"Abstract 2022"

 

1)      Sebastopol Center for the Arts, Sebastopol, CA, Abstract 2022, June 18-July 24, 2022

“Abstract 2022” is an international call from the Sebastopol Center for the Arts in Sebastopol, CA.  The juror chose 66 pieces from a 310 entries. 

 

My piece, “Rebirth”, was inspired by a 2019 trip to a Roman ruin outside of Seville, Spain called Italica.  I was fascinated to see reconstruction work alongside the centuries-old broken tile shards.  In 2022, this piece makes me think of images we are seeing of war destruction in Ukraine.  The footprint of buildings is laid bare, with their shattered floors and walls beside them, shattered lives.  Concurrent reconstruction is happening in the face of war.  This is the first of many stages of ending and rebirth.

I Take A Fractal Journey by Mary Tyler

A fascination with color and pattern has always been at the center of my work as a fiber artist.Through the stages of growth from weaver, to hot wax batik methods, constructing Artist’s books, making kaleidoscope patterned quilts to my current focus on altered fractal images, the continuous theme has been color and pattern.

Fractals are found everywhere in nature, fern fronds, lightning strikes, the coastline of England. Fractals are geometric formulae that are used to define and measure repeating but irregular shapes. In other words, fractured geometry. I select fractal images from a computer program, render them into a useable form, then alter them using an imaging program. Then the finished image is sent to a digital printing company that returns it to me as printed cloth. I topstitch it and finish the piece. Even though each image starts off as a mathematical formula, it ends up as a personal statement about the world. Color and pattern are still the center of my work.

Fractal 1:

Bird 1:

Fractal 2:

Untitled:

Fractal 3:

Growth:

Mary Tyler

June, 2022

Click here to see finished work

"Fiber Arts, Expressive and Innovative" by Ileana Soto

The O'Hanlon Art Center is a little-known but special art center nestled in the hills of Mill Valley, California.  Monthly exhibits are juried by Bay Area art professionals.  "Fiber Arts, Expressive and Innovative," was juried by Carole Beadle, textile artist and professor, known for encouraging three-dimensional works by her students.  I studied with her for two semesters at the California College of Arts and Crafts (now California College of Art) in 1985.  She currently teaches at the College of Marin.  

I was honored to be juried into this exhibit, showing March 24-April 21, 2022.  I include a photo of my piece, "Chancay II", plus two details, based on my Peruvian heritage and the textiles of the Pre-Incan Chancay Culture, 1000-1470 AD.  This culture specialized in knowing the "essence" of a thing through sophisticated threadwork patterns called "gauzes."  When pulled taut, their patterns can be seen; when released, the patterns are hidden to the ordinary person. On the wall perpendicular to Chancay II are two felted pieces by Martha Wold Cornwall, "Elsa's Journey" and 'Fire Season".  

Ileana Soto 

Click here for a link to Ileana's website

 

Away from Clay - When One Door Closes by Mary Ann Nailos

     In addition to ACN, I am part of another art group called Stretching Art. The group puts out a call for entry once a year. Last year’s theme was “When One Door Closes”. I was a potter for about 20 years and most of my pots were hand built, mostly constructed from slabs. I rented studio space in my friend Richard Hess’ studio. In 2013 he informed me that he was moving to Illinois, so I either had to find another place to do clay, or find a new artistic practice.

     Doing clay at my house was not an option. I decided to go back to my first love – textiles. I started taking classes in traditional quilt making, then surface design, that then lead me to Jane Dunnewold’s Art Cloth Mastery class. 

    There are similarities between slab built pots and quilt making. These pots were made with a template on a flat piece of clay. Quilters cut shapes out of fabric and make quilt blocks. Different firing techniques and glazes differentiate the pots. Quilters use different fabrics and Art Quilters use different surface designs to create their quilts.

I printed textures onto black and colored fabric using Thermofax screens that I designed. Then I cut the pieces from the colored fabrics using the Notan method, fusing them to black fabric. After that I added stamping from various stamps that I made.

This is the finished piece below that I named Away from Clay. As the door to pottery making closed, the door to Art Quilting opened.

 

Excellence in Quilts

 MURANO was just juried into Fiber Art Now's biannual exhibit: Excellence in Quilts.  I'm so pleased!!  I was inspired by a photo I took while in Murano, Venice, Italy, of a gorgeously rusted metal fence.  Irresistible!  The piece has a 3D surface to indicate the rusty, peeling paint.

The image will appear in the Fall edition of the journal and, I hope, tour a bit into 2023.

Working with 3-dimensional elements

 

by Regina Marzlin (reginamarzlin.com)

I belong to an online international art quilt group called "Cloth in Common" (www.clothincommon.com). We are 12 artists from around the world, from New Zealand, Australia, Japan, South Korea, Germany, Netherlands, USA and Canada. Every second month, one of us gives out a prompt or theme, and everyone creates an artwork that responds to the theme. Our overarching theme this year is "Structures", so we had prompts like "Building", "Anatomy", and "Light". The latest prompt was "Cells", which led to some amazing artworks - you can see them on our blog.

I decided to go with red blood cells, as I find the biconcave disk shape appealing and the vibrant red colour is so lively. The finished artwork is titled "In the Blood", it is 25.5" wide and 39.5" high.

 I decided to actually make the individual disks as 3-D shapes to be applied to the surface of the quilt. Approximately 2.4 million red blood cells are produced per second in a human adult! That is a staggering number. I settled for the more manageable number of 44, and even that was a lot of work as it took me about 15 minutes to make one – cutting out, sewing the rounds, stuffing, sewing shut, and sewing the middle indent.

The black-on-white print of the blood vessels was done on a gel plate with acrylic paint. I printed two lengths of cloth to go on each side of the middle blood vessel. 

To bring in a bit more colour I decided to use a red Inktense pencil to outline the blood vessels.

It was fun attaching the blood cells to the quilted surface, I was able to overlap and stagger and really play with the three-dimensional idea of this design.

Title In the Blood
Regina Marzlin
Dimensions: h 39.5″ x w 25.5″
Material: cotton fabrics, acrylic paint, Inktense pencil
Technique: mono-printing, painting, applique, machine quilting