one more from Turkey, 2010

The Grand Bazaar in Istanbul. I didn't care how touristy it was now, I had to go, and wander through the arched brick walkways, totally lost among the silks, spices and plastic toys. I did find one great piece: a handmade child's dress, with fringed sleeves, embroidery and locks of human hair sewn to it (a form of magical protection).

Artifact: child's dress, Turkey (37" h x 32"w)

Back home, I deconstructed the dress just enough to open it, then merged it with a small old crib quilt. This required some very careful transplanting of red dress lining cloth under shredding blue quilt fabric. The dark red bird came from a mola (more of the mola can be found in some of the red patches) which I traced and copied as a pale blue patchwork bird and another (barely visible) sheer fabric bird. Together, the three birds fly out of the dress collar and become part of the checkered quilt......just as immigrants have long flown their homelands to become part of our red/white/blue pattern.

Some pieces require lots of planning and photoshop maneuvering: not this one. As soon as the dress met the quilt, they were both ready to cooperate.

This last one has nothing to do with Turkey, but is in the same immigrant theme  and made at the same time:

Older, But Stronger (33"h x 58"w)  An international textile collage of our national flag. The red and white falcon in the lower right represents my Polish immigrant ancestors. 

On Monday, I began a whole series of textile maps. Hope you enjoy.

Turkey 2010...influencing my art

I asked a young woman (visiting from Pakistan) what the biggest difference was between her country and ours. "Oh, there is no sense of history here!" At the time, we were in Philadelphia, one of the most historic cities we have. But I understood: I had been to Turkey. Turkey is a country where small shops are operating in the ruins of ancient Roman arches:

History is a breathable presence here. The ancient is everywhere. Old walls built with even-older temple fragments. The daily market adjacent to the Grand Bazaar. At the time, the city was trying to dig a subway....very slow going, because of all the archaeological material. My sister and I stayed in a lovely hotel that shared a wall with an ancient domed structure.

Each generation had appropriated the past for it's own uses, and erased what it didn't like:

I'd seen statues with broken noses, but some of these had their faces chiseled away. Carved in stone did NOT mean permanent. At Ephesus, I saw a mosiac floor...and in the corner, the older mosaics still underneath. 

 I became viscerally aware of history at a new, deeper level....and it affected my art. As always, I was carrying some small pieces to work on. These 2 were handkerchiefs with embedded objects, which I had been stitching down. Now I started cutting away - 'looting' my art, in the same way that so much history has been looted.  

When I returned home, I finished these 2 and mounted them over frames. Then I started on a big piece, Looted Artifacts (57"h x 37"w):

I used the same thermofax screens as the ones used for Formal Argument: directions for knitting, crochet and mending. Printing them with discharge paste allowed me to get lighter letters on the darker fabric. So...we have here a field of printed knowledge overlaying various objects related to that knowledge, and by cutting out the objects - by looting them - the knowledge has been vandalized. The remnants of 2 architectural personas are falling to ruin in the foreground.

I also tried a looted version of Domestic Markings (2009),  but I used a dark gray  top layer, which doesn't have enough contrast. If I get a second life-time, I'll re-do it.

As of today, my blog goes to 3 x per week: Monday, Wednesday and Friday. And now, I'm heading down to my basement dye studio, to spend the day listening to NPR, drinking iced tea and slowly painting thickened dye onto cotton...hey, that's my idea of a good time!