Month: March 2016

CARDED! at Hot Art Wet City

I’m super excited to have a piece in this show, presented by Hot Art Wet City on Saturday April 2nd, 7pm to 11pm.

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The creators of Hot One Inch Action present CARDED! a one-night only show of art reproduced on trading cards. The work of fifty artists is presented on trading cards and made available for art lovers to collect and trade. These 2.5″ x 3.5″ cards are displayed on the gallery wall and the audience is offered the opportunity to buy random cards in mixed packs of five for $5. If you purchase a pack that doesn’t have your desired card, get into some fast paced trading action with the people around you. How bad do you want that card!?

Artists in this show: Andrea Hooge, Andrew Ferneyhough, Aynsley King, Bryce Aspinall, Candy Hsu, Carelle Dunn, Chiara Ferrari, Chris Carr, Darren Dinh, Doug Savage, Erika Medina, Flavia, Gabriel Koenig, Gabrielle Ng, Gordana Ristic, Hailey Sato, Haley Smith, Hazel Cheng, Heather Gilbraith, Hryanskim, Ilya Viryachev, Jason Fielding, Jenn Brisson, Jennifer Chernecki, John Shigeta, Joy, Julia Iredale, Karyn Wong, Kathryn Mussallem, Kathy Moyou, Ken Rolston, Kim Nipp, Kimberly Parker, Kristian Adam, Kristina Kolosova, Mandy Lau, Marina Leclair, Megan Majewski, Michael King, Nada Hayek, Oliver Hine, Phresha, Quinn Lincoln, Rachael Ashe, Sean Moxley, Serena Inman, Shary Contrary , Vincent Truitner, William Weird and Yvette Tang.

Scenes From My First Braided Rug Workshop

I was very close to having to cancel this workshop on the weekend, because in the days leading up to it I came down with laryngitis. My voice came back by Friday afternoon, so I decided to go ahead with it.

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The workshop was held at Studio 126 in Chinatown, and I had a small group of people in attendance which was the perfect size for the space. This is the first time I taught people how to make t-shirt yarn and braided rugs, so I wasn’t entirely sure how things would go, or how much space each person would need.

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We spent the first hour and a half making t-shirt yarn. I introducing them to the joys of cutting fabric with a rotary cutter, which makes it so much easier. Everyone made a few balls of yarn before we switched over to getting started on braiding rugs.

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One participant decided to include an upcycled pillow case in her rug, which didn’t seem to work as well as t-shirt fabric because it is less stretchy. I’d been thinking about testing out other types of fabric, but I think stretchy fabrics probably work best.

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The final photo is where everyone left off by the end of class. It’s a good start, and I hope each participant will eventually share their rug with me when they are finished.

A Crowd of Succulents

The thing I like most about making multiples of the same type of paper object is how they look when grouped together. I made more green succulents this week to balance out the red and orange.

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Even though these are fairly small they are beginning to overrun the studio…

An Update on Spring Blooms

This spring season has been as wet as last year was dry. It’s been a downer on my mood in the short term, but I hope it ensures we’re safe from a long dry summer.

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Delicate white magnolias

Tiny pink blossoms

The flowering trees keep doing their thing, rain or shine. I admire them for that. As always, they are the best thing about spring in Vancouver.

Flying Over Four Feet of Tyvek

On Wednesday I managed to make it past the four foot mark with the tyvek piece. To document this progress I took a video with my phone and shared it on Instagram. It’s impossible to fit it into the frame of one photo, so this works rather well.

I think of this as a “fly over” video, similar to filming while flying over the earth in a plane.

Your task is to be dogged and persistent

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I had to share the latest horoscope for Leo from Free Will Astrology, because it so strongly relates to many of the projects I’m working on these days.

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LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): The marathon is a long-distance footrace with an official length of over 26 miles. Adults who are physically fit and well-trained can finish the course in five hours. But I want to call your attention to a much longer running event: the Self-Transcendence 3100-Mile Race. It begins every June in Queens, a borough of New York, and lasts until August. Those who participate do 3,100 miles’ worth of laps around a single city block, or about 100 laps per day. I think that this is an apt metaphor for the work you now have ahead of you. You must cover a lot of ground as you accomplish a big project, but without traveling far and wide. Your task is to be dogged and persistent as you do a little at a time, never risking exhaustion, always pacing yourself.

There are marathons, and then there are MARATHONS.

Succulent Growth

How many different titles can I come up with to include the word succulent, is something I wonder every time I write a new blog post about the project. I think I made ten more last week, as I switched between working on the growing cluster of paper plants and the giant piece of tyvek I am cutting.

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They have started taking over the top of my paper drawer because there are twenty-five of them now. I love how they look, with all that repeating shape, texture, and delicious colour.

In The Pink For Spring

The cherry trees have begun their magical work of blanketing the city in pink and white blossoms. It’s my favourite time of year, and I end up photographing flowers on a daily basis because they are incredibly beautiful.

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As with last year, there are trees coming into bloom earlier in the season than in years past, like the magnolia and Flowering Quince above. It has me wondering if this is the new normal, and what are the long term implications.

Work In Progress: Returning to a Neglected Tyvek Project

Looking through old blog posts, I was happy to realize it hasn’t yet been a year since I first started working on my second installation piece cut from tyvek. I set it aside in May shortly after I started my artist residency at The Leeway Studio, and have worked on it very little since then.

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But I’m back at it with the goal of trying to finish it in the spring, maybe even the end of March. The piece is hand cut from a roll of tyvek that is roughly seven feet long and eighteen inches wide. The design is composed of a series of circles intricately cut with my favourite freehand pattern of crescent shapes (I really should come up with a name for it…)

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I was surprised to realize at the end of last week that I’ve cut close to three feet of the piece already. I felt like I’d barely made much progress on it, but I’m close to halfway.

This is the second of three installation pieces from tyvek I eventually plan to create. You can view the first one here.