Amalia, New Mexico

Yesterday I took a day trip over the New Mexico line to the Rio Costilla Studio Tour. This tour was for the towns of Jaroso (CO), Costilla, and Amalia, NM. I love studio tours--at least for a few hours. I always have hope that I will find the most wonderful undiscovered artist living in some enchanting studio in a little town in backwoods New Mexico. Studio tours are kind of what New Mexico art is all about to me. There are artists tucked into every corner of the state, living in all kinds of places, making art under all sorts of circumstances. Regardless of the circumstances under which these artists are working, the inspiration for me is that they are actually DOING the art that they love.

I saw some wonderful ceramic art along with functional pottery (like mugs that fit into your hand like they were made for you), found some gluten free bread in a kitchen full of bread I was sure I wasn't going to be able to eat, and saw Randy Pijoan's studio. Randy is certainly NOT one of those undiscovered artists, but seeing his studio in person was inspiring to say the least. Now, if you haven't seen the painting of Randy Pijoan, look him up. His work has a depth that makes you feel you have touched something essential in life. I could have stayed in his studio all day looking at those paintings. And besides painting, he runs a non-profit called Ventero Open Press which benefits art in these small communities, especially art for kids.

Randy's studio is in Amalia, NM. Amalia is one of those rural NM towns nestled in a river valley full of old adobes and cottonwood trees. It is one of those sleepy artsy towns that makes me want to move there immediately--especially if I can find one of those adobes in which to set up my weaving studio. We drove through Amalia and up to the Valle Vidal for some hiking. The Valle Vidal is an amazing caldera of open meadow ringed with pine trees, streams running throughout. After the dogs chased some cows and we had had enough walking, we drove the "back way" through Ventero, past San Francisco--towns I didn't even know existed until yesterday...
It was a stellar day.

Small Town Life

I spotted this sign in Fort Garland, CO right on Highway 160 on my way to Taos to meet with some weaving friends. Fort Garland is only a few miles from my current home. I was struck by the small-town assumption that people would know where Tina's house was. There were no other signs or balloons to mark the yard sale anywhere in line of sight. I guess I haven't lived in the San Luis Valley long enough to know Tina personally. I hope her yard sale went well.

Living in rural Colorado or New Mexico where I have spent the last few years has a lot to teach me. I have more time to look at the landscape--often while driving long distances to work or meet with friends or family. I was wondering about how our environment leads us to choose certain things--a way of building a house or perhaps a color of yarn or technique for the next work of art. Definitely the landscape leads me question what building methods I use when discussing building a house or a studio (hopefully some day soon)... I have always wanted to build a straw bale house and I think this comes partly from growing up in New Mexico where the sky is big and you feel more connected to the ground. A straw bale house feels grounded. The walls are thick and the air inside is cool and quiet in the summer and warm and quiet in the winter. The walls are covered with mud and it fits into the landscape. I imagine the porch where I can watch the thunderstorms in August and dye my yarn. And I wonder if I'll put little designs or perhaps broken tiles into the mud as decoration to make it my own.

Yarn choices also stem from my environment more than I would guess. NM and the San Luis Valley encourage my sensual addiction to yarn and color. Somehow it is a place that feels more real to me than the suburban neighborhood I lived in with manicured lawns in Reno, NV. Somehow experiencing the dirt, the rock, and the cactus under my feet every time I step out the door as well as watching the clouds moving across the Sangre de Cristos, hugging 14,000 ft. Mt. Blanca connect me to the land and maybe to myself. This probably doesn't work for everyone, but for me it is an important part of my life. Somehow yarn is part of that sensual connection. I love nothing better than going to Village Wools or Serendipity and feeling the yarn, imagining knitting a scarf or wondering how that dyed-in-the-fleece yarn would change the look of my tapestry.

Bauhaus Talks

I had a great trip to NM the end of May to continue working on the Bauhaus project with Cornelia Theimer Gardella and James Koehler. Conni finished the description of our project--she got the lions share of the work here as she was translating German to English and back again. Fortunately she is exceptionally good at this! Here is the link to the project description should you be interested:

Bauhaus project description

We are working on finding grant money to help us fund the project and also trying to firm up some show locations for the summer of 2009. We are hoping to get into a community gallery in Erfurt, Germany as our first stop. We'd like to find a gallery in New Mexico to hang the show in late summer or fall of 2009.

Bauhaus Project

2009 is the 90th anniversary of the Bauhaus—a German art school that existed between 1919 and 1933 in Weimar, Dessau, and Berlin, Germany. The Bauhaus’s students and teachers were such people as Anni Albers, Josef Albers, Johannes Itten, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Georg Munch, Walter Gropius, and Gunta Stolzl (among many others). Although the Bauhaus ran for less than two decades, the influence of the design theory and ideas about art had far reaching effects. Many ideas begun at the Bauhaus continued at schools in the United States such as Black Mountain College after the German school closed in 1933.

