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Woah dudes. It's done. This is by far my largest scale project yet. So big, in fact, I had to get up on a ladder to photograph it.

Click to enlarge.

You can see this piece, and others, at my show at AS220 in august. Just a quick plug for now, more info to follow.

Labels: fiber, finished, paper, shows

The saga of the security blanket continues. So far I've quilted seven of the ten rows. "Quilted" being used in the loosest sense of the word. While quilted stitches are usually tiny and delicate, and keep the layers nice and smooshed together, my stitches are large and in charge, and run haphazardly across each row of blocks. Do you know how hard it is to quilt a giant piece of paper? And hand quilting it is the easy way. My new sewing machine has a programmable text feature. But when I tried to feed this huge, thick, clumsy behemoth through the machine, I got an unintelligible mass of stitches that were trying to look like numbers, but without much success.

At the risk of exposing the fact that my sewing technique here is kind of suspect, an extreme closeup:


The numbers are another layer of meaning in the piece, referencing account numbers, user IDs, ATM codes, etc. The order of the numbers is random, and subject to my whim as I'm working. (So don't think you're going to hack into my bank account if you scrutinize the sequence. There's not a whole lot of money in there anyway.) There are probably a disproportionate number of 1's and 0's, since they're the easiest to do, and some of the numbers aren't even numbers. I've been working on it upside down, from the top down, and so sometimes I think I'm doing a 3 but it's really an E, or I think it's a 7 but really it's just a 90 degree angle.

I've been working on this project for several years now, and it's exciting to see it so close to being done.

Labels: fiber, paper

In the interest of educating myself, I'm going to make a feeble attempt at finding other artists working in similar areas, or just work that I really like. The first person someone that one of my neighbors introduced me to, Kenn Speiser. He lives in Providence and he uses lots of mundane objects and construction items in his work. I especially love the Department of Transportation piece (pictured at left). From his website:

"In the words of Bruce Helander, former editor and publisher of Art Express Magazine and frequent contributor of collages to The New Yorker, Kenn has "the intuitive gift that all conductors of visual poetry must have -- to keep dissimilar parts spinning at the same time, and to fine tune them into an aesthetic balancing act with a provacative twist." It's no surprise that large corporations, small businesses and public institutions have found Kenn's vision appropriate for their site-specific projects. "

He also has a security envelope project, although he actually calls them "safety envelopes". There are SO many different patterns, broken down into categories. There are specimens I've never even seen before, and colors too.

The site is also educational, for any envelope history buffs (I know you're out there...):

"The earliest example I have of an inside security tint is an envelope used at the White House during Woodrow Wilson's administration. The inside tint was used to insure that no one read the contents of the letter and Wilson used window envelopes at the time to save on readdressing time given the quantity of correspondence his administration produced."

Labels: artistsiheart, paper

Here's a new piece that I just finished, and haven't named yet. It's about 20" x 20", made of bristol board, paper, pins, lottery tickets, insulation, and in ikea frame.

A while back I had started making these cranes out of lottery tickets, with the thought of making a mobile out of them. Then I got the idea to make them into an entymology display, which I always love to look at when I go to a museum. So these are sorted into categories based on which part of the ticket is showing, and labeled with various words and phrases.

Labels: finished, paper