A Box of Good Fortune - Barbara Schneider

Last year I signed up for the Fiber Arts Take Two online course with Sally Tyrie called Visual Narratives. This was the second FATT course that I took. The course description reads:

Your training will begin with researching and examining areas of interest, before revealing ways of reimagining mark-making and collage from Sally’s considered and painterly approach. Use various print techniques without a press, including gelli plate, photo litho and collograph printing whilst learning to abstract visual narratives from any source of inspiration to create an ambitious body of work.

I was intrigued and looking, as always, for a way to expand my mark making.  She taught many different approaches and we were encouraged to make lots of samples.  I was familiar with some techniques, learned some new things, and discarded a lot of them as not being something I wanted to explore further. One of the best things about the course is that FATT provides and opportunity to submit a piece of work done during the class and then they create an online catalog (which you can also get in print through Blurb).

I had been working quite a bit on printing and copying (with my Epson printer) on pages from a vintage Japanese account book.  I built up layers of imagery on the page and pushed my printer to do things it was not meant to do.  I thought creating some small themed books (Japanese style) would be a way to create my catalog piece. But I felt like something was missing to bring the project together.

While out one day I saw an old box at a thrift store. It may have been an old painters box but any inserts were missing and it had no paint marks. I thought the box might make a great container for all of my book samples. Now all I had to do was clean it up, decide how to use the interior space, create it, finish the books, make a cover!  Step by step I worked my way through. It was really great to work on something totally different. I had done quite a bit of bookmaking and box making loooooong ago and this project brought me back to doing that kind of work again and how I like the precision of it and the play of images across pages.

 

I created a Kanji signature for my name to use on the back of the box.

 

This is the  statement that is inside of the box explaining the process, naming and techniques.

Daifuku-cho

A Box of Good Fortune

 

I was inspired to make this artwork by two disparate things- finding an old

artist’s box and a Japanese ledger titled Daifuku-cho (Good Fortune),

that I have long wanted to use in my work. Although a mundane object in Edo Japan,

the calligraphy and paper in the ledger are beautiful.  Ledgers were used to

record a merchant’s debts and payments. The box and ledger are the elements I

used to build a collection of samplers that explore the various techniques from

the Visual Narratives course.

 I used pages from the old ledger as the base to explore printing, overprinting,

painting and collaging with a variety of imagery. The samplers developed in

different directions under these themes.

Meditation

Contemplation

Introspection     

Rumination 

                        

The box was stained, and refitted with section dividers to hold the samplers.

 

I am now moving on to the other FATT workshop that I signed up for last year which is with Claire Benn using pigments and soy.  And then, someday, I will get to the 3rd one which is Sensing Place with Debbie Lyddon.  For these two I have watched all the video lessons and even if I never make a particular project I have learned something new, had time to think about it in relationship to my own work and know that I can go back to it at any time to review and try again. They fulfill my need to learn but at the same time to focus on my own work.