Module 4, Chapter 12: Study Three Artists
CAS
HOLMES
“With making comes meaning.” (Cas Holmes in Stitch Stories)
Narrative is an important part
of Cas Holmes’ work. The stories
encapsulated in found objects, particularly the everyday and commonplace, are
an important part of her work. Every
found object or scrap of cloth has a story to tell.
“Having a story to tell often starts
and underpins a work of art’s design process.”
(
Introduction to Stitch Stories by Cas Holmes.)
Cas believes that all artists
need to find their own unique voice, so that they can create work which is
meaningful to them.
“Your artistic take on the world could
be sparked by your daily journey to work, seasonal changes in your garden,
family stories, local history or even an intuitive response to the feel and
history of a piece of cloth. Such things
provide a rich resource in developing your own narratives, or what some may
call a personal vision.”
(Stitch
Stories by Cas Holmes.)
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| Cas Holmes Lace Shadows |
Her environment and a sense of
place are also an important part of the narrative in Cas Holmes’ work.
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| Cas Holmes Spring Verge |
I bought a copy of Cas Holmes’
book Stitch
Stories, about the same time as I started to research her work in order
to write this essay. I felt an immediate
bond and connection to her approach to her art, particularly the intensely
personal and intuitive response to her subject.
I had a tremendous struggle with Module 4 – my work wasn’t satisfying me
and I had reached an almost complete block in trying to progress. This culminated in a decision to start the
piece of work again and this time, I did find a topic that told a meaningful
story to me, one that I very much wanted to share with others through my
work. It was so satisfying to me that I
could use the century-old family photos which I found so meaningful, and that I
could incorporate my husband’s fascinating stories (which I never tired
hearing) of an industry now vanished.
The photographs of the young women, who travelled around the country to
gut and pack the herring, were so evocative to me that I almost felt that they
could speak through my work and make their long-dead voices heard once
more.
This is true also of Cas
Holmes’ work. Through her, these
discarded and unwanted objects have a voice again and speak to us through her
work, telling their stories.
_______________
LOIS
WALPOLE
“Trained
in sculpture, basket making and product design, I am a designer and maker of,
baskets, furniture, and art works. These artefacts combine the techniques and
often the forms of basketry with the detritus of consumerism and the natural
materials of my immediate environment.”
Like
Cas Holmes, Lois Walpole uses found objects in her work, finding value in
something which has been discarded by others.
Indeed her latest exhibition is entitled “Precious
Waste”. In her work she uses a wide
range of waste materials such as old ropes, plastic packing tape and wire as
well as a range of natural materials.
Lois divides her time between Shetland and
Charentes in south west France.
Her
family connection to Shetland is a strong undercurrent in her work.
A recent exhibition of Lois’ is entitled “Weaving Ghosts”. Ghost gear is the term used for discarded
ropes, nets and other floating waste, which cause problems for both shipping
and marine life. Large quantities of
this ghost gear are washed up on the beaches of Shetland, and Lois has a
love/hate relationship with it. On the
one hand, it provides a useful free resource for her work, whereas on the other
hand, it causes a great deal of harm to the environment. However she uses these
materials in her work in order to draw people’s attention to the problems which
they cause. Care for the environment is
a strong ethic in her work.
: “Wanting to make something out of nothing has always been a driving
force for my work. Maybe I inherited this from my Shetland family, though for
them it was a necessity rather than a choice. If my great grandfather Laurence
Moar Tulloch had found some of these ropes washed up on Brekkon beach I feel
sure he would have been as excited as I am to find something so strong,
colourful and useful.”
Lois Walpole is another artist
to whose work I feel a real connection.
In particular her exhibition “Weaving Ghosts” strikes a particular chord
with me.
“But
the 'Ghost' bit of my chosen title is not just about these materials, it is
also about the lost tradition of basket making in the Shetland Islands.
Basketry once played a critical role in survival, now there are only a handful
of people who remember how these tools for life were once made. The centuries
old tradition of making containers, traps, brooms, mats and chairs
from indigenous natural materials died in the space of 50-60 years and by
2000 could officially be declared dead and buried.”
(From Lois’s blog, see below)
Like
Lois, I too was trying to reflect a lost local tradition. Another thing I noticed in which Lois
Walpole’s work relates to mine is in the preponderance of circles in many of
her pieces. Here is a selection of my
favourites.
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| Lois Walpole Scooby-doo |
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| Lois Walpole Honey Trap |
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| Lois Walpole Satellites 3 |
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| Lois Walpole Log Basket |
A
further way in which Lois’s work relates to the content of Module 4 is that she
often deconstructs found objects (for example, pieces of old rope) and then
weaves them back to form a new structure.
This relates to the drawn thread work of Module 4 in which a fabric is
partly deconstructed and new threads woven in to make something new. In some ways, Lois’s work (as well as Module
4’s drawn thread work) could also relate to Module 1, where the theme was “growth
and disintegration”.
Both
Lois Walpole and Cas Holmes are artists with whose work I was fairly
unfamiliar, but it has been a joy to explore their work and thoughts and to
find such a connection to my own.
