It's a little fuzzy trying to remember exactly what my studio practice was these past couple of weeks, but in an effort to keep all my ducks in a row, I'm going to retrace a couple of my steps and put 'em down on paper. Holy run-on.
Week 6-
I worked on a larger version of the above. The maquettes pictured are quite small; the sewn white central figure (or ground) are a square inch. Despite the grueling nature of the work involved in making these, I decided to go big. But, not too big. I settled on a square foot.
This idea seems very rich. Despite my excitement over the promise of the three completed maquettes, I still haven't finished the larger version I started on week six. It really is a tedious and mind numbing task to sew the square white figures. It takes about a million lines to create that square. AND, its not even fully covering the fabric design.
What sparked the initial 3 was my realization that I had to acknowledge and face the inadequacies of the sewn line as a replacement of paint. Its an answer to Morgan's question about me and fiber arts. That stuff is cool and all, buuuuuut I'm a friggin painter, yo.
So, back to that stuff about putting the sewn line's inadequacies on full blast. Although I have a deep reverence for its beauty and its role in my work so far- as a visual manifestation of my forcing two things together, as a stand in paint, etc- I kinda have been feeling bad for abandoning paint. Thinking about "why this" and "not that", I was particularly interested in some of the fundamental differences between the two materials.
For me, the sewn line functioned more like a drawn line than a painted line. They have a slow tempo. They pop in and out of the fabric, traversing the fabric and bringing your eye on a steady but slow ride. The more of them present in one area, their power in numbers creates a rich field of color; the beauty of the whole is in the sum of all its parts. These lines, despite all manipulations and concerted efforts to diminish their individuality, still demand to be independent.
And for me, painted lines are all about fluidity. The slick nature of the material allows for the line to move quickly and spontaneously. In multiplicity, the painted line can create fields and forms much larger than width of any given brush. Depending on the artist's manipulations, the individual can be swallowed up in the whole.
And the ease of creating form and field in paint is not present in the sewn line. So, I'm trying to kill myself making the sewn line function like paint in these new works. Not because I want it to work, but because I'm hoping it won't.
What happened since this initial inception of the idea has blown my focus out of the thread/paint debate. The build up of the horizontal and vertical sewn lines within a square inch/foot of fabric creates a surface that is reminiscent of canvas. So, the effect of this sewn, white, toothed field on the factory produced, patterned fabric is a conversation between art and life. The built up surface, which is striving to be "blank", is a sort of stand in for canvas. Its a neutral color; its texture is reminiscent of the tooth of canvas; it struggles to assert itself as a rectangle; in its confrontation with the stylized print of the fabric, its "absence" of imagery recollects the idea of a blank canvas.
And then there's more.... this all would be past Catherine Murphy critique which I had on or around November 2nd. This is where my more recent curiosities got a real footing. Her response to my work dealt with the work as a 3D object that spoke to or through painting's language and history.
What you see above in that pretty poor photo of the border between the sewn figure and fabric field is the "happenstance" of the activity performed on the two materials. This sort of buckling, tension, pulling, straining, insistence and resistance.... its all quite beautiful. And what seems so funny about this is the fact that through a series of actions to create/stress a flat 2d surface with these materials, the whole thing becomes 3D. Which isn't particularly peculiar in light of my other works. But, in the history of not too long ago art, the painted X that calls attention to the picture plane's flatness here is a physical X, calling attention to the objecthood, arrived at through an attempt to make a flat field of color. And if this doesn't make sense or there are wholes in my logic, it's because I'm still just getting to thinking this whol thing out.....
