My work is featured in this month’s issue of Patchwork Professional, a beautiful publication from Germany. The small image left center is mine, a detail of Reflections (full image below). I wonder if my high-school German will be adequate to the task of reading the articles? Hmm, probably not.

The gorgeous quilt on the right is Seaside Town by Alicia Merrett, part of her Mapping and Recording series in which she interprets landscape from a bird’s eye view. Alicia says, “I explore colour from a variety of sources – the urban and natural environment, mapping, literature, music, the world around us – and reflect it in the textiles that are my passion.” Visit her web site for more luscious color and line work.

Reflections, 38 x 92 (diptych), ©2008 Deidre Adams (click image for larger view)

Last Friday, the Longmont Museum in Longmont, Colorado, hosted a lovely reception for America Celebrates. The exhibition was beautifully designed, and the space is first-class. A good number of the artists were in attendance, several traveling from out of town just for this event. I was surprised at how large the opening night crowd was. Judith Trager deserves high praise for her skill in curating and producing this exhibition. Many thanks to her for an outstanding show!

Opening reception at the Longmont Museum gets a strong turnout

Judith Trager with Cinco de Mayo

Patty and Wes Hawkins with Patty’s The Red Truck: Fiftieth Anniversary

Linda Faires with Vaishaka Day (Festival of the Buddha)

Terise Harrington with The Run for the Roses

Elizabeth Davison with America Celebrates our Communities

Jamie Bolane with All Saints’ Day

Carol Watkins with Celebrating the Vernal Equinox

Anne Theobald with America Celebrates Tennis

Carol Waugh with Celebrate Our Differences

Lea McComas with Wrapped In Tradition

Gay Lasher with Diwali: The Hindu Festival of Lights

Carol Waugh, Patty Hawkins, Deidre Adams, Vicki Carlson

The Longmont Museum is offering a catalog of the exhibition for $10. The exhibition runs through March 13, 2011.

I’ve just finished a new piece in my Façade series. (I’ve posted a couple of others here and here.) This piece was started well over a year ago, but it took me a long time to finish it. Sometimes this happens; I get stuck. I don’t try to force it, I just work on a particular piece until I realize I’m not getting anywhere with it and then I put it away. I bring it out later after I haven’t seen it for awhile, and by then I can see it with fresh eyes and I’m ready to try some new things.

Façade VIII, detail

It took me a while to realize that I am not a linear thinker. I used to try to work on one piece from start to finish, but I found it frustrating and self-defeating. Once I discovered the idea of working on multiple things concurrently, my productivity increased exponentially. When I get stuck on one thing, I just move to the next. I have many textile pieces and paintings all in various stages of completion at any given time, and with things always out on the wall or on the table, I can take advantage of any tiny sliver of time to get a bit of work in. It’s especially handy since a lot of my work involves waiting for paint to dry before I can go further on something. It also seems to suit the way my brain works, which admittedly has changed in the last several years. I blame the Internet.

Façade VIII will be shown in CELEBRATE!, an invitational exhibition curated by Linda Colsh for the National Quilt Museum’s 20th Anniversary next year, along with Façade II.

Façade II, 40 x 68 inches, ©2006

My first Façade piece was made in 2006. Since then, my thinking about the series has been refined somewhat, and I decided that my artist statement about this work needed to be updated. I view all of my statements as works in progress. Here’s my latest:

In this series, I explore ideas of time and transformation, inspired by the structural elements and seductive surfaces of old buildings and walls. An old wall tells a story, like a canvas upon which both nature and human beings play and leave their marks. Over the course of many years, layers of paint and graffiti are applied, only to be eroded by sun, rain, and wind. The result is a surface rich with texture and color.

I use the textile medium of fabric and stitch to impart a unique texture, both visual and literal, to my work. I want the work to carry a physical reminder of the artist’s presence, a visual diary of sorts. Patterning and design from the base fabrics interact with the stitching and my personal system of painting and mark-making to create a richly layered surface that captures the essence of my original inspiration.