I am currently engaged in a Bauhaus project which is the brain-child of a good weaving friend of mine, Cornelia Theimer Gardella (www.corneliatheimer.com). She is a native of Erfurt, Germany and she and her husband Kurt split their time between Germany and northern New Mexico. Conni wanted to do a project connecting the ideas begun at the Bauhaus in the early 20th century and its influence on contemporary tapestry artistry. She approached myself and James Koehler (www.geocities.com/jamesrkoehler/) to collaborate on a project that would explore the ideas from the Bauhaus and connect them to our current work in the southwestern United States. James, Conni, and myself are all contemporary tapestry weavers. Conni and I have been mentored by James Koehler for the past several years and I definitely feel grateful to be included in this project which will continue our mentoring relationship and further my knowledge not only of contemporary tapestry, but of some of the art forms’ roots in Bauhaus ideas.

We are planning a show of our work in Germany during the 90th Bauhaus celebration. All three of us will display works hopefully in a gallery in Erfurt--Conni’s home town. Our plans also include a workshop accompanied by lectures designed to connect the Bauhaus ideas with our current work in New Mexico (and Conni’s continuing work in both Germany and New Mexico). We are currently looking for a venue for the show in New Mexico when we return from Germany, probably in the fall of 2009. If we’re lucky we’ll be able to also make a connection at Convergence in 2010 (we’re hoping for Albuquerque!) and perhaps show the work and repeat the workshops a third time. Our next challenge is to secure venues and find some grants to support our travel and teaching.

Piedra Lumbre

I grew up in New Mexico, and have spent many happy years since leaving for college living there and visiting. I now live just north of the Colorado border near Blanca, CO, but the red rocks and the blue skies of New Mexico call me back over and over. Last week I made a trip to Ghost Ranch--a place of many happy childhood memories. Now I go there to hang weaving, mostly through Espanola Valley Fiber Arts Center. The Piedra Lumbre (the name for the area around Ghost Ranch which means valley of shining stone) is most certainly one of the most stunning places I have ever had the privelege of spending time. It is really indescribable--the blue sky, multiple colors of red and yellow rocks, the blue reservoir, the sagebrush, Georga O'Keefe's famous Pedernal mountain... and then there is Ghost Ranch, that oasis of green alfalfa and friendly people. Anyway, I went to Ghost Ranch's Piedra Lumbre center to hang a new set of weavings there. One of them was my newest piece, This Time I Dance II. The new piece was a further exploration of ideas from This Time I Dance (see prior post) and used the same colorways.

In my experience, when hanging weaving shows in New Mexico, the weavings all get laid on the floor as they are chosen to put on the walls. This is always difficult for me. After all, I spent many hours making that piece of art which is now in danger of being stepped on and is undoubtedly picking up fuzz and dirt from the old carpet it is lying on. But my friend Conni (www.corneliatheimer.com) convinced me to take a deep breath and let it go, and indeed, the show was hung without incident. If you visit the show (it hangs from now until July 6th), you'll notice the wide variety of art hanging there. They are not pieces I would probably group together, but it is an interesting representation of work being done in northern New Mexico fiber arts. So if you're going through northern NM any time soon, stop and visit. Ghost Ranch is always worth the time, and the weaving shows there are always something to see.

Memories of Utah--Weaving inspiration

My partner and I spent 5 days in Utah last month with my extended family, some friends, and 5 assorted dogs (fortunately only 2 of them were ours). The weather was beautiful and the amazing canyons of Butler Wash and Comb Ridge near Bluff were just as fabulous as ever. If it weren't for the rainstorm and the clay puddle my tent was sitting in the morning we were to leave, I might still be there.

I especially enjoyed the rock formations on this trip. The striations in the rock and the colors that swirled around each other reminded me of weaving. The tactile aspect of the various rocks and the walls of the cliff dwellings were interesting to me and brought to mind my love of the tactile nature of fiber and weaving. Touch is so important to experience. Can we allow this when we're making art also? There were many remnants of cliff dwellings in those canyons. I marveled at the way the rocks were stacked and placed decoratively in places. I could feel the grooves fingers had made in the mud used for mortar so many years ago.

A new way of journaling...

This is my first foray into blogging. It has not been a process that intersted me in the past as I do my journaling on paper with a fountain pen. But a smart woman convinced me that it would be a good addition to my website and a great place to explain in an informal way my weaving process. So here I go!

This week I mailed the last piece I finished (titled This Time I Dance) to a friend who purchased it in Denver. It is always a little sad to see a piece go (especially because this one just came off my loom a couple weeks ago and I like to have a new piece hanging in my studio a little longer to push me along), but it is good to know that it is appreciated by a friend. After all the work of designing the piece, dyeing the yarn (which for this piece was a lengthy process of about 50 colors), weaving the piece, finishing it, photographing it, and looking at it on the studio wall for awhile, putting it in a box and relinquishing it to a postal employee seems a little shocking. But we have to let our art go so it can find its own way in the world and so that we artists can move on and create something new.