My latest creation! The silk is from saris that I found several years ago in Calcutta, deconstructed, and then dyed with Indigo and Persimmon natural dyes. The Magnolia leaves are painted with fabric paint.
On display at Circle Craft on Granville Island, Vancouver, until the end of August 2017, as part of their 45th Anniversary Exhibition.
Category Archives: Seasons
Midwinter/Midsummer
These paintings “Midwinter Frost” and “Midsummer Night” represent two very opposite seasons in my garden. The paintings are about absence as much as presence.
Sitting in the garden on a dark, hot summer night the plant forms seem to grow larger, darker, more mysterious, sometimes even a bit menacing.
On a cold winter day there is a stark beauty and emptiness, expressed so well by Wallace Stevens in the last stanza of his poem “The Snow Man”.
“For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.”
Hollyhocks
Hollyhocks, in bud, before they have bloomed.
Last year in early August I spent some time in the village of Caseneuve in the Luberon in southern France. Hollyhocks were growing everywhere, a riot, an exuberance of Hollyhocks (Rose Tremiere in french). They seem to have the ability to grow anywhere that there is the smallest bit of soil, amongst paving stones, beside houses, between broken bits of pavement.
November Hydrangeas
I’ve finally finished the painting “November Hydrangeas”, oil on canvas, based on an iPad drawing I made in my garden over a year ago.
Dreaming on a Summer’s Day
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Silk Fusion and Embroidery
One of my favourite summer pastimes is lying under a tree, looking up through a canopy of leaves at a blue summer sky dotted with a few fluffy white clouds. In this work I want to evoke a sensation of dreaming, of drifting and weightlessness- the feeling that you are looking up through the leaves at the clouds- but also that you are floating in the clouds looking back down at yourself. I combined the silk fusion technique with actual leaves from my garden. It seems strangely fitting that each silk mawata square is the product of one cocoon produced by one silkworm from the leaves of the mulberry tree. My palette of lemon yellows and turquoise blues is an attempt to capture the sensation of the shimmering and reflections of the leaves, light, sky, air and clouds.
Fuzzy Orifices~Spring
I’m working on a series of “Fuzzy Orifices”, that will combine crocheted flowers with knitted shapes that evoke plant forms, body parts and organic growth.
Fuzzy Orifices~Spring depicts the exuberance of forms springing to life- of parts emerging from and transforming into other shapes. It contains a mixture of colours, bubble gum pinks and bright reds suggesting the body, combined with the darker greens, browns and blacks of the natural world.
The piece is meant to be slightly critical but also playful, something of an ironic commentary on crocheted granny squares, which have always seemed to me to be a bit too fussy and cute. I want the effect to be a little grotesque and funny at the same time.
My first Fuzzy Orifices. From the spring of 2012.
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