Quilts in the gallery and other adventures

Tuesday is cleaners day, so I spent the time at the library, in the company of this dazzling show of hand quilting, much of it created during lockdown.

Even her set-up table is art!

There's a great sense of calm and optimism in this show. Just right for a foggy damp day with dodgy driving. I don't think I'm up for it again, to retrace my route for the Tuesday Knitting Group.

And here's what I found when I got home to a shining clean house, courtesy of my cleaning family.  My poinsettia!

Meanwhile here's the current reading 

The heroine's 87. I like this. She's lived, and her past life informs her current actions very handily.

Textiles and Tea featured

A powerful artist using textiles as her medium. She showed some personal art about her outlook and experience

She started as a commercial graphic designer but developed a two sided art practice after she became a textile artist. One is the personal experience side, like the pieces above. 

 And a vivid artwork, When I'm 64, reference to the Beatles song, about her hysterectomy at the age of 64.  It involves crocheted drops of blood, and strings leading to scrunchies entwined with specula. The speculum is the freezing cold often painful tool inserted into the vagina to open it enabling the doctor to see inside.

 

The two red roses indicate the years she gave birth to her two daughters.

A lot of the time in the episode was spent on her monumental installation work, designed as participatory art for social awareness and justice.

This floor, many square yards, consists of caution tape crocheted into squares with the frail net suspended above it. It addresses homelessness and some of the crochet was done by people who were homeless and living in tents. She paid these participants for their work after they had learned to crochet.

The crocheter on the left created many pieces, and on the right is another worker connecting the squares into strips before they were carried to a big indoor location to be finally attached into the piece you see exhibited.

Other installations address the red/blue political divisions in the US, and were the work of thousands of participants.

Every member of Congress received a box of these squares including work from their own state. Abigail Spanberger, among others, was very supportive and welcomed them.  Some members were baffled!

Here's a rendering of the next projected installation, a labyrinth in Arizona consisting of flags, on the subject of the environment, created by many artists, to be set up in early 2025. I tried to sign up today, but I think I missed the window, heard about it a bit late.  The deadline is December 31.  This is Towards 2050, a twenty-five year period in which  climate change must be addressed before it is irreversible.

In these massive, people intense projects, she explains that the art is the intricate organizing and fulfilment of work far beyond the capacity of a single person, the multiplier effect.

 

So that was another packed Tuesday. There was also free cycling, laundry and cooking.  

Happy day everyone, I feel like a pretty tiny cog after seeing all the art today, but I can do my bit. Or bitkin. Nanobit.