fibrequarterly anthology 2005 part 1

Fibre Quarterly 2005 Anthology

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Cover art: a Kimono by Sheila Niles

"My Mother Always Wanted to go to Japan” by Sheila Niles Width: 70 in. height 76 in. Materials: All kinds of materials from a lifetime stash including antique Japanese fabrics, hand-painted fabric, a piece of Shibori from Kasuri Dyes Works Techniques Used: Piecing, appliqué, paper piecing, and various decorative techniques, The cross stitched pieces on either side of the front were an altar frontal made by her mother 65 yrs. ago and serendipitously came into my hands just after she had finished the kimono.

Convergence is an outstanding conference for everyone who loves and works in fiber. It is the biennial, international conference sponsored by the Handweavers Guild of America, Inc. (HGA), and hosted by a committee of dedicated fiber enthusiasts. Convergence features keynote speakers, workshops, seminars, exhibits, special events, and hundreds of booths filled with fibers and fiber-related equipment from around the world in the Vendor Hall. Convergence 2006 Grand Rapids Sponsored and organized by the Handweavers Guild of America, Inc. Hosted by the Michigan League of Handweavers Email Convergence questions to [email protected] Convergence * A Grand Preview * Calendar * Classes at a Glance * Exhibits to Enter * Exhibits to Visit * FAQs * Fiber Challenge * First Timers * Leaders * Merchandise * News * Press Room * Registration * Seminars * Special Events * Special Interest Groups * Studios * Tours * Travel and Planning * Vendor Information * Visiting Michigan * Volunteers * Welcome * Workshops


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Table of Contents

Preface: thinking fibre…........................................................................................... 5 Editorial...................................................................................................................... 6 Finding Regine .......................................................................................................... 7

Regine Faust: Timeline part one: Germany .........................................................................8 Form & Intuition: Regine Faust’s Design by Ann Davis ...................................................11

Meshell Melvin: the Kitchen Dance Portfolio........................................................ 16 Jacquard Journey, by Joe Lewis........................................................................... 25 Around town............................................................................................................ 27

Jennifer Angus: A Terrible Beauty....................................................................................27 Anna Torma .....................................................................................................................28 Nieves Carrasco................................................................................................................28 The Knot Show.................................................................................................................29 Toronto Out Doors Art Show............................................................................................30 OCAD Open House ..........................................................................................................30

Canadian Textiles Studies...................................................................................... 32 Books ...............................................................................................................................32 Exhibition catalogues........................................................................................................33

Afterward ................................................................................................................. 35

“Playing” vignettes from vintage printed cotton circa 1950’s floating on over a French toile circa 1875


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Fibre Quarterly

Is a new concept in co-publication and presentation.

As both an on going E-Zine updated three

times a year and a Printed Anthology once a year we will present;

Contemporary Canadian Textile and Fibre

Art and Artist

While looking at the rich history of textile art and production in Canada

On a computer screen near you Fibre

Quarterly on line at

www.velvethighway.com

Fibre Quarterly Publisher: Joe Lewis Editor: Sharon Butler Associate Editors: Dennis Kelley Michelle Hogan Walker