__________________
Hedi Kyle
 |
| Hedi Kyle teaching |
Until
I started on Module 4 of the Certificate with Distant Stitch, I knew next to
nothing about bookbinding. I had loved
books for as long as I can remember, but I had been interested only in their
content and was quite oblivious to how they were made. As part of Module 4, I had to do some simple
bookbinding and it was love at first sight.
As well as the content of books, I now loved also the vessel in which
these thoughts, ideas, pictures and stories were held – and I was keen to learn
more. Serendipity stepped in at this
point as I found a second hand book, “1000
Artists’ Books: Exploring the Book as Art”.
This opened my eyes to a whole new concept – that of the book as not
just possibly containing works of art, but being a work of art in itself. It was mindblowing and I spent many hours
pouring through the book and admiring the work of the incredibly talented
artists whose books were pictured. One
image stood out in particular for me: a flag book made of thin sheets of
mica.
 |
| Hedi Kyle Mica Flags |
The
transparency and the fascinating shadows cast by the pages fascinated me. I found it was by Hedi Kyle, an artist previously
unknown to me. I researched on the
internet and found that she was a pioneer of the concept of the book form as
art and that, by sharing her ideas through her teaching, she had enabled this
concept to grow and flourish. She has
indeed been described as “a rock star in the book art world”.
Hedi
Kyle is a German-born American book artist and educator. She was born in 1937 in Berlin and the family
later moved to Poland. The Second World
War led to an unsettled period for Hedi and her family. With her father off to war, Hedi’s mother and
grandmother cared for Hedi and her three siblings, until they were forced to
flee with only the clothes they stood up in.
It was a stressful and frightening time for the family.
Eventually
in 1946, her father returned. His work
as a marine biologist took the family to Borkum, an island in the North Sea,
north of the Dutch province of Groningen.
She was very fond of reading – anything and everything she came across –
and eagerly awaited each edition of the Reader’s Digest which arrived by
post. She also spent a lot of time on
the beach, collecting driftwood and other objects that washed ashore and making
things out of her finds. After high school, Hedi attended an art school in
Wiesbaden. She worked for a while for
an advertising agency as a commercial artist.
On turning 21, she went to Greece for a year to paint.
By
the 1970s Hedi had moved to the USA, where she studied in New York with
bookbinder and conservator Laura Young.
She was an imaginative and innovative student, constantly questioning and
challenging her teacher. (“This can be
changed: why do you have to cover the spine?”)
Hedi
got into education when she was offered a job teaching at the Center for Book
Arts in New York. Later she moved to
Philadelphia to work as a conservator.
This work fostered in her a great love for and familiarity with book
structures. She was interested in the
old traditional techniques, but did not want to stick only to that, as her
lively and inquiring mind led her to experiment with making her own books,
adapting and adding to traditional structures.
As Hedi once wrote, “The book as a mechanical device is basically immune
to improvement, it is not immune to change.”
She enjoys sometimes using completely new and modern materials such as
Tyvek and plastic.
Hedi
was invited to teach at the Philadelphia University of the Arts. Through her teaching she has been able to
pass on to her many grateful students her innovative ideas and the new book
structures she has invented. She does
not mind when people copy her ideas (and even sell the instructions for book
structures that Hedi has invented). She
says that when you teach you are giving ideas away, which means it can’t be
copyrighted. She says she has plenty
more ideas!
Hedi’s
spirit of playfulness and transformation has led to some iconic book
structures. One of the best known,
almost her “signature” book is the widely popular flag book, a variation of a
simple concertina fold.
 |
| Hedi Kyle April Diary |
Another
well known and popular structure is the Wunderkabinett – a book with wonderful
surprises hidden within.
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| Hedi Kyle Wunderkabinett-1 |
A
useful and intriguing structure is the “blizzard book”
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| Hedi Kyle Construction diagram for Blizzard Book |
Above
is a diagram of Hedi’s instructions for how to make a blizzard book – a book
structure which, by clever folding of a single sheet of paper, makes a book in
which each page becomes a pocket. It got
its name from the fact that Hedi came up with the idea for it while snowed in
at her studio.
 |
| Hedi Kyle Blizzard Book |
Hedi’s
“Mica Flag” book was a direct inspiration to me in my work for the final assessment
piece for this module. I had simplified
my response to the images and information I had on the herring industry,
interpreting it symbolically as a circle.
I decided to show the embroidered panels as a series of drawn thread
work circles. I wanted to display them
in book form, but I wanted the empty spaces to be as important as the stitches,
to symbolise the fact that this industry is now gone. The memories of those times is now
fragmentary and will be even more so when the last of the people who can
remember the days of the “silver darlings” have died. Inspired by Hedi’s work, I thought of
mounting each piece of embroidery on acetate.
It
has been a great delight to find out about Hedi Kyle and her work and I am
grateful to her for her friendliness and generosity in allowing me to write
about her and use some photographs of her work.
14 May 2017
Solo exhibition 'Precious Waste' now on at Cesta Republica in
Madrid until 8 June 2017.
