Call of the Wild, Fibre Style

This is an interior view of the Gros Morne venue.

CALL FOR PROPOSALS

WILD, PURE AESTHETIC WONDER

Fibre Explorations of Gros Morne National Park

The unique natural and cultural wonders of Gros Morne range in scale from the epic to the microscopic to the sublime.  Wild, uninhabited mountains, towering cliffs of a freshwater fjord carved out by glaciers, wind-wizened tuckamore, technicolour lichens, textural fossils.  The history of those who lived in the region and who live there today bring a human response to the spirituality of the landscape.  You are invited to dig deep and create a proposal for an artwork that can be a conduit for yourself - and for visitors - to a deeper visual and emotional experience of Gros Morne National Park, a UNESCO world heritage site and the venue for the Fibre Arts NL 2015 Conference.  Let the wonders of Gros Morne inspire you to explore your own wilderness.

Exhibition Venues

Wild, Pure Aesthetic Wonder will open at the Craft Council Gallery in St. John’s during February / March of 2015.  It will then travel to Gros Morne National Park, where it will be displayed at the Discovery Centre Gallery in Woody Point from May through October, closing at the end of Fibre Arts NL 2015 on October 18, 2015.  Artist fees will be paid.  Shipping and insurance to and from the Craft Council Gallery will be the artist’s responsibility.  Shipping and insurance between St. John’s and Gros Morne will be the responsibility of the Craft Council.

This exhibition will be curated by Gloria Hickey and Philippa Jones.

Deadline for receipt of proposals: March 15, 2014 to events@craftcouncil.nl.ca or by mail to 59 Duckworth Street, St. John’s, NL  A1C 1E6.  Deadline for receipt of artwork from successful applicants will be January 2015.

What are we looking for in your finished work:

•       Dynamic, immersive and exciting fibre art pieces that push the boundaries of your practice

•       Technical and conceptual strength

•      Contemporary fibre art that goes beyond its pure function to make a connection to Gros Morne

•        An interpretation of the wonders of Gros Morne, reaching beyond literal illustrations of the landscape

Preference will be given to fibre techniques; weave, spin, knit, crochet, dye, rug hooking, basketry or work in other materials that utilize fibre processes.  Natural fibres are preferred.  Collaborations are welcome.  

ELIGIBILITY

 

Because this exhibition honours the spirit and environment of Gros Morne National Park and celebrates the culture of the handmade work of this province, preference will be given to craftspeople / artists who can show an affiliation to Newfoundland and Labrador.  Please submit a short written description of your connection / affiliation to the province.  Include reference to a personal experience of Gros Morne if one exists.

REQUIREMENTS

Your application must include

-       the attached form completed

-       a written description of the artwork, with drawings or sketches (maximum 3) and information about medium, technique and finished size

-       artist statement

-       CV or resume (maximum of three pages)

-       up to ten digital images of recent works (no earlier than 2005) and a list of images. All images should be in JPG form at a resolution of 72 dpi (no more than 1800 x 1800 dpi in size).

-       A short written description of your connection / affiliation to the province.

If works have been previously exhibited, please include details. Preference will be given to newer works and works that are created specifically for this call.

Work must be suitable to travel.

Scale of work is negotiable. 

If appropriate, include diagrams of how you plan your work to be displayed.

Outdoor/site specific work will be considered for the Gros Morne segment of this exhibition project. If this is your intention please make it clear in your proposal.

The Exhibition Committee has compiled resource materials and sources to inspire you.  Find these on the Craft Council website.  http://www.craftcouncil.nl.ca/blog/group-exhibition-craft-year-2015/

Lets Give Credit to the Submerging Artist

An example of Kathleen Knowling's hooked wit.

Let's give credit where credit is due.  Not credit as is in card (although I am sure they'd appreciate that too) but credit as in acknowledgment.  I have gone on the record in a number of places as bemoaning the growing number of awards and competitions aimed at rewarding emerging talent.  Believe me, I am all for encouraging anybody at the start of a creative career.  It is going to be a hard slog ahead and we need the next generation but, face it, they still have stars in their eyes and if they are serious they also have the fire in their gut to make it through the first couple of years.  It is the dry expanse between start up and that lifetime achievement award that concerns me.

Kathleen Knowling is the artist who first drew this to my attention.  Kathleen is a painter and a subversive rug hooker, who –I believe–is currently 84 years young.  To say that she is a personality and a half is an understatement.  She is my kind of woman.  Knowling pointed to the generation of artists behind her and commented on what a hard time they were having surviving financially.