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Preface: thinking fibre… It should come as no surprise that Fibre Quarterly is continuing and expanding especially with the recent loss of Artichoke Magazine and Surfacing Journal it has become more necessary to have a publication focusing on Textile and Fibre Arts in Canada. Over the past seven years my own interest in the contemporary practice and history of Canadian Fibre Arts has grown. In the early eighties there was a great deal of controversy around Judy Chicago’s “Dinner Party” and what it had to say about what was considered traditionally to be women’s work. This discourse had been developing through the seventies since the 1971 exhibition “Abstract Design in American Quilts” at the Whitney Museum of American Art. This exhibition started a renewal of interest in the making, collecting and scholarship of Quilts. It also sparked a flame in the fine art world. A generation of artists inspired by aspects of textiles and fibre began in earnest to build a new category of fine arts practice. By the late seventies Guilds and associations with multiplicities of basic interest in various methods of dealing with fibre were well established, many continuing now. Textile Printers and Dyers Association (the recently disbanded Textile Artist Designer Association) focused on different methods of surface design and manipulation. Canadian Quilters Association which has tried to retain and support traditional hand quilting while giving way to machine based trends and opening the door to more innovative art quilters. The Toronto Embroiderers Guild has just celebrated its 30th anniversary. Art Colleges and Universities have added more textile course to their curricula and students are able to complete PHDs in textiles these days. While the practice has grown, the exhibiting and collecting of these types of work is still lost in the hazy ground between Craft and Art. Within the Craft world Textiles still exist only after Ceramics and Glass, with glass currently being at the forefront in the market place. Usually

categorised as Mixed Media or installation, it has made its way into the fine arts world but still with an apology or a re-contextualization to accommodate some current discourse. While the Textile Museum and curator Sarah Quinton try to provide a venue to show contemporary work, their mandate to show the historical collection must remain foremost in there programming. The Library Galleries in Cambridge are into their third decade of collecting and showing contemporary textile and fibre work and have been producing “Fibreworks”, a biannual juried exhibition, since the mid-eighties. This past year has seen exhibitions of both contemporary Canadian quilts go to Japan and Inuit Tapestries from Baker Lake go to China. Canadian conceptual artist Kia Chan was one of sixteen speakers at last November’s Sign Post to a New Space Symposium in Harrogate, North Yorkshire in England an international gathering of textile practitioners, curators and historians. This coming fall, the Textile Museum and Harbourfront in Toronto host the Textile Society of America Symposium. Fibre is alive and well and being used in Canada by cutting edge and traditional professional Artist and by the hobbyist. The range of skill and imagination is diverse but the passion once sparked becomes delightfully consuming. It is an amazing world that needs to be shared with a larger audience. With the 2005 Anthology of Fibre Quarterly I welcome you to the tip of the Iceberg, climb on board


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1989-2005 no longer funded

dead

Editorial

“ Unsatisfactory” to quote from Paula Gustafson’s editorial in the Summer 2005 issue of Artichoke Magazine “ Since 2002, two long established magazines have ceased publication- The Craft Factor, which for 27 years served as a voice for Prairie craft artist, and Arts Atlantic, which represented art and artist in the east coast provinces.” Add Surfacing Journal which has now published its final issue after 27 years as an in house publication for its membership of Canadian Fibre and Textile artist and educators to the list and a bleak picture begins to emerge. As magazines representing either a geographical region or a “sub-category” of Canadian artist, art production and exhibition are dying off due to a variety of reasons (lack of adequate funding being only one, a major one unfortunately) we lose our ability to record our own contemporary art history.

To quote Gustafson again “in addition to their role of serving a readership interested in arts and culture, Magazines:

• Are powerful influences in shaping (or denying) artistic careers • Develop audiences and markets for the visual arts • Establish the monetary and cultural merit of certain types of art • Document and affirm national and international Cultural values • Are a resource to art historians and researchers • Provide a platform for discussing social, political, and ethical issues • Nurture and support successive generations of critical writers and essayists

In this first anthology we are republishing content posted on-line over the past year that has been re-edited to fit this printable format. We have also included a profile of Yukon based artist Meshell Melvin’s “Kitchen Dance”, along with “Jacquard Journey” the first article I wrote for Surfacing Journal Volume 23 Issue 2/ Summer 2003. Bits and pieces put together the patchwork quilt of another Fibre Quarterly -JL-


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Finding Regine

Regine Faust knitter, designer, teacher, artist left a legacy in the concrete form of an archive housed at Seneca College in Toronto; a series of knitted tapestries at the Museum of Civilization in Hull and in a non-tangible form of lasting influence. As a teacher at the Sheridan School of Fashion Design in Oakville in the seventies and early eighties and by giving workshops she has given both a methodology and a work ethic to thousands of people. Talking to people who knew her one discovers the primary aspect of her character was work, always work. From an early age it was her ability to turn ideas into objects that propelled her forward. She had her first patterns published while still a student, translating her creative thought into patterns easy for the novice to professional knitter to produce garments of individual quality.


