Thanks to everyone who made it out to the opening reception for my show “Cloud Girl Accidentally Eats Rainbow” and a big thank you to the entire Sawtooth School for Visual Art team for believing in me and for all the work they put into helping bring this exhibit to life. I’m grateful.
I was delighted to see people excited to take a paper crane and children using them as shadow puppets with my video projections – and gleefully playing on my fabric boulders. The exhibit features 2 large series of works on paper, which I displayed unframed for the first time. That kind of vulnerability was appropriate for the show, and I was happy to be able to share less precious – and touchable! – work in contrast to these.
What’s next? I’m not sure yet, but we have such a rich history of textiles in NC…. I’m dreaming of more and bigger reclaimed fabric boulders – again made in community – and shown in an unused textile factory… If anyone knows of such a place, please let me know!
The installation of my exhibit Cloud Girl Accidentally Eats Rainbow continued this week at the Sawtooth School of Visual Art. We invited community volunteers to help me make boulders, large bundles of textiles that are compressed and tied together. I started making these a couple of years ago while experimenting with reclaimed fabric at Penland School of Craft, and wanted to include more and bigger ones in this show. They sit heavy on the floor in my sculpture work Boulder field.
I’m particularly pleased with this boulder-making experience because last summer I decided I wanted to make more work collaboratively and with community. The two events that the Sawtooth School held brought in people who were genuinely curious about the process, and who were happy to put in the physical effort needed to tightly bundle all of these materials. It was a real pleasure to make these as a group.
Thank you to all the volunteers who came out to help and to our community partners who generously donated the large quantities of scrap fabric needed to make these!
The opening reception is April 17th 6-8pm in the Davis Gallery at the Sawtooth School for Visual Art.
Jessica Singerman and volunteer Ann Rowe-Davis working on a textile boulderVolunteers Russ Dubois, Rebecca Silberman, and Betsy Messick making textile bouldersArtist Jessica Singerman and volunteers Katie Barber, Toni Bryja, and Nicole Cochran working together to make a textile boulderTensioning and tying down all the fabricAll hands on deck!Artist Jessica Singerman and volunteers Katie Barber, Toni Bryja, and Nicole Cochran working together to make a textile boulderJessica Singerman and her niece Alex Singerman Driggs celebrating Alex’s boulder-making prowess
The installation of my upcoming exhibit Cloud Girl Accidentally Eats Rainbow started this week. The first two days were focused on installing Children of the Clouds, the suspended textile work featuring 200 individually dyed handkerchiefs. You can read more about this project here and here.
If you’re interested in behind the scenes, here are some photos documenting the process. I roughly calculated that I went up and down that ladder 500 times in the 8 hours of work to tie and hang all of the hankies. Thankfully I had two assistants doing all of the thread measuring and tying knots to tiny safety pins.
Installation continues this week and next for the rest of the work in the show.
The opening reception is April 17th 6-8pm in the Davis Gallery at the Sawtooth School for Visual Art.
up in the cloudsalmost done!Artist Assistants Finley Billstone and Lex Piper200 hankies ready to be installed200 hankies waiting for their placemy concept drawing for the installation – the plan for the whole exhibit is on the right
Happy New Year! I just got back from a walk with my kitten Luna in a cat backpack. Yes, I am now that person who walks their cat in the neighborhood.
I’ve been on winter break and I’ve got a few days ’til the start of spring semester in the School of Film at UNCSA. It’s been nice to have the time and mental bandwidth to retool the classes I’m teaching and to work in the studio, where I’ve got several projects going on.
As we speak, I’m soaking River Birch bark (foraged with a friend) to extract some color and dye the last few hankies I kept aside. You may notice an open container of gesso, a sort of acrylic primer to prepare a birch wood panel for a painting. To get the surface ready to paint on, I applied four thin coats of gesso, sanding in between each one to make a bright white, opaque, smooth surface to work on. I’m looking forward to making this painting. It was commissioned at the end of the year by North Carolina Museum of Art (NCMA) Winston-Salem, specifically for the Hanes House.
In the last image, you’ll see a screenshot of an in-progress edit of a video piece I’m working on for my upcoming show in the spring. Some of my students were kind enough to help me out for this project and let me shoot their hands while they made an ink drawing of a landscape in Todd, a small community outside of Boone, NC, that saw a lot of damage during Hurricane Helene.
The previous two images are of ink drawing experiments I’m doing to figure out a series of works hopefully for the spring show. In the last few years I’ve made some drawings and paintings of plastic bags and crumpled up paper, but nothing I really dug into. Now I’m making drawings of plastic bags again, this time imagining a large group of them hanging together in a series as sort of imaginary topographies. We’ll see where it goes.
For the last couple of months, I’ve been dyeing hundreds of handkerchiefs using natural dyes as I work on a project for a show in the spring. So far I have successfully worked with madder, weld, cochineal, pomegranate, myrobalan, cutch, various parts of the oak tree, walnut, and indigo.
I waited to work with indigo till I had some experience under my belt. It’s a trickier dye to work with than others because it’s insoluble in water and has to be reduced to a water-soluble form. To make an indigo vat, you have to follow steps to create the chemical reactions needed for the indigo to convert to a dye rather than a pigment.
To make the indigo vat, you have to create an alkaline environment in the vat (adding lye or soda ash to the water for example), remove the oxygen (adding thiourea dioxide in my case), add the indigo “starter” you made earlier, check the pH, adjust the pH to the correct one for the fiber you’re dyeing, then you can start. You then adjust the vat as needed each work session, adding the necessary ingredients for each chemical change to occur.
Other colors are much easier to work with and just involve steeping dyestuff for hours or days.
What’s been so exciting about working with indigo the last 2 weeks is that I’ve added a whole side of the color spectrum to my handkerchief palette. I’ve been able to overdye reds and yellows to make a range of turquoise, greens, violets, and lavenders. If you look at the images below, you’ll notice that some of the handkerchiefs are much darker than others. This involves dipping the hankies multiple times in the indigo, anywhere from 5 seconds to 5 minutes at a time. And the magic of indigo is that when you take fabric out of the vat, it comes out yellow or green and only turns blue in contact with air. It oxidizes over the course of the next 30 minutes to reach its peak blueness. You can then dip it in the vat again to make it darker and bluer.
Giving fabric time to soak in the indigo vat.A range of colors using indigo alone and overdyed on myrobalan and weld.A range of colors using indigo overdyed on pomegranate and weld.A range of colors using indigo overdyed on cochineal and matter.