Entangled II, 24 x 24 inches, ©2009 Deidre Adams

Now that school is just about over, I thought I would start posting some of the work that I’ve been doing this semester. Besides the Art Theory & Criticism class, I had two studio classes, Painting V and Printmaking II: Lithography. I’ll start with Painting.

Painting V is the last level of painting that Metro offers, and it is the time when students are expected to be hard at work developing their body of work for the all-important thesis/portfolio show. At this time, we’re expected to be pretty much self-driven, choosing what we want to work on, developing our own proposals, and being given little direction other than feedback on the proposal and the work itself, both in progress and finished. It was a stacked class, meaning that the instructor had another class to deal with simultaneously and so was stretched pretty thin trying to get around to everybody. (Not surprising with budget cuts across the board, but who knows how much worse it will get before it gets better!)

As usual, I struggled to figure out what I wanted to go with for my concept. It’s not that I don’t have any ideas, it’s just the opposite. I have too many, and I feel such affection for each of them, it’s hard to settle on a single one. I went through a couple of false starts before I finally settled on this one idea. It’s something that’s been rolling around in my mind for a long time, but I never could figure out exactly what I wanted to do with it. Part of the problem is that as a highly introverted individual, I’ve always shied away from making work that is too personal, choosing for the most part to concentrate on formal elements and/or safe choices that won’t reveal too much of myself to the world. When my mother died four years ago, someone close to me suggested to me that I should do a piece about it, to allow me to work out my feelings. No, I said, I could never do that. I wasn’t even fully capable of confronting those feelings directly; it was better to keep it all at a safe distance.

Without saying a whole lot more about it, the important thing to convey is that about 4-5 years before she died, my mother began to exhibit signs that something wasn’t quite right in her mind. She was forgetting things, losing things, saying things that made no sense, sometimes displaying irrational fears about things that no one else could see. By the time she died, she didn’t know who I was any longer, but I think from some of the things she said, she might have been confusing me with her older sister.

While I was thinking over ideas for my concept, mulling thoughts about patterns and textures in nature and science, my dad had an accident and went into the hospital. I went down to Albuquerque to see him and deal with anything that needed my assistance. While there, I stayed in my parent’s house, which always makes me think a lot about my mother. I also think about how the things I experienced growing up might have looked from her perspective, how differently those same incidents and conversations would have appeared through her eyes. I think about what she might have been like as a child and a young woman, what kind of hopes and dreams she may have had that never materialized as she continued down the path she ended up choosing.

When I got back home, something I saw, I don’t even know what now, sparked the idea of trying to tie together her experiences with the physical changes that occur in the brain of a person with Alzheimer’s disease. I did a lot of research so I could understand the science of it. Neurons, the nerve cells which transmit brain activity, die when the proteins which are normally broken down and eliminated by the body instead become reformed into hard, insoluble plaques. Microtubules, the brain’s cellular transport system, break down abnormally and the proteins released reform into insoluble twisted fibers called tangles. As these cells die, the brain shrinks. Ventricles, the chambers containing cerebrospinal fluid, become enlarged.

Having seen the outward manifestations of these changes, I visualize the thoughts inside the person’s head becoming trapped: twisted, tangled, and cut off from their normal pathways by these cells and obstructing formations. An idea tries to make its way to a familiar connecting point, but it’s either stopped completely or diverted to a place it’s not supposed to go.

I wanted to use fibers and thread to express my concept, both because I love using them and because these materials seemed like a natural fit to express the concept of entanglement. As more and more thread is added, the surface becomes at once more complex and more unified. The idea is not a literal representation of brain cells, but rather a depiction of how the strangulation of the sending and receiving cells means they can no longer function as they should.

Entangled I, 24 x 24 inches, ©2009 Deidre Adams

These originally started out as strictly fiber works, but the shapes were very wonky and I couldn’t figure out how I would hang them. I also knew I would need several more pieces in the series, especially since these two were so different. I would need to make more pieces with bridging elements to make everything work together as a single exhibit. So I came up with the idea of making a grid of 24-inch squares, and to that end I ended up stitching these pieces to stretched canvas.

I also started a third piece, but since these are extremely time-consuming, I didn’t get this one to a satisfactory state before the due date. I’m not even sure if I want to keep going with it. For now, it’s a UFO (unfinished object).