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It is almost a decade since her death and it is time to present her to a generation that has benefited from her teaching and re-introduce her into the discourse of contemporary fibre scholarship. The following profile consists of my “Regine Faust: Timeline” and a reprint of “Form and Intuition: Regine Faust’s Design” an article written by art historian Anne Davis Director of the Nickle Arts Museum at the University of Calgary Anne Davis met Regine while working on her book about Faust’s daughter “Somewhere Waiting: The Life And Art Of Christiane Pflug”. She wrote two articles about Regine’s life and art for MacKnit a magazine for machine knitting enthusiast that published Regine’s patterns and articles regularly.

Regine Faust presents a machine knitted tapestry to then Ontario Premier Bill Davis and his wife Kathy in April 1977 during the official opening of Sheridan College's Brampton Campus and Sheridan's 10th annive

machine knitted tapestry

late forties pattern booklet

Photo on previous page is Regine Faust (Schuett) in her Downsville studio in the mid 1980s with argyle "samplers"

Regine Faust: Timeline part one: Germany

Regine Schuett was born in 1912, Rostock, Germany, into a bourgeois middle class family. Her mother came from a family of craftsmen that included weavers dating back to 1530, and her father’s background was composed of well-to-do millers and bankers with a strong interest in intellectual and cultural pursuits. She attended the School of Textile and Fashion Art and the Academy of Art in Berlin. This was a radical move for an unmarried daughter to leave home and pursue a higher education. While at school and afterward, while specializing in Knitting, she immersed herself in the design library and consulted old art books and catalogues, and pattern books to develop a unique design portfolio. The director of the Library organized an exhibition of her designs which led to more work in the fashion design and publishing industries. In 1939 she was awarded a Master’s Degree from the Knitting Guild. She was the first women to be awarded this degree. She worked as an illustrator and designer for knitwear, lingerie and home handicraft magazines and began publishing her designs before graduation and continued to publish in leading European Fashion Magazines such as Die Dame, Die neue Line, Sport im Bild, Die Elegante Wels, and the textile paper The Konfectionar. Later she became the editor of a leading Knitwear Magazine.

Her work was filled with motifs and designs taken from ethnographic sources and art history that depicted elements of nature, flowers, trees, and animals - images that continued to be foremost in her design and artwork for the rest of her life. Sweaters, suits, dresses, coats and accessories - designed, illustrated and transposed into instructions by Regine with the help of a few assistants from her home studio - graced the pages of these publications. During this period her designs were published internationally and she produced numerous special editions for the Leipzig publisher Verlag Otto Beyer. The work ethic and skills developed during this period stayed with her. However, the atmosphere in which she worked became more and more restricted, as the Nazis rose to power


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through the thirties. They sought to control everything, including women’s fashion. Eventually there was no yarn, no fashion industry or fashion magazines.

In an excerpt from a recently published book “Nazi Chic” by Irene Guenther [1] published in the September/October 05 issue of Selvedge Magazine the following description of the period is given: “Hitler’s rise to power brought a national natural look for women to embody the health and strength of the Reich. They were to be fresh faced in the party uniform or the dirndl of the newly restored national costume; wholesome bastions of racial purity fulfilling their simple duties in the domestic sphere. The women complied with their duties, breeding and working en masse for the war effort, but despite intense pressures to conform to the proscribed style and to relinquish all cosmetics, permanents and dyes, most simply refused.” During this period Regine joined the anti- Nazi group call the Adversary.

