Do You Like To Work Collaboratively?

     Have you ever done artwork on one piece with several other artists at the same time? I never had until just a few weeks ago when I was invited to help create a set of art cloths to grace an exhibit at Stetson University in DeLand, Florida, my hometown. It was for an amazing exhibit put together by scientists and artists called  "A Better Nectar". The artist in charge who coordinated the exhibit is Jessica Rath and the artist who was in charge of designing the cloth is Madison Creech.

Cover of the Brochure

     It's about the fact that certain bumble bees pollinate certain plants in a very special way. They hover over the anther part of the flower which contains the pollen and vibrate their wings at just the right frequency to allow the pollen to be ejected out onto them. Honeybees can't do this. Neither can the wind. So these bee species are extremely important to keeping these plants on our planet. Many of them produce foods that are part of our diet.

A giant anther sculpture that makes sound of pollen
being ejected when a person stands in front of it

     Over the course of a three-day weekend, we seven artists practiced printing with screens, designed screens with images of pollen, finalized our design, and discharge printed it onto three purple silk cloths that were each about 4 feet wide by eight feet tall. Of course, since the discharge paste is toxic, we wore respirators when near it and while we printed. And we worked outside in a beautiful courtyard on the campus.

That's me on the right side.

two of the cloths almost finished

Ironing to make the paste discharge

Screening on discharge paste

     The exhibit opened with a reception on three different places on the Stetson Campus the other night. When you stood outside the art museum, they had a portable microscope that you could focus onto anything you wanted and the images were projected onto the outer wall of the building. The purpose was to get you to interact with the microscope and they had some set up inside focused on pollen grains.

An image of a sequin on my purse projected

Stitching from my purse projected

    Inside the art building were sculptures of parts of bumble bees' hives with speakers inside. A choral group had prerecorded sounds to mimic the the frequencies of the bees' wings. The speakers are linked to the weather station at our local airport and switch sounds to match what the bees sound like as they would respond to temperature, wind, and humidity changes in the real world. You stick your head into a sculpture and can listen to the changing sounds in real time. 

Jessica Rath, the sculptor, explaining

     And at the entrance to the science building is the art cloth we created. 

My husband and me in front of the cloths

     The flowers and bee are paper sculptures created by students. Notice the musical score (to represent the music of the bees' wings) printed near the top of the cloths.

     It was a magical night not only because of this exhibit, but also, because just a few blocks away, we attended a mind-blowing M.C. Escher exhibit at Museum of Art DeLand an hour before. 

So, the answer to the original question, for me, is a resounding YES. I loved working collaboratively and hope to do so again. And do come to DeLand to see these two exhibits if you can. The links above will give you the details and dates.

     I'm linking this to Off The Wall Friday where you can find some interesting art quilt blogs. Please make comments on the artists' posts so that they know you visited. Thanks for stopping by.

Where Oh Where Have I Been?

     Where has the time gone since my last post? I think this may have been the longest time that has passed between blog posts for me. I kept meaning to make one, but then something would come up and I'd say maybe tomorrow I'll take a photo and write some lines. So let's catch up a bit...
     In mid-October, I attended my second session of the Art Cloth Mastery Class with Jane Dunnewold in San Antonio. We learned about over dyeing, discharge, more about color theory, and composition. And we critiqued the pieces we made for homework and made plans for the third session that will take place the last week in February.

dyed cloths on the line waiting to be over dyed

     After I got home, I took some of the cloths that I had discharged with various products and put them into a notebook so that I would have a reference of what the products looked like compared to each other and on different colors of dyed cloth.

two products compared on the same cloth

I had prepared many samples so I decided to cut up some of the discharged samples and make things with them. One of the things I did was to take an old canvas apron I had that was from Hershey, Pennsylvania and said "I Love Chocolate", and repurpose it. It had several stains on it so first I dyed it with two dyes... a blue and an orange. Then I sewed the discharged samples as appliqués on top of the writing and onto the pockets.

my "new" studio apron

     I also took some of the samples and pieced them together, made a quilt sandwich with ecofelt and dyed cotton backing fabric about the size of a placemat. I've begun to do some hand stitching on it.

The piece opened out

Detail of what will be a purse flap

After I finish the hand stitching, I'll fold it in such a way and machine stitch the sides and bottom, that it will be a small purse with a flap and straps. I'll post it as I make progress.

     When I got back home from my class, I was home for three days, and then I went to Chicago for a visit. It was great to see Autumn again. And to go downtown and see The Bean for the first time.

Me, doing a selfie reflection in The Bean

The Bean with Autumn's colors and Chicago skyline

Outside the Institute of Art the weekend of the World Series
hoping for a Cub's Victory

     And now I've started my homework for the Art Mastery Class that is due in February. And there is a lot of it. I hope I can be better about posting in the midst of the Holidays and homework. I'm linking up to Off The Wall Friday where you can find other art quilt blogs. Please make comments on the artists' posts so that they know you stopped by. Thanks for visiting.

Using Found Objects

My art group set a challenge a while ago. We would collect found objects for one year. Then we would bring them in to show everyone what we found. After that we had three months to make an art quilt using many of the objects. Since I was a teacher at a high school, I had no problem getting interesting things left on the sidewalks. If anything looked valuable, I turned it in to the lost and found. Other things, I told the office about but no one ever claimed them. Here is the quilt that resulted from this challenge.

The Cast-Offs
I put a bleach product onto some of them and pressed them into the fabric to discharge it and get some of the patterns.  To quote part of its description on my website: " I wonder what data is on that CD? I wonder what love story is attached to that heart? I wonder what's up with those castles? It's an enigma as the plastic tag says."
Here are some more objects found on campus and around town waiting for their spotlight.