Entangled III, 24 x 24 inches, ©2009 Deidre Adams

Wall Sketch #1, photo transfer and watercolor on artist-made paper. 9×9 inches (matted to 15×15). ©2009 Deidre Adams.

I have a couple more France posts I want to do, but I’m back in school now, already behind, and I’ve had two more short road trips since my last post. I can’t believe how fast time is screaming by.

But I wanted to post these images while the topic is still fresh. Translations Gallery is going to be featuring some smaller works by their gallery artists, so I brought these in last week. These are mixed-media works on paper, matted and backed, and inserted into Clearbags. I will also have some full-size watercolors to post as soon as I get them to the gallery.

Landmarks #1, photo transfer and watercolor on paper. 8×10 inches (matted to 11×14). ©2009 Deidre Adams.

Landmarks #2, photo transfer and watercolor on paper. 9×9 inches (matted to 15×15). ©2009 Deidre Adams.

Landmarks #3, photo transfer and watercolor on paper. 8×10 inches (matted to 11×14). ©2009 Deidre Adams.

Wall Sketch #2, photo transfer, clear gesso, watercolor, and gouache on paper. 7×7 inches (matted to 13×13). ©2009 Deidre Adams.

Wall Sketch #3, photo transfer, acrylic gel medium, and watercolor on artist-made paper. 8×10 inches (matted to 11×14). ©2009 Deidre Adams.

Iterations #2, 30 x 66 inches, ©2009 Deidre Adams

I finished this piece about a month ago, just before I left for Ohio (see images of the work in progress here and here). The commission was to make a copy of a work that had sold previously. The difference was that I needed to make the orange more red to coordinate with a swatch of fabric from some furniture that will be in the lobby area where the work will be hung. The swatch also has a kind of shiny copper look to it, so I put some metallic copper paint into the new one as well. I’m posting the original here again because it’s fun to see the comparison.

Iterations #1: Aquamarine, 30 x 66 inches, ©2006 Deidre Adams

While I was working on the color in the new piece, I was looking at an image of the old one on my computer screen in the studio and trying to make judgments based on that, but now that I see the photos together, I’m really surprised at how different the second one turned out. I knew the spaces between the stones were bigger and I had consciously decided that I wanted the negative spaces to be darker in this one, but the colors are more different than I expected, with a lot more contrast. I guess for me, making an exact copy turned out to be more difficult than I would have thought.

I delivered the piece just before I left town, and Judy and Kate from Translations both said they liked it better than the original, so that set my mind at ease. I hope the Ritz-Carlton likes it too.

Now, for another twist on this story. Translations moved into a new gallery space in the heart of Denver’s LoDo area last month. It’s a beautiful new space and the location offers much greater visibility and traffic potential than their old one. (They got a good write up in the Denver Post, which I meant to talk about here on my blog, but never got a response from the Post as to whether I could have permission to repost the photo, so I forgot about it.) A new customer came into the gallery and saw the work which was going to the Ritz-Carlton, which includes this piece:

Horizon IV, 24 x 24, ©2006 Deidre Adams

She loved this one, and so now I have another commission to recreate an existing piece — except she doesn’t like yellow too much and wants me to make it more red.

Is it true that something becomes more desirable when it’s unobtainable? (Like that guy I broke up with once in my younger years but then wanted him back as soon as I found out he had a new girlfriend and was going to take her to the Bob Seger concert? Wow, dating myself here!)

Today I took the dust cover off of my beloved Juki DDL-8700-7 for the first time in months. I haven’t done any sewing since the beginning of the semester back in January. I’ve been very busy with my studio classes in printmaking, watermedia, and painting, as well as a class for my general studies science requirement called Ecology for Non-Majors and a multi-cultural requirement class called Art & Cultural Heritage. In addition to this, I have several freelance design projects going on, but I really find it boring when people go on ad nauseum about how busy they are, so enough said about that.

