The Seventh Sense
Unwind, untangle, reorder.
Stretch the dry brown flax to taughtness, but never let it break.
Take care, attend.
Gently bind the bleached white strands into bars of Bronson Lace.
Mark but don’t reveal your means of egress.
Don’t give out. Don’t give in.
You know that.

Fit the grid.
Tight and straight, right of angle,
Pack together by force,
Truncate by circumstance.
Fill it in, strand by interrupted strand.
A solid weight of weft is your credential.
You know that.

Take time. Not now.
Give Way. Not here.
Under pressure, between a screen and a curtain,
Between a filter and a diffuser, there is grace.
You know that.

The sixth sense is the knowing of what can’t be known,
The paranormal, the supernatural.
The seventh sense is the knowing of worldly experience,
The stuff in the world that can’t be shown, can’t be told,
Can only be absorbed over time.
But it is truly there, and it is as real as real can be.
You know that.

Unwind, untangle, reorder.
Stretch the dry brown flax to taughtness, but never let it break.
Take care, attend.
Gently bind the bleached white strands into bars of Bronson Lace.
Mark but don’t reveal your means of egress.
Don’t give out. Don’t give in.
You know that.

Fit the grid.
Tight and straight, right of angle,
Pack together by force,
Truncate by circumstance.
Fill it in, strand by interrupted strand.
A solid weight of weft is your credential.
You know that.

Take time. Not now.
Give Way. Not here.
Under pressure, between a screen and a curtain,
Between a filter and a diffuser, there is grace.
You know that.

The sixth sense is the knowing of what can’t be known,
The paranormal, the supernatural.
The seventh sense is the knowing of worldly experience,
The stuff in the world that can’t be shown, can’t be told,
Can only be absorbed over time.
But it is truly there, and it is as real as real can be.

You know that.

Heavy gym weights
rest on the floor
but are tied to the hanging rods
of this very lightweight piece


The Seventh Sense
is gently
but very firmly
tethered
to its place.

The making of the tapestry
will have great influence
on its final form.

But only
if I intentionally slap back
my control-freak hands
and allow it to.

For the Sunday 2PM series
The cartoons are simple.
In this case, the simpler, the better.

Tapestry looms can be ultra detailed,
produce images almost like a photocopier,
but only if they are coerced.
Weft beaten tight.
Warp stretched taught.

With Sunday 2PM: Animal Hall,
I was looking for an indoor feeling;
enveloped, cocooned,
yet not fully enclosed.

The piece has the scale and proportion
of a real door,
but I wanted the image to recede,
placing any perceived means of egress
far, far behind the picture plane.

Various weaves and densities of wool
all smushed and felted together,
but in an un-homogeneous way,
creating waivers in line and texture
that would lend their own distortions
to the imagery.

The piece was suspended:
it was not attached to the ground
where a viewer stands.

An outdoor doormat,
placed on the “outside”
of my doorway representation
was intended as a further outward extension
to that perceived indoor-to-outdoor pathway.

With Sunday 2PM: Animal Hall I look for
that complacent, private feeling
that can only be located “at home”;
the complete opposite
of stepping-out into the world.

This work was shown in the 2013 Group Exhibition Fibre Fortnight in the main Mall at ACAD.

Animal Hall is a felted, woolen construction;
a patchwork piece involving
different types of wool-based components.

Stand-alone tapestry pieces were combined
with needle-felted fleece and
an assemblage of over-dyed wool fabrics.

All were collaged
a rough loosely woven burlap base
which would allow the different wools
to move and shrink,
each in their own way.

After assembly
the entire piece was washing-machine felted
and then backed with 10 oz. canvas for support.

The entire work was felted after assembly,
however the Needle-felted fleece
provide the most intensively felted
woolen surface on the piece.

Stand-alone tapestry pieces
make up the foundation blocks
of the image
with their random weave,
but controlled colour and contrast.

I wanted to create a tenuous connection
to the real floor tiles
placed beneath the work
in it final installation.

The "real" tiles
were placed on the floor
and referenced the image above
but were not attached
to the fully suspended piece.

