Animated gif of the takedown of Polytopia from the upArt 2011 installation.
It took months to make, a week to assemble, 4 hours to hoist up, 2 hours to nail in place, and only 1 hour to take down. It was kind of sad!
This project has a lot of life of its own, in a way, and ripping out the staples felt like disecting some creature. I kept whispering to it that it shouldn’t worry, and that I hoped it didn’t hurt too much. A surprisingly strong and strange reaction to the task at hand, and no doubt the thick layer of fatigue that filtered my reality at that point in the exhibition had lots to do with it.
Marc Ngui takes down the Polytopia component of The Reef installation. There was a whole lot of ladder action with this project...
Polytopia is an ongoing textile art project and it formed the background component for the Reef installation that happened 27 – 30 October 2001 as part of the Gladstone Hotel’s upART art fair in Toronto, Canada.
The exhibit was wonderfully photographable, and as a result we have hundreds of images to edit of the installation and exhibition, and those are coming, too.
Here are some photos of arrangements of sewn textile pyramids laid out on my studio floor to test composition before being sewn up into a large three dimentional quilt called Polytopia.
This Geom was made to be part of a larger installation of textile art and paper sculptures called The Reef, on display 27 to 30 October 2011 at the Gladstone Hotel in Toronto for the annual upART Contemporary Art Fair.
The nomadic lifestyle is coming to a close. After 5 years of uprootedness, Marc and I will be moving to a new home for 1 February 2011. We have signed a year lease on a sprawling apartment in Cambridge, Ontario. The apartment is a portion of a 120 year old stone mansion and will give us the much needed grounding and the sheer volume and area of space needed for larger, more ambitious works of art.
In the meantime, for the month of January 2011 we are house sitting in our old university town of Waterloo, Ontario. It’s in the snow belt, oh yes, it’s very peaceful and quiet.
I have been balming my impatient pangs of biding time in a transition space by sewing up and embroidering one Happy Sleepy after another.
I just love these knit bolster pillow covers by Hong Kong based Chic sin Design. Originally I found the items in their Etsy shop.
The pillows are in the shape and size of tree logs “chewed by beavers”, and the tree bark and other texture graphics are knitted into the textile in several colours, rather than printed on the surface.
Happy Sleepy Tumble and Surf patch based on a drawing by Marc Ngui.
Marc had this patch made in Arambol, Goa, India, back in January 2009. It’s about 6 inches wide, and it is machine embroidered. I sewed it onto one of our bags while we were travelling, to repair where it was torn.
The workmanship on this patch is really rough and completely omits some of the details that were in the drawing. I’ve been spending quite a bit of time getting my hand embroidery skills off the ground, and I look forward to remaking this patch by hand.
The latest addition to the shop is Happy Sleepy Suavey, made from
orange cotton velvet with brown suede “sunglasses” applique. When turned upside down, the sunglasses look like a mustache.
There’s been a flurry of real in the world making activity all fall around here. I delight in having the laptop set up right beside the sewing machine set up right beside the cutting table, opposite the shelves of materials and tools. I glee up every time I pull a suitcase from under a table to rummage in my collection of fabrics, which is what the suitcases hold these days instead of clothes, books and other travel essentials. In short, I’m loving my studio space.
Flurry of cutting and piecing on the work table. My favourite shears were recently profesionally resharpened and now glide through multiple fabric layers like a heated knife through butter. Whoosh-chuk!
Happy Sleepy Star Dipped stuffed animal art toy for sale on Etsy
Currently the shop features art toys in the signature Happy Sleepy shape of the reversible abstract animal that looks like he is either beaming happy or fast asleep, depending which way you hold him up. There is no top or down with the Happy Sleepies.
Threespine stickleback pretending to be barracuda.
These guys were commisioned by fellow Flickerite Frenquency to commemorate the end of his PhD studies of this fish species. He studied the evolutionary loss of pelvic spines and was able to switch the relevant genes back on, producing fish with one or both perlvic spines. The thesis title was “The Genomic Basis of Parallel Evolution in Three-spined Sticklebacks”.
