1970s weavings

these scans are from the book "weaving off-loom," first published in 1973. yes, my taste level is questionable, but i loved it! i think that macrame has the potential of being reinvented as an elegant, interesting medium.

i'm glad the photos in the book are black and white... i imagine the color schemes would have been quite jarring.

the one on the left is 6 feet long!

this is a room divider... amazing!

i hope some crafter bought these illustrations to life at some point...

magical

this whole page is great... a woven lampshade with beads! a woven plant holder with gourd! a contemplation tunnel!

happy thanksgiving!

blue & white

i'm realizing that most of my posts aren't going to be that insightful- more along the lines of "i think this is pretty"... this post was inspired by a tiny piece of blue and white pottery that i found on a hike...

valerie hammond

sorry- i wish i remembered the name of this artist!

kiki smith (not that into her work but i love this piece)

WIP/studio view

i've been busy, busy, busy! some of it art, some of it decoration...

lapidary abstractions

i first read about hilary harnischfeger's work in a review without a photo in the new yorker. i loved the description so much and it was exciting to find images of the work online after imagining what they looked like... i would really love to see them in person! they are an interesting combination of painting and sculpture, and the palette is lovely.

"When Robert Smithson wrote his essay “The Crystal Land,” in 1966, he might have been cataloguing the qualities of Harnischfeger’s irresistible wall reliefs: “Fragmentation, corrosion, decomposition, disintegration, rock creep debris, slides, mud flow, avalanche were everywhere in evidence.” Lapidary abstractions roughly the size and shape of Byzantine icons—and the colors of twilight and dawn—are fashioned from paper, plaster, and ink and embedded with minerals (pyrite, green calcite, turquoise, rose quartz). Their intricate, stratified surfaces look less like handmade objects than like chimerical core samples—prized possessions in a twenty-first-century Wunderkammer."

-The New Yorker, June 2009

"Astrid," 2009, paper, plaster, ink, glass, and chalcedony, 16 1/2" x 13"

"Untitled," 2009, turquoise, paper, ink, plaster, 13" x 10" x 2 1/2"

"Formspiel," 2010, plaster, ink, paper, crushed glass, 20 1/2" x 22" x 4"

"Portrait," 2010, paper, plaster, ink, chalcedony, smithsonite, crushed glass, 16 1/2" x 18 1/2" x 4"

"Patternist 3," 2010, paper, plaster, ink, apophyllite, mica, crushed glass, 26 1/2 x 32 1/2 x 4"

detail: "Patternist 3"

more images: http://www.racheluffnergallery.com/artists/hilary-harnischfeger

ken price

snail cup, 1968

three leg cup, 1967

pamel (part camel), 1960

"Prodding the invisible barrier between functional art and fine art inherent in ceramics, he then turned to making mugs and cups off and on until the early 1990s. They often have absurdist handles in the shape of animals. (“That was when I thought, my God, this guy is terrific,” the artist Vija Celmins said of initially seeing the mugs.) When an animal’s shape proved too fragile to function as a handle — as with hermit crabs — Mr. Price simply made drawings of hypothetical mugs."

- Nick Stillman

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/arts/design/07price.html

moss

Maybe the idea of the world as flat isn't a tribal memory

or an archetypal memory, but something far older - a

fox memory, a worm memory, a moss memory.

Memory of leaping or crawling or shrugging rootlet by

rootlet forward, across the flatness of everything.

To perceive of the earth as round needed something else

- standing up! - that hadn't yet happened.

What a wild family! Fox and giraffe and wart hog, of

course. But these also: bodies like tiny strings, bodies like

blades and blossoms! Cord grass, Christmas fern, soldier

moss! And here comes grasshopper, all toes and knees

and eyes, over the little mountains of dust.

When I see the black cricket in the woodpile, in autumn,

I don't frighten her. And when I see the moss grazing

upon the rock, I touch her tenderly,

sweet cousin.

-mary oliver

anne percoco

here are some images from a project by my friend anne... so beautiful...

"For the 2010 Dumbo Arts Festival, I created a functional sleeping bag and pillow sewn out of cloth leaves cut from botanical-print fabrics. These leaves vary in material, color, graphic style, and texture. From a distance, the sleeping bag appears to be a messy, beautiful pile of leaves.

During the festival, I invited people to nap in the sleeping bag in the Brooklyn Bridge Park. In this way, participants activated the sculpture. They had the opportunity to rest, camouflaged, in the midst of the festival's activity."

-Anne Percoco

http://www.annepercoco.com/canopy.html

trying to turn clay into lace...

the tile is just a support during firing- hopefully it will survive in some form!

tabletop arrangements

pedestals are tricky to work with, aren't they? do they disappear or do they just say "art" too emphatically? so, i'm thinking about ways to use tables (and shelves) to display sculpture...

i'm also thinking about what happens when you group smaller individual sculptures together and they form a dialogue between one another...

ree morton

sam windett

eva hesse

francis upritchard

margaret pezalla-granlund

robert filliou

olafur eliasson

hermann glockner

fantastical creatures

i've always loved depictions of strange creatures like these:

images above from http://bibliodyssey.blogspot.com/

perhaps because i grew up looking at artwork like this?

(more photos here)

these were painted in the stairway of my grandma's house by my mom and aunt. it's amazing how deeply you can be effected by artwork that you see as a child. these murals will always be such a integral part of my aesthetic- even though my grandma's house is now gone...