Hi friends,
This is something I’ve been meaning to re-start for quite a while, and New Year’s Day seems like the perfect day to do it.
2009 was a crazy year for me – definitely mixed. I spent the first half of the year desperately trying to find a new job. By the middle of the year, I had three jobs (plus an internship,) but I was barely (actually, um… I wasn’t) making ends meet. Thankfully, the right job finally came along in June. I was so so lucky to get it – and lucky, too, that I’m enjoying it and getting to finally do what I went to school for.
Another highlight in 2009 was that my dear friend Jen and I were invited to take part in not one, but two (albeit related) art shows despite the fact that I had almost zero prior experience in showing my work before, and Jen was also pretty new to it: The City of Craft show at the Theatre Centre in Toronto and Home & Away (& In-Between) group preview show for City of Craft at the Cream Tangerine café.
It was a stressful period, getting ready for the shows, but I’m super pleased with the way it turned out.
Jen has been fixated on fire escapes as an aesthetic form for quite some time, and had been working on some pieces related to her fixation, which she then posted in her blog. The curator of the installations at City of Craft and connected shows, Tara Bursey, somehow saw this and approached Jen to create an installation based on work she had seen in the blog.
In the beginning, I was merely along for the ride, and not sure where there ride was going. But then something crazy happened. We took the theme and created individual pieces that worked really well together, yet drastically different. In the end, Jen created wonderful paper silhouettes of the fire escapes, while I created wire models out of soldered together paper clips. As both of us are a bit fixated on hot pink in our other work, we decided it should be the colour to tie the pieces together.
The pieces looked great, and we got some really nice feedback from people who saw our work. There is some stuff about us on the internet here and here… and here are some photos from the main show:
Tara, (who did an incredible job! I can’t thank her enough…) has some excellent shots of our work (as well as the other amazing installations from the shows) on her flickr account, including the one above here.
Aside from “Escapes”, I was lucky enough to participate in another installation that was also part of the City of Craft show, on display in the front window of Fly Gallery on Queen St. West here in Toronto. For this one, I crocheted three pieces as part of a larger “hyperbolic” crocheted coral reef. Here are some images:
As a special note, one of the pieces was made of leftover wool that my grandmother once knit a cardigan for my dad with. I wished she could have seen the piece, but I’m sure that somewhere she is thrilled that her wool was used in an art project. If you’re curious as to which pieces are mine, they are tagged in the picture in my flickr account here.
A good resource for information on this particular project is on the Church of Craft website here.
So there you are. It was a crazy, wonderful experience: to go from an artist who has never had anything on show before, to an artist who had pieces on display in three venues simultaneously, it was quite something… and it still doesn’t feel real.
Incredible momentum was gained last year, and I think these experiences were really important to both Jen and I. As such, I am using this blog as a way of documenting my work and staying accountable to myself. Hopefully it works.
Happy New Year!
Edit (January 2, 2010): I’ve been busy updating and going through flickr backlog and I’m only now noticing that the fantastic Becky Johnson also has a *lot* of good photographs from both the main city of craft show, and the smaller group preview show, Home & Away (& In-Between). You can find them all in a neat set here. I should also mention that Becky is one of the people responsible for organizing the whole darn City of Craft thing, and was also the one to teach me how to crochet hyperbolically, so many thanks to her!