The studio work has good and bad points. While it does push me to think in new directions and takes me out of my established patterns, it also distracts me from pursuing my own body of work. My mind is full of lots of ideas and concepts for things I want to do, none of them having anything to do with fabric. I’ve been really enjoying the painting and mixed media work I’ve been doing this semester, both in watermedia on paper and acrylic on canvas. So much so that I’ve wondered if I even want to go back to doing my textile work in the near term.

Well, something did come up that kind of forced the issue. Thanks to the very hard work of Kate and Judy at Translations Gallery, I have a commission! That’s the good news. Bad news: it’s due May 18, just a few short weeks away. The client wants another version of a piece I’ve already done, sold to EnCana Corp. last year, but now with a slight variation of the color on the bottom strip.

Iterations #1: Aquamarine, 30 x 66 inches, © 2006 Deidre Adams

So last night I got started on the prep work of cutting and ironing the fabric and basting the pieces together with the batting. Then this morning, I got down to the serious business of the quilting. Well, just a few minutes into it and I quickly remembered why I love the textile medium. The magic is still there. This medium has a tactile hands-on aspect that simply is not available in the other media I’ve been working in. I love the feeling of the fabric in my hands, the meditative back-and-forth rhythm of the stitching process, and the zone I get into when I’m working this way. The finished product has a dimension and depth that a painting lacks.

When I made this piece the first time, I was working with my Bernina Artista 180. At that time, I thought it was a pretty good machine, and it is, but I was feeling dissatisfied with it because of the restrictions of the small area of the center open space (I’m too lazy to look up the technical term for this, so if anyone knows offhand, please chime in) and also because I felt like it was too slow — I pretty much had it floored all the time and it still felt like it took forever to quilt something. It has a lot of fancy stitches and an embroidery attachment, which I have used exactly once. While it is a very fancy machine and cost a lot of money, it just was not built to do what I need it to do, which is take a huge pounding putting a gazillion stitches into some rather large pieces.

My first try at remedying the situation was the Grand Quilter from Pfaff. The store I went to is used to selling this machine with a frame and setup stuff that basically turns it into a long-arm quilting machine. I didn’t want all that stuff, I only wanted the machine, so they really weren’t equipped to deal with my questions. I bought it anyway and took the thing home, but within 30 minutes of using it, I knew I wasn’t going to be happy with it. It was very loud and clunky and I returned it the next day.

The next step was to go to industrial. In Denver, that means Ralph’s Industrial Sewing Machine Company. This was a whole new realm for me. Turns out there is an amazing variety of industrial machines out there, including machines built to quilt mattresses, so they also had a hard time understanding what I needed. We went through quilt a few different models, with me testing each one using a sample quilt I had brought with me. I finally settled on this Juki machine because it sews 5,500 stitches per minute, has a large opening and an automatic thread cutter, and it counts down how much thread is left on the bobbin. Cool! It’s heavy and solid and sits in its own table. It is also amazingly smooth and quiet, and it has its own oil pan so I don’t have to oil it. Yay! Another bonus: everything in the industrial machine world, like thread and needles, is SO much cheaper than in the commercial home sewing world.

It was a bit traumatic getting the machine to work in the beginning. Because it was designed for straight-stitch garment sewing and I was doing free-motion quilting, which means yanking the piece in all different directions, I had a lot of thread breakage issues at first. Luckily, the technicians at Ralph’s are very professional, and the guy who came out on three different occasions finally hit on the right combination of presser foot, throat plate, bobbin case, needle, and customized hook assembly so that now it’s smooth sailing, full steam ahead. I can even use rayon thread with very little problem.

I’ve decide that this time, I’m going to work this piece in three separate sections and put them together after the quilting process, because it’s very difficult to keep the lines between the sections straight when each has different amounts of quilting from the others. This time, I finished the quilting on the first section of the piece in just a couple of hours — a huge improvement on the last time.

Reflections, 38 x 92, ©2008 Deidre Adams

UPDATE – 2:15 pm
Just found out from gallery manager they are NOT planning to be open tonight. I apologize if anyone is inconvenienced by this!

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As today is the first Friday in December, this means tonight there will be another opportunity to peruse the galleries in Denver’s ArtDistrict on Santa Fe, including Translations Gallery, where my solo show continues through January 2. Above is one of my latest works which is on exhibit at the gallery. This is the end result of the piece that you can see me working on in the video on the gallery’s home page.