No stranger to the digital age, Kathleen regularly sends an image of a painting to all her contacts.

I thought about it.  Aren't they as committed to improving their craft as younger artists?  Of course, they are.  It struck me that if they picked up new techniques to experiment with they also were emerging artists even if they had a few grey hairs.  Cathia Finkel at The Plantation is a case in point, although I have never noticed any grey.  Anyhow, the Plantation gets my kudos for recognizing that "emerging" is NOT an age specific category.

Tree of Life by Louise Pentz.

Back to Gloria's research, during the summer months I had the pleasure of having lunch with Louise Pentz, a ceramic artist who was visiting from Nova Scotia.  I had gotten to know Louise when I was writing about her work with African grandmothers for Ceramic Arts & Perception.  So, the topic of age was not a new one for us.  Anyhow, when I mentioned my concern with mid career artists being overlooked she laughed and said, "Oh you mean the submerging artist".  Bingo.  This is one of those instances where words pull it all into focus.

When I was in Chicago for the SOFA annual event, I took every opportunity I could find –didn't matter if it was in the Ladies Room–to talk with collectors.  And I noticed that collectors were very keen to try and figure out who the next "Picasso" would be.  In other words, you buy talent when it is young because that's when it is cheap.  Everyone wants a bargain.

The corporate world of art sponsorship had its own version of this.  The RBC stands out for its generous backing of emerging talent competitions.  I would imagine that is because it gives them a bigger bang for their buck.  Not to mention the optics of backing today's youth.  It is a win-win.

I am happy to say that I think this trend is being altered.  The start can be seen with Canada Council and its reworked its grant categories. 

The Bend in the Road is Ahead

This has been one of those weeks where I have been haunted by one of my favourite expressions:  control is an illusion.  It seemed no matter how hard I worked, things kept unravelling.  You roll the rock up the hill and it rolls back down.  I know there is a lesson in there but I can't seem to learn it.  And the sinking sensation is that it all will keep happening until you figure it out.

Maybe what it boils down to, in both our personal and professional lives, we must allow for what I delicately refer to as "fuck up time".  Things go awry.  That's normal.  That is probably why we have the term snafu (situation normal all fucked up).  This begs the question: why do we expect otherwise?  Or even, why do we get upset when things do not go well?  Even in the Garden of Eden the plot got twisted.

If I have learned anything in life it is simply to leave enough time to find solutions, to try one more time or come up with an alternative.  It is when we are naïve enough to expect something to be right the first time that we end up in crisis mode.  It is so much more rewarding to have the resource of time and energy to avoid panic or to sit back and savour the extraordinary experience of things going smoothly. 

Don't get me wrong.  I am not a pessimist.  I still subscribe to, what I think it was Voltaire who said, "my life is filled with terrible things most of which have never happened."  The key word is most.  It is a matter of proportion.

So, that means when that grant deadline is looming, the editor asks for one more rewrite, the artwork disappears, your child refuses to talk to you, your spouse asks for a divorce, and your best friend is diagnosed with a terminal illness –all within days apart–you need to be able to tell yourself "this is the bend in the road not the end of the road".  Or you will simply give up.  But if you are a writer like myself you will hear the thought in your head:  "is this an article I can sell to someone?"   

One in a Line–Margo and Sophia Meyer's Creative Legacy

Some collaborative projects are unintended.

I stepped out of the winter's cold on Sunday morning and into the warmth of the Clay Studio (see link below) in the downstairs of the Craft Council of Newfoundland and Labrador.  It was warmth made not just of heat produced by radiators but also of a collective of women potters who had gathered to decorate a harvest of pots– and warm each other's souls at the hearth of friendship.

http://www.craftcouncil.nl.ca/clay-studio/

Wendy Shirran is the co-ordinator of the Clay Studio.  Boundless enthusiasm!

Executive director of the Craft Council, Anne Manuel, was telling a story drawn from her years of friendship with Margo Meyer.  Meyer was the matriarch of functional ceramics in this province.  It was a legacy she passed on to many through teaching– like Isabella St. John–and to her own daughter and grand daughters.  Two of whom, Sarah Anne and Jesse were in attendance.  When Margo's daughter Sophia passed she left several boxes full of undecorated pots: mugs, lamp bases, vessels with soft curves and generous lips.  There was also a flock of tiny darling ducks.  Ducks and duck decorated earthenware had captured the hearts of many customers.  And stories were told by a few of the potters gathered around the work tables, like Maaike Charron who today works in the shop upstairs, of customers who came over decades looking for one more duck decorated mug.   Very pregnant, Sarah Anne, announced that her daughter would have such a mug to use.  She also said that her baby would be a girl, another in the tradition of Meyer women.