There are patches
of different coat-weight woolen fabrics
such as plaids, houndstooths, and twills
that were all overdyed with brown and black
to give them a cohesive tint.

They are patchworked onto and into
the other tapestry and fleece;
muted chunks of colour and texture
in this warped and fuzzy mindspace.

Filters For a World Made of Steel

They can be viewed from either side.
With backlighting they become a line drawing.
With front lighting
the colour in the woolen tapestry
becomes fully evident.

Detail - the wool is paying absolutely no attention to the insistent squares of the linen, it is nonetheless defined by the relentless grid.

Filters For a World Made of Steel

Truncated wandering woolen threads of tapestry
have a natural, organic agenda of their own.
interfering with,
and sometimes altering
the strict grid of the bleached linen.

Filters For a World Made of Steel

Simple dichotomies:

linen vs wool,

the wandering thread vs the grid

the solid impassible filter vs
the precariously open linen weave

the light blocker of the screen vs
the light reflector of the tapestry

Filters For a World Made of Steel
And then, btw
wrt the imagery of
contour or landscape

Air flow filters to the ground,
just as ground rises into the air.

Tapestry wools work by packing themselves firmly together- as wool is want to do.
And here the wool does indeed take the chance to pack in as much as possible.

The Well Worn View installation involves
a mixed fibre tapestry and two leaded windows
salvaged from my grandmother-in-law’s circa 1910 home.

The foundation tapestry of mixed fibres
is meant to be an obscured and muted image
of my back yard.
The tapestry was created
on a horizontal loom
which allowed for painting
of the stretched warp threads
with acrylic ink.
The painting done pre-weaving.
Because this was a
4 shaft counterbalanced loom,
I was able to thread the setup to allow
the patchy tapestry to be woven
in a mixture of plain and twill weaves.
The tapestry consists of
a cotton and linen foundation
interwoven with mohair, silk and wool.
The tapestry mutes the bright inks
into indistinct pastel colour patches.

I was looking for a worn-out feeling
to come from the underlying indexing
of openly spaced linen weft
against the brightly painted seine twine warp.
I was looking for a worn-in feeling
to come from the accumulations
of tightly-packed twill patterned weft
of wool, silk and mohair.

The piece was intended
to reflect the idea of a kitchen linen;
well-used, but not used-up.
A view that is so familiar
that I can’t really remember what it looks like,
until I come home and stand there
and see it again.
I sort of hope that everyone has a Well Worn View,
somewhere in their recollection.

The image is in the painted warp..
the obfuscation is in the tapestry

Seine Twine is traditionally used to support tapestry. The cotton twine is much like cotton canvas, so why not paint it with vibrant inks that will be diffused by absorption into the threads and later obscured by the tapestry woven over them?

The twill is the stuff
that looks like bluejeans weave.

The Plain weave is...
well the weave that looks plainer
(over/under, over/under...like that).

The different materials:
the indexing lines of raw linen,
the chunky lines of wool and
the fuzzy lines of mohair and silk
each obscure the painted warp
in a different way.

The circa 1910 windows came from
Nana's (Mary McLeod Hogg's) house
in Perth Ontario.

Surface Imagery was applied with a dry needlfelting technique that uses barbed needles to force wool fleece through the woolen tapestry. The needling causes the fibres to mash tightly together, like the worst tangle-up bad hairday dreadlock ever.

The result is a solid image of fleece on one side and a ghostly image of the fibres that have poked through onto the otherside. The unplanned flipside of Logan Burn seems somehow poignant. The piece was suspended in a floor to ceiling arrangement of wires. Securely and obviously connected to both the floor and the ceiling, I wanted to create a purely two dimensional plane in space; wanted there to be a definite sense of the solidity of the plane, but without any physical depth. In this way, I wanted to create a sort of mind-space, rather than a physical space.

The hanging system - like an aluminum window fitting of some sort, allows the piece to be suspended between ceiling and floor.

And here is the solid-side image.
After weaving the tapestry and adding the needle felting, the piece was then further felted together - more dreadlocks - in a front loading washing machine.

The cartoon is more like
a suggestion,
than a plan.

The materials
and the making
take over from there.