Fancy

Artist Statements, 1996

Susie Brant

The three works in this show are from a series of blankets composed of collected textile ephemera. They are assembled using traditional quilt making techniques and invented structures. The resulting tactile and rich visual fields are meant to explore issues of labour, material consumption, function and the iconography of cloth.

Each piece begins with a few very simple premises or questions. Among other things, the piece Blackened Blanket is an answer to "what can pure sewing be?" Brant says "Darned Blanket is the result of owning a sewing machine with a darning feature that allowed me to bring bits of found embroideries together. When I began working on Dainty I wondered what the experience of lace would be without the holes."

Rummy Gill

This body of work is a development of patterned images that have evolved from the integration of two historical sources: William Morris's wallpaper designs and Indian textiles. By combining these interior surfaces, I am trying to make associations with myself by questioning "Who am I?" and "Where do I come from?" The Indian patterning and the wallpaper motif are constituted through the complex layering of pattern and colour. Through this intense amalgamation, the significance of my two cultures - the Indian and the British - are shown: one I was born into, and the other, raised into. The historical designs help me to decipher my identity (or identities) on a conceptual level rather than a realistic one. The authenticity of the designs is enhanced through the intensity of indigo, a colour shared by William Morris and traditional Indian textiles. The work exhibited here is a series of small panels, painted in oil on Xerox paper and Indian silk, and adhered to the canvas with Rhoplex. Though the scale may be restrictive, it gives me a sense of control and engages not only myself, but viewers, on an intimate level.

Anna Torma

My textile structures typically consist of layers. First, a patchwork underlay consisting of neglected small pieces of waste, textile fragments and old clothes. The second layer is textile drawing - found texts and found drawings. The structures are held together and embellished by hand-embroidery stitches. My goal is to create innovative textiles that blend craft with conceptual investigations into femininity, domesticity and ethnicity.

Rhonda Weppler

Assuming that creative and artistic ability may be to some degree hereditary, I wondered why I have no close or distant relatives who are or were artists. In thinking about my family background, which lies in the rural Ukrainian-Canadian communities of Northern Manitoba, I understood why someone in my family might not have thought of becoming an artist.

However, the creative urge has to be vented somewhere. Evidence of it lies in the art of my maternal relatives. My mother is an expert baker who obsessively creates beautiful pastries and cakes. My grandmother crochets and embroiders her own complex designs. My great grandmother did all of these things and also made pysanka - Ukrainian Easter eggs.

I love to paint, and have had the luxury to do so. My work reflects the respect I have for domestic art. I want to illustrate how painting can be like the obsessive repetition of needlework. Painting also follows the steps of mixing, stirring, spreading and making things look "appetizing," just as cooking does.

By making my work life-size and in trompe I'oeil, I hope to confuse the lines between art and craft, paint as paint, and paint used to create an illusionistic rendering.

© 2007 Textile Museum of Canada

Fancy

By John Armstrong and Sarah Quinton, 1996

Fancy explores textile patterning and embellishment. The exhibition title refers to the term "fancy-work," used to describe decorative needlecrafts such as lace making, needlepoint, appliqué and crochet. The four artists in this exhibition may be seen to have extended the definition of this term - they have altered or depicted their fabric sources using a remarkable range of conventional and improvisational techniques based on sewing, mending, embroidery, cake decorating, collage and impasto (glazed oil painting). Their labourious approaches to handwork create an extravagant material presence that is both physically and conceptually layered. Techniques and subjects frequently associated with the modesty of art made at home are intentionally celebrated. These elaborate reinventions of familiar textiles range from pointed, even humourous critiques, to caring acknowledgement.

Susie Brandt, Rummy Gill, Anna Torma and Rhonda Weppler make work that is grounded in their often complex cultural heritages as well as in their studio-based, contemporary art practices. Their artworks reenact the state of contested flux within which tradition, in its struggle to maintain current relevance, exists. Decorative patterning associated with textiles - which may be understood to represent "tradition" - is buried beneath layers of paint, dissolved by over-washing and over-stitching, taken apart and sewn back together, or squeezed out of a piping bag. On one hand, such careful (if eccentric) rendering pays homage to particular cultural precedents. On the other hand, the references to "authentic" traditions found in these newly created hybrids also serve to subtly destabilize conventional expression, suggesting both the desires and the risks associated with the transformation of tradition.

Here, motifs associated with traditional, popular and "high" art are intentionally overlapped to create a web of reference: quilt-work's obsession with "busy work" and thrift (an economy often shared by 20th-century collage artists); the much-trafficked traditions of Indian paisley and Hungarian embroidered flora and fauna, and; the parallels between the geometric designs found in modernist painting and in domestic textiles. The artists productively eschew the strict dichotomies of innovative and conventional art, or, of dominant and less-represented cultural expression, by playing out a particular art-form's circulation, cooption and ongoing re-evaluation. This exhibition charts these artists' interest in making sense of the values implicit in culturally inflected art by working in between established traditions, in order to develop a vital relationship with historical art and craft. The flights of (whimsical) invention present in Fancy are laid over serious meditations on the structures and assurances of inherited custom and orthodoxy.

Susie Brandt commandeers some of quilt-making's "virtuous" characteristics - thrift, precision, hard work and beauty - and refashions them into fabrics that are relentless in their questions of comfort and well-being. Her human-scaled coverlets and blankets are made up of radically over-sewn scraps of fabric, other peoples' embroideries, bits of lace and doilies. Brandt's textiles speak of the compression of time; her hand is fixed to that of the needleworkers whose artwork she has recuperated. With these potentially "nostalgic" materials hovering in the background (or foreground, depending on who you ask), Brandt asserts a labour-intensive process that playfully invigorates both periods of production.

Rummy Gill builds her indigo blue-drenched paintings upon grounds of Indian silk saris and paper photocopies of textiles, which remain partially visible beneath layers of paint. The masking of the underlying fabric metaphorically recalls purdah, the custom of veiling women in India. Her small-scaled paintings refer to traditional Indian printed fabrics, decorative motifs found in Indian architecture and William Morris's textiles. The repetitive quality of the printed textile is fastidiously rendered here, both in her paintings' reiterated serial format, and in the layer upon layer of rhythmic pattern, which reflects the accumulated, overlapping filters of her Indian, British and Canadian cultures.

Anna Torma's large, stitched assemblages contain images of - and are quite literally held together by - embroidered emblems and patterns found in traditional Hungarian folk textiles. Torma's fabrics are drenched with play and perseverance, memories and dreams, journal entries and doodles. Tenuously pieced together networks of "shredded and roughed up" bed sheets, pillowcases, cheesecloth, handkerchiefs, fluff and worn clothing freely quote traditional North American quilting and piecework - art forms unfamiliar to Torma until her arrival from Hungary. The poetic stringing together of these fragile constructions, embellished with primary red stitching, recounts a post-Soviet Hungarian diaspora.

Rhonda Weppler draws upon domestic textiles she has collected as well as other handcrafts - pastries, Easter eggs and embroideries - made by members of her Ukrainian-Canadian family. Weppler creates a trompe /'oeil effect with paint on shaped canvases in order to imitate the texture, colour and structure of crocheted potholders and knitted kitchen cloths. She presents an evolution in material and style - from 1940s butchers string dishcloths to the acid palettes of 1970s acrylic yarn potholders - suggesting an incontestable link between the changing fashions in home economics and the economies of art. With a confectioner's touch (she works in a bakery), and a nod towards modernist abstract painting, she conceives thrift store potholders as objects of prominence and wit.

© 2007 Textile Museum of Canada