Anne's stories, of early days at the Salt Box craft store and memories of Christmas past, had the quality of family reminiscence.  Some of the women, who were all potters affiliated with the Studio, had never met Margo or daughter Sophia Meyer. (Margo died in 2010 and Sophia in 2012.) I knew them mostly through the ceramics.  So to me, the hushed room had the quality almost of listening to a children's story of way back when.

Anita Singh stroked an urn getting to know its shape before she started to decorate.  She asked for a story to help prime the creative pump, to spark some appropriate image.  Sarah Anne told us about the time her mother had made a batch of urns for funerary ashes.  And that her mother had made one for her own ashes.  The conclusion was that when Sophia passed away her ashes could not all be contained in a single urn.  "Mom didn't fit…we couldn't fit all of Mom in it".

One of Isabella St. John's lovely serving pieces.  Isabella studied with the late Margo Meyer.

The finished pots will be on show for the exhibition, One in a Line, which opens February 28th at the Craft Council Annex Gallery and will be on view until March 8th.  The invitation will be designed by daughter, Jesse, who is a graphic designer.

Collaboration is in the Air

Has anyone else noticed?  Collaboration is one of the new buzzwords in both the arts and business worlds.  It is a rare instance when we really accomplish anything by ourselves. Although in the self-employed sphere it often feels that way because we are forced to wear so many hats.  We don't get the luxury of saying, "that's not my job".  Faced with a shortage of financial, human, and even inspiration resources, the solution seems to be:  collaborate.

Collaboration is usually based on the principle of each player bringing a mutually exclusive skill to the table.  It is not unusual for example, to find potters, sometimes life partners, who divide labour according to skills such as throwing, decorating, and firing and let's not forget marketing, promotion and retailing.  Often one partner prefers the isolation of the studio and technical challenges to the social world of networking and people.  I have said of Lucky Rabbit Pottery that each does what the other cannot.  I have marvelled over how little husband and wife Ray Mackie and Debra Kuzyk talk during their working hours.  We have even joked that may be the secret to their success (and how few arguments they have).

This February 1st, collaboration will cross generations in the instance of potters Isabella St. John and her niece Erin Callahan St. John.  I am looking forward tomorrow to getting an up close look at the pottery they have created in collaboration.  (Yes, I am lucky I get a preview.) Their shared inspiration has been the bird population in the Battery of St. John's Harbour, which is the world outside the window of their studio in Blue Moon Pottery.

This is from Culture Hall and shows Robyn collaborating with a member of the public.  The piece, SpinCycle, was presented at The Brooklyn Museum.

Robyn Love, a textile artist who divides her time between New York and Newfoundland often harnesses wider or less controlled sources of collaboration.  Volunteers, members of the public and social groups help her create installations such as the Knitted Mile.  Check out her latest presence on an interesting new curated website:culturehall.com

 Artist co-operatives are a form of collaboration that intrigue me because they come up with cutting edge art that might take years to percolate through to the exhibition calendars of conventional institutions.  Co-ops are not usually hamstrung by naysayers or bureaucracy.  I love them for their excitement and can-do attitudes; the creativity and fun does not get strangled by laws and concerns about liability.  

I admit that in these sentiments I am betraying myself and my affection for the days of Gertrude Stein and Picasso.  If we could only recreate a little of the creative and intellectual energy that must have animated the exchanges between the minds at Stein's artistic and literary salons!  There's a neat little video on Biography.com that might help inspire you.

"Gertrude Stein," The Biography Channel website, http://www.biography.com/people/gertrude-stein-9493261 (accessed Jan 26, 2014).

Learning from the word NO

Nicola working on one of huge pieces in her Junkosphere show at The Rooms.

I learn more from rejection than acceptance and it is a lesson that I think worth sharing.  When I was pitching Nicola Hawkins' show to art magazines I was first turned down by C magazine.  As a rule of thumb, I respect an editor's decision not because they know art better than I do (I will argue that one case by case) but because they know their audience or readership better than I do.  Where it becomes useful is in the reason they give me. 

In the case of Nicola's show at The Rooms, it was the perception of her decorative impulse and more specifically in its designerly aspect.  What the editor said was true Hawkin's did create like a designer. There was an aspect of resolution that masked her content.  Thinking about that I knew which magazine to pitch it to next.  The rejection was useful.  We even ended up on the cover of Studio magazine, which was unusual for a review article.  That prime real estate would normally be reserved for a feature article.

