Category: Reflections

I want to start with a note to say thank you for being here. Thanks for reading. Thanks for supporting my studio and growth as an artist. I’ve found it hard to share about my artwork since mid-2022, and I realize now that it is because things are in a state of transition. My artwork is changing and what I want from my career is changing. The large fiber collage pieces I created in June unlocked something new in my artwork. I can feel the work resonating with me, and with others.

It’s exciting. But it’s slow, too. I’m not sure how to transition to making large work in my current studio. I’m not sure who the new audience will be. I’m not sure how to fund it. I’m working it out, though. Stick around, I’m hopeful 2023 will be a good one.

-DC

PS. In today’s email, I’m sharing a few of the things I’m thinking about in relation to this new work. Sticking with the theme of change, I’m not sure what my studio emails will look like moving forward, but I love the idea of connecting you with the things that are inspiring and exciting me in the studio. 

Elena del Rivero

This year I came across the work of Elena del Rivero. I am most drawn to her work with the dishtowel. She has been working with the dishtowel form since the 90s, including the work above made from handmade paper, pristine at first and then worn down on the floor of her studio before being reassembled into a storied paper dishcloth, embellished with hand stitching. 

Elena del Rivero, [Swi:t] Home. Dishcloths, 2000-01.
Stitches and mending on handmade and dirtied abaca paper with watermark.
5 dishcloths. Each 292 x 381 cm.
Installation views at The Drawing Center for Performance Paper, a project curated by Catherine de Zegher, July 2001.
Photo: Cathy Carver

I sourced the photo above from Rivers Institute for Contemporary Art & Thought, where the text titled “Nineteen Notes for Elena del Rivero’s Nineteen Flags“ by John A. Tyson, is an incredible, insightful companion to Elena del Rivero’s body of work. 

Here is note #9. 

“Del Rivero’s artworks rattle sabers with conventional accounts of modernism. Her series of monumental dishtowels emblazoned with geometric motifs and irregular splatters and smudges, “Letter from Home,” brings to the fore one of the repressed aspects of “high art”: paintings are really just stained swathes of fabric. Arguably, Clement Greenberg’s notion of “pictorial space,” the idea that a mark on a support yields an illusion of figure superimposed upon ground, is one final defense against seeing uncovered canvases for the materials they are made from. Del Rivero’s grids posit that dishtowel designs could possess this kind of illusionistic dimensionality when put in conversation with abstract canvases. In the context of del Rivero’s paintings, Greenberg’s affirmation, “thus a stretched or tacked-up canvas already exists as a picture—though not necessarily a successful one,” comes to define painting as the manipulation of cloth.”

Martha Stewart and Fashion/Women’s Rights Timeline

When I downloaded this podcast to listen to, I had no idea how much connection I would find in it to themes I’m wondering about in my artwork and my life. Yes, the story of Martha Stewart is worth a listen, even without a deeper interest in craft, domestic work, and powerful women. 

I was especially intrigued by this timeline that  Sarah Archer shared, which I’ve transcribed/cleaned up below. 

1970

50% of single women and 40% of married women are participating in the labor force 

Jessica McClintock buys gunnysacks and begins producing prairie dresses

Gloria Vanderbilt appears in a quilt extravaganza called Gloria the Great’s Patchwork Bedroom in the pages of Vogue

1971

Erica Wilson’s needlepoint show premieres on PBS 

1972

hobby lobby opens 

1973

Roe versus Wade is decided 

Betty Friedan debates Phyllis Schlafly on TV

Michael’s craft stores open 

1974

Little House on the Prairie premiers on NBC

Women can apply for credit and their own names

1976

Yves Saint Laurent presents his peasant collection 

1978

Passage of the pregnancy discrimination act

So what strikes you about this span of time?

From the data points you’re giving, it feels like there’s a direct correlation between women gaining legal rights and the aesthetic of an imagined past domesticity becoming ascendant. 

Louise Bourgeois’ fabric books

I was recently introduced to these illustrated, fabric books by Louise Bourgeois. I did not previously know that Louise Bourgeois worked with fabric in this way. The blog article Louise Bourgeois: A Flashback of Something that Never Existed, posted by Christina Costello, Louise Bourgeois Print Cataloguer, Department of Prints and Illustrated Books, is a great short read. 

Here is an excerpt from the MOMA website:

“Although she is best known for her sculptures, drawings, and prints, Bourgeois also made illustrated books (a format that she herself collected) from the late 1940s onward, incorporating her own texts and those of other authors. Fabric had deep personal associations for her, as she had spent her childhood living upstairs from her parents’ tapestry restoration workshop and then for years employed textiles in her sculptures and as the support for her prints and drawings. She had long used art as a means of exploring and exorcising her personal history, but this volume is unusually intimate: it is composed entirely of pieces of textiles she had worn or had saved since the 1920s, including nightgowns, scarves, hand towels, and table napkins from her wedding trousseau, monogrammed with her initials.”

Thanks for reading! Until next time, Dana