| Laurel Anderson | Nancy Bonnema | Tani Guthrie | ||||||
Jan Haag |
Dran Hamilton | Penelope Higgins | Kris Leet | Jana McFee | Bonnie Tarses | |||
| Lenore Tawney | Linda Tomback | June Wayne |
OPEN CALL FOR 21ST CENTURY ART was founded under the Open Studios Project of the National Endowment for the Arts, the Benton Foundation, the Seattle Art Museum, the Seattle Public Libraries and Technology Resource Institute. It's mission is to exhibit some of the world's finest work in Needlepointing, Weaving, Baskerty, Beading, Lace, Tapestry, and Rugs on the Web, and refer you to the fine work of each of the artists shown.
Click on the thumbnail picture of each work to see a larger version of the work and a statement by the Artist, and/or if the name is highlighted in _____ click on the name and it will take you to that artist's individual Website.
I have been encoding knowledge in the needlepoints from the my very first piece, long before I knew I was doing it. Perhaps this is how it begins for all of us: we encode knowledge, not only of beauty, taste, technique and skill, but of philosophy and beliefs, perceptions, insights, enlightenment in the many things we do, quite automatically, unconscious. Then out of amusement, delight, often stitching only for the eyes of God, one starts to do it deliberately.
A few years after I finshed my first needlepoint, the I Ching, I remember going to a rug gallery, to an exhibit of very unusual rugs. they had a more random kind of pattern than the usual Oriental rug. The moment I walked in I "knew" that these particular rugs encoded a knowledge -- probably somewhat like physics. I just knew it. Yet they pYet they puzzled me because they seemed so unplanned. The gallery person agreed there was something special about these rugs but he couldn't tell me more about them.
Sometime later, I saw a similar kind of line design at my niece's wedding which took place at the family beach home on Hoods Canal. My niece is the astronomer Suzanne Hawley, and those who gathered for the wedding were mathematicians, astronomers, physicists, etc.. To arrange the rocky beach for the wedding they picked up the oyster shells and distribute them in patterns of random lines curving back on themselves like those in the rugs. When asked what the lines meant, no one seemed to know. The scientists claimed to be doing them without any particular reason.
Later I learned similar lines are a script that is referred to as "the Sound of Jade" and even more recently, I saw and Australian landscape in a book about Aboriginal Art. Taken from a high place out across flat land a river ran. There, again were the squiggly lines.
Laurel Anderson, Kris Leet and I recently started a "sewing circle" where stitchers of all kinds come to work and talk. One of our main topics of discussion is the encoding of knowledge in textiles, especially "women's knowledge."
Often the knowledge encoded in needlepointing, embroidery, weaving, rug making, etc. is the transmission of traditional, sometimes "secret," knowledge which exists among women.
"Secret" in several ways:
I also found I could distinguished three different categories of "encoded knowlege."
First) There is that which can be "read" by the initiated or cognoscenti. For instance, anyone who knows there are traditional layouts of the sixty-four kua of the I Ching, including the one I used as the basis for my first finished needlepoint, knows at a glance "this is the I Ching." Or an astronomer looking at Palimpsest will see instantly, almost subliminally, that its central section is a reference to the famous 1984 "South Galactic Pole" photograph taken by Tony Tyson in Chile. If one knows the twenty-eight Chinese constellations, one will recognize them in the seemingly random pattern of brighter red dots that form part of Palimpsest's middle border. Similarly, students of Eastern Mysticism will recognize the central Kundalini design of Asian Diary #1; or the Tibetan bhupura and the Chinese longevity signs of Green Pillow. Thus, being aware of the first kind of encoded knowledge depends on the viewers own wide rangeing knowledge or interests.
Second) There is that which can quite simply be read if one knows the language. I am profoundly intrigued with the Devanagari script in which Sanskrit is written. I find it a beautiful and meaningful language to use in designs. So if you know Sanskrit, you can simply read the mantras or drum bols or letters I use in Tintal Coin Purse , Kaida, Tabla Covers, Tukra, Tabla Covers, Mukhra/Tukra/Chakradar, and Ten Thats.
Third) There is the encoded knowledge that is unique to the individual needlepoint in the same sense that a book is unique to its author. The kind and use of color, design elements, textures, etc. Using continental in all four directions, for instance, gives a rich variety of sheens and creates a much richer surface texture than that of most needlepoint. Adding to the texture is the hairyness of Persian wool, the softness of silk, the shimmer of the rayon and gold. These elements help evoke the emotion that is inevitably stored in any aesthetically made object -- its music, so to speak -- and is conveyed subjectively. This third kind of knowledge is often evidenced through juxtapositions, the colors themselves, the following of tradition, and the personalizing of tradition.
