Monday, September 30, 2013

New Collages for the Southern Highland Craft Guild - Fall Fair

I will be doing the Southern Highland Craft Guild Fall Fair, October 17 - 20, at the Cellular One Center, formerly the Civic Center here in Asheville. I have been working on some new work that I will have on display in my booth. This summer at the Fair I had a corner booth for the first time and it was a tremendous success. I have been exhibiting at Craft Fairs for many years and felt it was my
                                                                                         

best booth display so far. Here is my booth from the summer Fair. The corner booth allowed for a more open feel and better visibility. I look forward to tweaking it for the fall Fair and having new work to play around with, compose and create a dynamic display. I have been continuing to explore


my collage series and will have a number of new collages on display. These are two new collages I have framed for the show. They continue to explore relationships. The layers of words, stitches, kakishibu and tea are getting richer and richer. They provide a more immediate way, than labor intensive clay or textiles, for me to distill and process what is going on in my life. They begin first in my visual journals and then certain explorations on my journals pages inspire larger collages.




Friday, June 21, 2013

Carolina's Got Art - First Place Award


"The Space Between"  45" x 25" x 5"  steel, bamboo, lacquer, paint

This piece "The Space Between" was accepted into an exhibition Carolina's Got Art a the Elder Gallery in Charlotte, NC. Lance Esplund was the juror for the exhibition. He is the art critic for Bloomberg News and Muse.  It was an honor to be selected by Lance Esplund for the exhibition and to have "The Space Between" chosen for the First Place Award. Below is the statement I wrote to accompany the piece.

"The Space Between"  Statement

       The vessel is a metaphor of interior and exterior, of containment, of transport and journey.  It is both universal and personal. A vessel can symbolize self. The vessel in all its many forms is my muse. These vessels are enigmatic being boat pod shapes, or pod tool shapes or tool vessel shapes. Once a piece is begun, it takes on a life or story of it’s own. As I respond to the process and materials, a dialogue develops between the piece, the material, and me. The vessel allows me a vehicle to investigate new ideas, materials, narratives and relationships.
       A number of years ago I became interested in how shadows extend the presence of a piece. Shadows are ethereal, always changing and can appear very solid yet one cannot touch a shadow, it touches you. For many years I have explored clay to create very solid and stable vessel forms.  I am interested in how shadows extend the presence of a piece. In “The Space Between” the individual vessels represent the essence of a vessel, stripped down to its basic elements, its skeleton.  The essence of the vessel is felt and brought alive by its shadows and its interplay of shadows with its neighbor’s shadows.
       I am interested in duality and the idea of a grouping of vessels that are intrinsically bound together by placement and the interplay of shadows. “The Space Between” explores relationships and inter-relationships between individual pieces. This grouping of vessels is intrinsically connected by the interplay of shadows. Created separately, these individual pieces are presented as a grouping to strengthen and highlight a sense of similarity and contrast. A dialogue is created by the contrast of line, and form and how the 3-dimensional forms are translated into 2-dimensional shadows.  Each vessel is an individual, separate and yet touched by the neighboring vessel’s shadow. The shadows overlap and weave together creating a silent conversation whispered on the wall. These negative spaces and shadows enter into the dialogue, extending the piece and representing the silent energy or the unsaid between individuals. 

Saturday, March 30, 2013

Many months have passed and many changes since I last wrote. Hietala is now legally my new maiden name. So a new chapter begins. This spring semester I am teaching adjunct at Haywood Community College in Clyde, NC,  and really enjoying it. In Advanced Craft Design, 3-D design, we have been working with line using wire, planes using foam core, manipulation and transformation using clay, and our next project will be functional containers of gut and wire. I have been intrigued by translucent gut stretched taught over wire forms for a number of years.

This is one of my gut and wire pieces, "Instrument of Motion - Textiles" that is currently on exhibition in Breaking Ground: Innovative Craft at HandMade in America here in Asheville. The exhibition was curated by Kathryn Gremley, Director of the Penland Gallery and showcases work by artist that are pushing the boundary of their medium in unexpected ways. The exhibition runs from March 8th through
May 31, 2013.

"Instruments of Motion" is a series of paddle like forms that are inspired by some aspect of trade goods that were brought back by vessel. When I think of vessels, I am a romantic and inspired by the era before diesel, when sails and the wind carried new ideas, materials and information around the globe.

"Instruments of Motion - Textiles" is a piece inspired by the labels I remove from my clothes, and save of course. Most of them are made in far off places. The labels represent textiles disseminated across the globe by vessel. Paddles/oars or what I have come to call instruments of motion were an integral part of that journey.

It is created of steel wire in the manner of tinkering or working by hand with simple tools. Hog gut is stretched and dries taunt and translucent. It has a natural tone that alludes to nostalgia and a sense of time passage. In this piece there are three compartments that house mother of pearl buttons and labels removed from clothing. I inherited a jar of white mother of pear buttons from my grandmother. Over the years I have used them and replaced them with new mother of pearl buttons that I have collected and saved.  The labels are presented showing their front and backside for variation in color. The work is stationary yet creates the sense of motion and sound that a rattle would create. Due to the delicate nature of the gut I now present the work in a white shadowbox frame for protection.