Also, a reminder to anyone in the Denver metro area that the Speaking in Cloth: 6 Quilters, 6 Voices exhibition, featuring the work of Ann Johnston, Jeannette DeNicolis Meyer, Cynthia Corbin, Nancy Erickson, Quinn Zander Corum, and Trisha Hassler, is currently showing at the Rocky Mountain Quilt Museum in Golden, through Jan. 31, 2009.

Over the last several weeks, we’ve been making sheets of paper from cotton and abaca fibers which were obtained as “half stuff” (which means the fibers have been partially processed and sold as compressed dried sheets that the artist then needs to process further into usable pulp), as well as raw plant materials and recycled papers.

Here’s a selection of sheet samples:

From left to right, these are abaca, recycled bond paper printed with black inkjet ink (which turned blue when soaked), cattail mixed with abaca, daylily with abaca, green iris with abaca, kozo with bits of recycled cardboard, dried iris, and kozo papers.

There are several ways to process fiber. The preferred method is to own your own Hollander beater, a specialized machine made just for this purpose. Failing that, an ordinary household blender could be used, which works especially well with recycled paper. Plant fibers must first be cooked, and can then be processed either in a Hollander or blender, or by hand beating with some kind of mallet or a baseball bat — marvelous for releasing tension and long-suppressed aggressions.

Prepared fibers are then suspended in a vat of water, where they can then be made into paper with the use of a mold and deckle — two same-sized frames, one with a screen, which are dipped into the pulp to form the sheet.

Over the course of the last few weeks, I’ve made two sizes of my own mold and deckle sets, plus acquired most of what I need for my own papermaking studio, which currently consists of outside on my deck. I don’t know how much paper work I’ll continue to do, but I do have some ideas about combining paper and textile processes for something new in the future.

I’ve been trying to develop ideas for my final project in the class. I want to use recycled paper, because the idea of making something out of another used-up thing has a huge appeal for me. I took a bunch of old unsuccessful watercolor paintings and turned these into a pulp by soaking several hours and then processing with the blender. Here’s a sheet made from this:

The chunky look of it is due to the fact that the original paper consisted of different compositions, including some good 100% cotton and some crappy student-grade stuff. The cotton breaks down better than cheap stuff, which stays chunky. The blue comes from the old placemat I pressed the wet sheet with. This is also how I got the ribbed texture.

I also have a huge stack of old maps which were rescued from a recycle bin where my husband works, and I would love to use these somehow. I need to think up some kind of a concept for them which makes sense as a finished piece, though, and that’s the stumbling block. Better get going on some brainstorming in the sketchbook.

Horizon I, 12 x 12 inches, ©2005 Deidre Adams

This piece is like an old friend to me. I recently had a chance to see it again after it came back to me from the Fine Focus 2006 traveling exhibition, before I shipped it on to the buyer. When I first made it back in 2005, my only goal was challenging myself to work within the very small format required by Fine Focus. Although at that time I had no idea that it would turn into an ongoing series, I did make two others at the same time. That may have been what helped me to see that this was an idea worth pursuing through more variations.

Here’s a photo of all three of them together. I thought they made a nice triptych, although after the first one sold, that was the end of that. I still have Horizons II & III.

Horizon I, II, and III; 12 x 12 inches (ea.), ©Deidre Adams

The challenge of making work this small within the fiber medium is that because of its size, weight, and physical presence, it’s hard to avoid the association with other familiar things made of fabric: placemats and potholders. Small paintings don’t have this problem – they’re still paintings.

Lots of artists have discovered that mounting these smaller pieces can solve the potholder problem. There are a myriad of ways of doing this, including matting and framing, attaching to a larger fabric-covered mounting, or attaching to a canvas. The latter is my preferred method. I use a stretched canvas, attach the piece by hand-stitching it (I’m afraid of glues or other adhesives), and then paint the edges in a coordinating color. Here’s an image showing it from the front and side:

I think this gives it enough presence to make it look like a work of art and not a household object.