It is raining in Vancouver for the first time in many weeks. Most people don’t realize that the rainy Pacific Northwest goes through a two-month dry spell each summer. Bone dry. Great swaths of British Columbia are burning right now as hundreds of natural and man-made wildfires race through endless miles of standing timber; forests and tree farms that have been infested by the Japanese pine beetle are exploding like fire-crackers.
To celebrate the rain and our temporary reprieve from the burning acrid soot that has been thickening the air over Vancouver these last few weeks, I did what every nerd does: I bought some books.
Our local Book Warehouse is closing its doors to make way for another condo extravaganza so I wandered in for a final look. How lucky was I to find a copy of the Boston Museum of Fine Art’s ‘Shy Boy, She Devil, and Isis, The Art of Conceptual Craft, Selections from the Wornick Collection,’ for less than 30% of the bloated Canadian price on the jacket. It’s the catalog for a 2007 Museum of Fine Art (Boston) exhibition which includes, much to my delight, work by Canadian artists like Vancouver’s Peter Pierobon, Toronto’s Gord Peteran and Saskatoon’s Michael Hosaluk.
I have found the work in this book to be especially inspiring because I am starting another art project and the blurry (and often arbitrary) boundaries between art and craft, concept and function have been on my mind. A close friend is remarrying and I am making a quilt for the new couple. Amy, a paramedic by day and motorcycle-driving animal rescue superhero by night, has invested her savings in Beaver Creek Farm, 20 bucolic acres on the outskirts of Southern Ontario’s rural Stevensville. The plan is to create a haven for abused, neglected and damaged animals and the menagerie already includes Vietnamese pot-belly pigs, fainting goats, a pack of ravenous toy dogs and bunnies galore, oh my!
I am impressed by the determination and vision that Amy shares with her new partner Brent, a local boy, so I have begun sketching the design for the quilt. It’s going to be a complete departure from my work to date. I began by reviewing the paintings of prairie-homestead life by one of my favourite Canadian artists, William Kurelek. Here’s a little short by (who else!) the National Film Board.
My interest in maps inevitably led me to Linda Gass’ quilted landscapes. Check them out. They’re formidable, aren’t they.
I’m going to try to quilt a map of Amy and Brent’s Beaver Creek Farm. When we were growing up it was the ‘Bremner place,’ and I have a general idea of the landscape of the farm from our many in situ escapades, so I’ve interviewed Amy and Brent to find out what they envision both as a process and as a goal. Here’s the first iteration sketch. The property is bound to the west and north by Beaver Creek, an ecologically sensitive body of water that flows into a great regional swamp and from there into the mighty Niagara River.
The quilt will not be sturdy enough for everyday bed use or casual laundering, so it will be an unambiguous departure from the functionality that is one of the hallmarks of craft. I’m going to experiment with method: I am going to depart from the structured grid assembly method I’ve used to date and will try using appliqué (some of it raw-edge) on larger, more casually assembled background pieces. I only have 1 month to complete this piece so I think I will eschew painstaking literal representation and detail in favour of silhouettes and flourishes. I’ll post progress images regularly on Orangewool.com during the next few weeks.