Now, in terms of the tattoo project, the first gallery I proposed it to was Eastern Edge Gallery in St. John's.  We got turned down.  Ned Pratt, whose photographs are the centrepiece of this exhibit of portraits, said wisely, "It is better to be turned down in the beginning rather than in the end."  I took his meaning to be that in the beginning you can still revise or renavigate.

In the case of More Than Skin Deep, which is what I called the tattoo project, the rejection and the one after it, helped me focus on what was important about the project.  Intuitively, I knew these things but the rejections brought them to the surface.  Eastern Edge told me that it wasn't advancing the practice of photography.  I took that to mean it was not "edgy" enough.  And I agreed all around.  The show is not trying to be avante garde.  The photography style is deliberately documentary because (and this is my opinion) that is what is needed. 

No, this is not one of our images.  Is a face tattoo a life-sentence?  Well, that's open to interpretation.

that  the show would be anti climatic given other body centred work they had shown.  It is true.  Our show is not sensationalistic.  We are not going for shock value.  No cheese cake photos of inked women, no side show freak guys, no one doing rude things to each other's bodies.  This is a show about respect.  It is about listening and documenting people's stories:  why they picked those images to be tattooed on their skin, why they wanted to spend the rest of their lives marked thusly.  It is showing the nuance, the dimension and the variety of tattoo culture.  I was really floored when the last comment I got on a tattoo illustration was about how tattooed people were more likely to end up in a prison.  Excuse me?  As much as I disagree with this cliched response I would be foolish to ignore it.  This is an occasion to rewrite, revise and rethink.  If I want to succeed I need to understand why I fail. Oh and the tattoo project was accepted by two other galleries– after a custom tailored proposal.

WANTED: New Art Critics, New Blood for an Endangered Species.

I often joke that the only people who make less money than artists are those who write about them.  And if those writers are the specialists who interpret art critically, as opposed to those who generate the human-interest stories, that group gets even smaller and less well paid.  The exception would be the academics that regard critical writing as part of their practice.

One of the reasons why critical writing is so unprofitable is if done conscientiously it is labour intensive.  There is a lot more involved than simply going to an exhibition, making notes and drafting an article.  Knowledge of the issues that are relevant to the exhibition, familiarity with the artist's prior work, whose work to compare or contrast it with, and more is involved.  And then of course you have the writing, revisions and sometimes rewriting.

Kailey Bryan is bringing new energy and perspective to St. John's.  I reviewed her recent Rogue Gallery show for the upcoming issue of C magazine.

Reviews seem to come and go out of fashion.  They were once the mainstay of newspaper entertainment pages and art magazines.  Reviews could be favorable or negative.  The problem was that those same publications were often dependent upon the advertising revenues of the galleries whose exhibitions might get panned.  For a while they seemed to be replaced by human-interest type articles that focused more on how blue the artist's eyes were or where they grew up than the art they created.  Magazines ran shorter and shorter reviews and tried to include more.  One of the drawbacks was that reviews had a perceived shelf-life or stale-date, which was not conducive to seasonal publications.

C magazine is, in my opinion, the best magazine to publish critical writing about art practice and exhibitions in Canada.  It is lively, informed but not too jargon laden.  It uses interns and assistants to help writers develop their ideas and arguments and fact check.  I recommend them to anyone interested in critical writing.

And they are hosting an annual competition with a cash prize and an opportunity to publish!

The C New Critics Competition is designed to help develop and promote the work of emerging art critics. Writers must submit a review of an exhibition, performance, or site-specific intervention, between 800 and 1,000 words in length, by Friday April 11, 2014. The jury for the award includes Amish Morrell, editor of C Magazine. The winner will receive $500, editorial support in order to prepare their article for publication in C Magazine, and a two-year subscription to C. All participants will receive a one year subscription to C Magazine. Participants are not restricted by age or citizenship. To be eligible, writers must have published no more than two exhibition reviews or one article in a magazine or journal. Writers are not disqualified for having written for personal blogs or student publications. One submission is allowed per person and must be sent as an email attachment, in MS Word to Amish Morrell amishmorrell@cmagazine.com. Mail or fax submissions will not be accepted. Try this idea:    Are you one of us who has a pile of magazines associated with your art or professional practice that you never get around to reading?  This year a group of us are going to get together on a regular basis.  Each of us will read one magazine or book and tell the others about it.  We can then exchange based on interest.  We are hoping that being responsible to a group and a meeting time will help us focus, save time and money as we share tasks, information and subscriptions.  Not to mention that we get to socialize with liked minded creative types!

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