A Needle Woman

It's Monday morning but at least the sun is shining. I have a cold/flu and am still not feeling entirely human but I made it to work today, so that's a start. I spent most of the weekend horizontal on the couch, sometimes knitting but not pushing myself too much. Sometimes you have to step away and look for inspiration other places. I was watching a lot of PBS and caught the latest episode of Art 21. It's a series on art in the 21st century and this weeks episode was on Systems. You can watch the entire episode here and any other episodes from this season.

With my Masters in Counseling I've done a bit of reading and study in systems. Systems as it applies to psychology is different but it's all related to how things interact with each other and the different parts of a whole. All of the artists in this episode are creating their own systems and logic through their work. The most fascinating to me was Kimsooja who is a Korean artist who works primarily through videos and installations. She is also a textile artist and her roots in sewing show through in my favorite of her work "A Needle Woman". You can watch the clip of the show that absolutely mesmerized me above or you can see a slide show of her other work on Flickr here.

In "A Needle Woman" 1999-2001, she stands with her back to the camera, facing the flow of people and records the reaction of those who cross her path. She is the fixed needle in the metaphor, and the people are the flow of the object that she interacts with and changes in some way. She has stills on her website from all the different videos from all over the world that she has done.

One thing that Kimsooja talks about in her interview on the Art 21 blog is how she discovers “artistic questions and answers from our daily life activities.” I can't fully explain how this helped to inspire me but suffice to say that it gave me some renewed vigor in my work. I'm thinking again about how I can combine different fibers and textures in my knitting and I'm also thinking about some different artistic avenues using fiber. I'll talk more about this later after I've had time to think about it more and have a better visual picture of what I want to create.

Fiber Artist Mandy Greer

I was just over in the campus bookstore getting my $10 copy of Microsoft 2007, one of the perks of working on a college campus, when I saw the latest edition of Fiber Arts Magazine with the breathtaking cover seen above. I literally stopped in my tracks and picked it up immediately. I have never really ventured to call my self an artist, I'm a crafter making utilitarian creations with whatever flair I can come up with. Mandy Greer is a true fiber artist in the fullest sense of the word. She uses crochet, knitting, and sewing to create sculptures and create epic visions. Her current installation is called Dare alla Luce and can currently be seen at The Museum of Contemporary Craft.

She collaborated with dancer and choreographer Haruko Nishimura to create a multimedia performance and film that has been shown in Seattle. The Silvering Past focuses on the Slug Princess seen above. She takes myths or stories and artistically interprets them with her work. The blue is a poster for her latest installation and is without a doubt one of my favorite shots of fiber art I've ever seen.



Here is how Suzanne Beal, the magazine writer, summed up her work, "This kind of transformative touch marks Greer as a rare artist who aims for material immortality through the recycling of myth and meaning. A prolific alchemist, she fervently strives to make the worthless, worthy, and the old, new." What a beautiful sentiment to try to live.