with each piece than you would have presumed. (Find the frog or the heron below.)
Griffith is closely connected to nature, living with a rather large snake, a rabbit, and the occasional injured squirrel being nursed back to health, together with his longtime partner in a duplex in Vancouver, WA. The rooms are filled with his creations, a joyous riot of shapes and hues.
Lou Palermo, Maryhill’s Curator of Education, in conversation with the artist.
After the first years of the typical emerging-artist struggles, he was chosen to display his art at Portland Airport. The tableaux were exhibited along the entire Concourse B and thousands of people encountered them. He’s not lacked for commissions ever since, now able to create his art full-time. Here he explains in a short clip his approach to making these felt paintings.
I was taken by the fluidity of the work, unfiltered and unafraid, a sense of improvised decisions guided by intuition, and occasionally “corrected” by removing misplaced sections through application of heat from the back (a great willingness to sacrifice all that labor-intensive placement.) This is one of the contrasts that I alluded to earlier, when remembering Yayoi Kusama‘s work: if you look at the dot patterns on her ubiquitous pumpkins there is nothing that is not pre-calculated to the millimeter, and precision reigns supreme.
The Japanese artist has freely talked about the traumatic events in her early years during a childhood burdened with parental abuse, and I have always wondered if there was an obsessive, even compulsive yearning to control environments with precision, despite their seemingly cheerful subjects.
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I had another association to Griffith’s approach with something much more closely related visually: Aboriginal Dot Art. A short overview of the history of Australia’s most famous art form can be found here. The almost 80.000 years old indigenous culture without a written language was ephemeral in its art. Some rock paintings survived, but most of the stories told and symbols transmitted were drawn on sand or bodies, quickly removed, meant to preserve ancient knowledge within tribal boundaries, kept secret from outsiders.
In 1971, dot paintings found their way into permanence for the first time, when Aboriginal people were encouraged by a teacher, Geoffrey Bardon, to draw and paint murals, then paint on canvas. Given the general visibility of the art, the need to preserve cultural symbols, it is speculated, led to heavy layering and over-dotting of the paintings as a way to hide and protect their sacred elements in the works that held special internal cultural value.
Yumari by Uta Uta Tjangala, 1981. Courtesy of the British Museum
One can see some similarities in the way animals are embedded in Griffith’s dotted worlds. What sets his work apart, though, is the fact that it has become increasingly three-dimensional. Let me first say: No matter how hard you try, photographs don’t do the work justice. I was really surprised how much looking at the real thing changed the perception – and the feeling the pieces elicited. There is sense of depth, even movement, of warmth from the materials used, that simply doesn’t come across in photographs.
This is particularly true for his approach to depicting his Columbia river section that is to be displayed at Maryhill’s Exquisite Corpse project come August 6th.
His felt creation of some aspect of the landscape are slowly taking shape, still under experimentation.
The individual pieces are stuffed with more hand rolled felt flecks, the manual labor going in to these creations intense.
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Xander Griffith is a burner. He has attended the annual Burning Man event in Nevada’s Black Desert as well as its regional off-shoots countless times. The open-air art installations and community celebration has grown into a metropolis, one week of the year, that admits close to 80.000 people, charging $575 for a main ticket per person and a $140 vehicle pass plus fees. Cheap it ain’t. Yet tickets were sold out 29 minutes (!) after online sales opened this year after a Covid hiatus. (There are more to be had across different sales venues until August.)
The experience is clearly one that people yearn for, and that enriches them in so many ways that they live with the costs, economically as well as pragmatically: you have to bring everything in (15 gallons of water per day per person included) and cart everything out from an environment that has above 100 degrees during the days and is cold at night. Sustainability is writ large, and requires effort, particularly given that so many art installations are burned to the ground by the end of the week, and so many participants arrive by plane and endless car rides.
What draws so many artists to Burning Man is an environment that has yet to find its match. The folks at the Smithsonian tried to expose this to a larger public with an exhibit about Burning Man 4 years ago at the Renwick Gallery for Contemporary Craft. No Spectators: The Art of Burning Man explained it this way: for one, the scale at which you can work in the desert location is unmatched. Just imagine, 55 ft pieces surrounding you everywhere. Secondly, the installations are complicated enough that they require a community to be set up, only a collective of artists/workers with diverse skills and backgrounds can make them happen. And finally many of the pieces have an interactive quality – their kinetic, light or sound components, their invitation to touch them or climb them, all expect and encourage an involvement of the viewer.
This last component is certainly deeply lodged in Griffith’s art – the pieces invite you to touch, to feel, to peruse. I also am willing to go out on a limb, that the spiritual aspects of the Burning Man culture have found their way into the souls of many of the participating artists – here is a short talk by the exhibition curator that partially speaks to that.
Of course we cannot look into souls, but Griffith’s work is currently used to soothe some agitated ones. PDX airport has recently opened a new sensory room which is available to passengers 24/7, designed to be a therapeutic space particularly for travelers living with anxiety or along the spectrum of autism. His felt designs might be calming, or they might spread joy. I certainly look forward to seeing what he comes up with for the installation at Maryhill, soul growing as we speak.
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And here is FELT, some sufficiently old psych-prog-rock album to match my mood and age that I listened to when I drove home, through Vancouver neighborhoods full of lush murals on neighborhood stores, a sun way too hot for March but perfect for a band from 1970s Alabama. “Felt” is, of course, not just the material used in the art described, but also the past tense for the verb “feel.” Feeling itself can have two meanings: to touch or have a sensory experience of something, or to perceive or experience something emotionally. The one-wonder album elicited the latter, Griffith’s art, on the other hand, invites both.