When “Fashion” disappeared she joined the German Red Cross where politics were less emphasized and you didn’t have to be a member of the Nazi Party. “Soon however Regine returned to the publishing world, this time as a writer. Within a year she transferred from her nursing job to become head of the Press Division for Magazines of the German Red Cross. In an area dominated by men she was one of only three women correspondents allowed to cover activities at the Front. When Paris fell, she became a prisoner of war - an experience she actually relished because she was now able to express her anti Nazi feelings, openly.” [2]

Rebuilding her life and business after the war was easier because of her politics (having never joined the Nazi party) and her academic credentials. She moved from Berlin to Frankfurt and to design and edit for another Otto Beyer’s publication Handararbiet and Waesche. “In 1951 Regine moved to Hamburg where she became editor in Chief of Constanze Knit Fashions. In this position she produced four books featuring her own designs. Despite great success in re-establishing herself at the centre of the German fashion and knit world, Regine and her husband Peter no longer felt comfortable living in Germany. In the autumn of 1953 Regine took her daughter Mikki to meet Peter in Toronto, Canada. Her elder daughter, Christiane, stayed in Europe, attending courses in fashion design in Paris.”[3]

To have come of age in the period between the two world wars in Germany and specifically in Berlin during the rise of the Weimar Republic and its subsequent failure making way for Hitler and the Nazi party was an

experience that marked Regine Faust, to say the least. There is obviously more to say about her life in this period of time. As the roles of women where changing and opportunity for higher education increased the Bauhaus was reinventing an approach to Applied and Industrial Design, and creating architecture with Socialist leanings.

During this period Regine made personal decisions that produced a daughter out of wedlock, engaged in political activity that if known, could have brought about her death by the Nazi SS and did cause the death of her partner. (German Historian Hans Koppie is writing about this period of her life.) From 1953 until 1970 Faust worked at various design jobs including doll costume designer for Regal Toys. It was a struggle to establish her autonomy, but all that changed when she was hired by the newly-opened Sheridan School of Fashion Design in Toronto to teach their machine knitting course (despite the fact that she had not yet worked on a knitting machine!). Working with an instructor from the knitting machine manufacturing company, she kept one class ahead with her first class but eventually discovered the range of the machine’s capabilities and created a four-year program. She developed a book from the curriculum, and then her creative self emerged to produce more books and patterns that expanded the "Home Use" of the machine into a tool of design.

[1] “Nazi Chic” , Irene Guethner, Berg ISBN 185973717 www.bergpublishers.com

[2] “Regine Faust: A Life of Design” Ann Davis, MACKNIT Magazine, 199?

[3] “Regine Faust: A Life of Design” Ann Davis, MACKNIT Magazine, 199?


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*Sea Creatures machine knitted Tapestry Regine Faust

Copyright © 2005 by artist estate All rights reserved Used with permission


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Form & Intuition: Regine Faust’s Design by Ann Davis Regine Faust’s knit design is remarkably consistent. From her earliest sweaters, produced while still in school in Berlin, to her most recent wall hangings, done over the last decade or so, her art is instantly recognizable. Even the switch from hand to machine knitting had little effect on her designs; the basic principles remained clearly apparent. Like renowned painters, her work need not be signed for its characteristics boldly proclaim it to be by her hand. Also, like all masters, she makes knitting look easy deceptively simple realistic images parade playfully across sweaters, shawls, pillows, and hangings. Boldly contrasting values complement subtly modulated hues, an un erring and often innovative sense of color. Balance is of importance, with a preference for the asymmetrical over the symmetrical. Regine’s production is very much her own. Although she looks for inspiration from nature and from art, she cannot name one person who was an overriding influence. The consistency apparent throughout her work underlines the very basis of her art: it documents her delights and demonstrates her ability to rise above the petty while dealing with everyday survival. Regine’s design principles are already clearly visible in a hand knit matching mother and daughter sweater set produced in 1940.