I recently ran across A Foreshadowing of Twenty-first Century Art -- On the Meaning in Turkish Carpets by Christopher Alexander. His thoughts are both similar and different than my own, re the knowlege encoded in Oriental carpets. Both of us attempt to go far beyond the usual explanations of garden, water, sky, etc. as explantions of the knowledge or symbology encoded in Oriental rugs. I don't quarrel with these traditional interpertations, but I think they don't begin to deal with either the first or second kind of knowlege I am speaking about above.
Alexander, on the one hand, tries valiantly to intellectualize and generalize the more than likely intuitive and very specific variations in design from minute detail to the overall pattern. I, on the other hand, see all of textile design as more akin to the Raga concept of Indian Classical music -- given a theme, one might say, and having a lot of experience within a tradition, one's own or one's culture, one improvises/composes as one goes along -- the glory of the music, or the rug design being unique each time, and only infrequently totally designed ahead of time. Breathing space must always remain to change one's mind or color or feeling, or do it in reverse or upside-down or backward, just to see what it will look like. The gaiety of freedom, a woman's trait, shines through in all the great textile art of the world.
Textile art and crafted works because of their usual mathematical base were as if born for the Net, they are fundamentally 21st Century art. The first time I saw Mandelbrot Sets was in 1988. I was living in a Zen Center in Los Angeles when a copy of Harvard Magazine turned up in the living room. I opened it to look at an article someone had recommended -- mostly to ascertain that odd name: "Mandelbrot Sets." What could they be? -- and saw the most astonishing geometries and patterns I had ever seen. I remember relating what I was looking at to the floor plans of Hindu Temples. I was dazzled, but I was too new to thinking "in pattern" to realize what I was seeing.
Seeing the Mandelbrot Sets in Harvard Magazine and, at that time creating the most elaborate iconographical needlepoint I had ever made, I began to suspect -- mainly because the formula for Fractals (which includes Mandelbrot Sets CK) repeated often enough produces organic forms -- that maybe we are all patterns. Maybe all we are is pattern.
Women have probably known this for milleniums. And, on the eve of the Second Christian Millenium, Christopher Alexander began to decipher this in ancient Turkish rugs (mostly woven by women). He called his 1993 study of his own awesome antique Turkish Rug collection: "A Foreshadowing of 21st Century Art: The Color and Geometry of Very Early Turkish Carpets. Alexander, if you don't already know his work, is one of the great architectural thinker of our times, a computer expert, as well as a rug collector.
What he apparently is not, is a weaver.
His book on Turkish carpets is the best I have ever found on what, indeed, is 21st Century Art -- as well as probably 21st Century BC art, having been made in unbroken lineage from one millineum to another in almost every culture of the world. However, though he does acknowledge in a footnote at the end of his introduction that most of the rugs probably were woven by women, this magnificent art is often ignored or dismissively classified as "Craft," "Decorative Textiles," "Women's Work," without recognizing its complextity and awesome beauty, in which indeed the face of God is embodied, wherein "the geometry is the light". So it is a rare delight to have someone of Alexander's stature give his imprimeture to this perhaps highest of all arts.
However, aside from his truly reverbertating insights revolving around the concept that the --------------- Geometry is the Light, he fills his explanations with intellectualized, non- pragmantic gobblegook which no one who has ever used a needle on canvas, or strung a loom and thrown a shuttle would ever indulge in.
Creation in textiles is a pragmatic art! Try it.
However, I agree with Alexander that it is the art of the future. Pattern is the creation of the world. This Website of 21st Century Art is designed to be the fountainhead gallery of this art as it emerges -- mostly from women. It is to introduces this idea, transmit this idea in the tradition as it has been transmitted for thousands of years. Textile artists, mostly women have been secretly conveying this knowledge to the cognocenti behind/within the beauty of cloth art/crafts for thousands of years.
This same kind of beauty of geometery is part of the magic that lies behind music, drumming especially, where the patterns create and communicate the soul of the drummer, the face of God
Browse through these gallery pages, get to know the work of the women here represented, contemplate the awesome intricacy of each pattern.
Some place in here mention Kaffe Fassett
If you do textile art (man or woman)and would like to show a work on this Web site, contact jhaag@u.washington.edu (or Open Studio URL)
I am looking especially for other improvisational needlepointers, weavers, and those who, with or without knowing it, encode knowledge into their designs, whose intention is ________ encoded in the useful and decorative arts.
I am especially looking for older women, whose knowlege must be caught, interperted and preserved now. I also hope to teach other Textile Artists how to create Web sites so that their work can be seen around the world and their knowlege preserved in cyberspace.
Jan Haag may be reached via e-mail: jhaag@u.washington.edu
Former Website address was: http://weber.u.washington.edu/~jhaag