Here stylized two dimensional animals are contained in horizontal bands. Impact is created through her use of contrasting values, with the animals delineated in light values while the ground is relatively dark. Note how the design has been modified for the smaller sweater: the central column of animals has simply been removed. Five years later, just as the war was ending, Regine produced her famous Fish Tree sweater, pictured here being modeled by a friend while Regine makes adjustments. One central image has replaced the banded smaller images. Interest is assured and the design contained with the sharp value contrasts, the asymmetric order, and the hi-directional movement of the two types of fish. In a later version the right hand fish was replaced by a sea horse. Regine’s interest in nature in general and water creatures in particular surfaced again in a much later jacket based on a simplified shell pattern. The finished product is composed of black swirls and irregular triangles banded vertically on a light ground. An earlier version, which Regine had knitted up in a swatch as she always did, then reject, had the values reversed and the triangles and swirls integrated rather than separated. The final approved piece is lighter, less dense.


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Another water piece is a fish hanging which graces the wall of an indoor pool. Divided, according to the golden rule, into two unequal vertical strips, the work is again subdivided into horizontal bands. The wider strip is the width of the knit ting machine. The fish on this wider vertical strip are ordered, regular in their placement, while those on the smaller strip relate, in general, to their fellows on the left, but refuse to swim in precise formation. The dividing line between the two vertical strips is accentuated, not diminished, by the continuation of end fish over the demarcation line. The large fish was executed by hand. (* Sea Creatures) Regine’s sense of whimsy is very apparent in another animal motif: the lizard sweaters. Here, two lizards, placed off- center, one positive and the other negative in value, climb up the front of the sweater. At the back, reversing direction, the lizard climbs down. Inspiration for this design came from a Maori carving, an example of Regine’s everlasting interest in other works of art.

The artist who has probably inspired more of Regine’s knit designs than any other is her daughter Christiane Pflug. Christiane’s creativity was, in one respect, a mirror image of her mother’s: while Regine started off in art school and moved to fashion design, her daughter started off in design school and moved to painting. Christiane Pflug’s Self-Portrait with Doves is small sketchy oil executed in about 1960. Regine’s initial drawing for her knitted hanging uses the canvas as a point of departure but superimposes her own familiar traits, including ordering on a horizontal and vertical grid, sharp outlining, and value contrast, all the while remaining true to the basic structure and ruling mood of the painting Blocking out her worked-up swatches, Regine critically studies her production, including the effects of color. Note; for example, how she shifted the ground color behind the dove sitting on the food bowl, putting a warm hue on the bottom and a cool one on top. Yet Christiane’s general color balance is maintained. Regine’s creative methodology is also apparent here, for she rejected her initial figure as being too sharp in outline, too much of a fashion drawing. She replaced it with a rounded, softer, hazier bust. The finished hanging is clearly a commanding work by Regine Faust.


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Detail of Regine Faust’s Sea Creature machine knitted Tapestry Regine Faust Bibliography

• "Fashion Knit Course Outline for Knitting Machines", Ewa Lavoy, Regine Faust, Regine Faust,

Binding Unknown, 1978, ISBN 0808706470

• Tuck Knit", Provencal Printing,1979, ISBN 0920827799

• " American Indian Designs Adapted to Knitting", Regine Studio,1980,

• Design With Knit, Regine Faust, 1983

Knitting Machine, like loom or sewing machine, is an implement of fabric construction.

The tool does not create the artist does.


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Cityscape by night, a machine

knitted tapestry

dress with nature motifs from the

seventies/ eighties time period Aboriginal motifs combined in Tapestry , detail of sun Dates and size unknown though given the width of knitting machines it can be estimated at 36” X 72” ( 92.cm X 184 cm)


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The inspiration she took from nature is all through her work on the previous page is a dress with cranes along with a flower from her Hawaiian Motif collections

The images in these two articles on Regine Faust come from various sources, family and friends. Copyright © 2005 by artist estate All rights reserved used with permission

fibrequarterly anthology 2005 part 1

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regine fausts design

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