Thank you to all the organizers, volunteers, vendors, installation artists, helpers, shoppers, and others who made City of Craft 2009 such a great hit. We are all very tired and looking forward to some much needed rest.
Also, big thank you to Katie Muth for designing those awesome cards and letting us have a few.
See you all in 2010!
Sorry for not lasting forever, that is; Sorry that the City of Craft is not a permanent city we can all continue to live in.
That's right, another year is over and (as expected) it was bigger and better than ever!
Full appreciations and accolades will be coming tomorrow. For tonight, though, we expect you all to do as we are - resting, eating, bathing, and more resting.
Toronto (and beyond), you rock us.
Love,
City of Craft
So...Shannon and I spent a good chunk of Wednesday night in the workroom's basement collating wonderful swag from our lovely sponsors into the totes and she, Anna and Day printed a couple of weeks ago. The stuffin's were just so good that I thought I would tantalize you with a little sneak peek.
Above are some generously packed lavender sachets from our first ever floral sponsor, Coriander Girl. They also come with a $2 token good for anything in the store.
Up here are some full fledged graphic novels from Drawn and Quarterly. It's true! Each of the 100 swag bag recipients will get one (and in many cases, two) entire books from Canada's preeminent publisher of graphic novels and comic arts! Books? Can you imagine?
Also in the loot is:
WORN magazines, Broken Pencils, SOAK samples, pencils and coupons from The Paper Place, Sublime Stitching patterns and various show-specific coupons from the likes of Le Petit Pig, mynta, Hand & Shadow, Kid Icarus & more!
Please note: some swag donors do not give us 100 items so bag contents may vary. But they are all awesome.
The weather tomorrow is also supposed to be nice so we can feel less awful about making people line up. And if you miss out on the swag, there are even more jam-packed raffle packs being handed out twice daily.
For the 2009 show, we are very happy to be able to offer a pop-up tea party on Sunday afternoon courtesy of Dufflet (read below) and Tealish. Read on to learn more about the mouth-watering pasteries involved...
Who are you? Dufflet Pastries
Where are you located? 3 Toronto Retail Café Locations
Downtown: 787 Queen Street West, Ph: 416-504-2870 - retail@dufflet.com
Uptown: 2638 Yonge Street, Ph: 416-484-9080 (closed Mondays) - retail2@dufflet.com
Beach: 1917 Queen Street East, Ph: 416-699-4900 - retail3@dufflet.com
What do you/your business/your product do? Dufflet Pastries offers an extensive selection of handmade desserts, light lunches and specialty coffees for eat-in or take-out. Distinctive gift items and greeting cards, gourmet candy and chocolates round out the Dufflet repertoire - Toronto's most talked about destination for wedding and birthday cakes.
What does your sponsorship for the show entail? A donation towards dessert from our Dufflet Small Indulgences Morsels: Sublime Raspberries in Pure Dark Chocolate (Tart raspberries enrobed in rich dark chocolate giving a burst of flavour)
Why handmade? Dufflet's product line is entirely natural and hand-crafted from scratch, using only premium ingredients, with no artificial flavours, colours or preservatives
Anything else we should know? EAT MORE CAKE!
The Caribou Collective are a group of 11 makers who are responsible for what will be one of the focal points of next week's main event...a 10 foot tall knit tornado! The following interview with collective member Ellie Chesnutt talks a bit about collectivity and knitting up a storm...literally!
Tell me more about The Caribou Collective. How many of you are there, and what sorts of skills and backgrounds contribute to the collective's projects and activities?
Well, we are pretty much brand-spanking new as a formal collective, but the concept is this: The Caribou Collective is an amorphous group operating under the mandate that the nature of the project decides who is involved. So, whatever skills are required to realize a concept, existing members are called upon or new members are recruited until the complete skill set is established.
So, the idea of the collective in our case is really about stockpiling ability rather than people. As I mentioned, it is project-focused. So, the vision for a piece can come from a single source and be carried out by a selection of Caribou. Each person knows that when they want to carry out a project, they simply call on the relevant hands to bring the idea to fruition.
The individual Caribou involved in this City of Craft project include eleven artists and crafters, combining a variety of strengths and experience. Cumulatively, our skills include knitting, sewing, crochet, mixed-media installation, photography, stained glass, writing, film, paper-mache, video, painting, web and sound art.
Your installation for City of Craft is an enormous, hand-knit tornado. Why do you feel knitting was the the most suitable medium for this installation?
Well, my own work often incorporates aggression and tedious repetition. In terms of process, I enjoy taking something that has velocity and rendering it very slowly and methodically, although the end product isn’t always this still – I’m used to working in video.
As a medium, knitting is slow, but there is a lot of motion that goes into it that you can’t see in the end. The final product is so still that it masks the movements that created it. I thought it could do the same for the tornado – to take the movement out of it.
Knitting the tornado in strictly garter stitch furthered the tedium – it started to feel like meditating. You can’t help but think about the similarities and differences between the comforting, cozy and methodical and the violent and unpredictable.
Was it ever a concern of yours that you may not have enough time or person-power to make the tornado as large (approximately 10 feet tall!) as it ended up?
It definitely provoked a few of us to wake up with the sweats in the middle of the night screaming, “yarn!” But, we’re feeling much better now.
The original idea was to go between six to eight feet tall; and, at the time, even that felt like a tall order. We consoled ourselves by saying in part the size would be dictated ultimately by the space available; so, if we had to go shorter... And we wanted to leave enough room between the floor and the bottom so that people could crouch down and get inside the tornado.
But, people just went berzerk with the knitting, even before we had received notice from the COC that we were going to be in the show. Also, I think throughout the main tornado body stage we all feared that we were behind schedule, then it turned out we were way ahead of where we needed to be. There was a fair bit of calculating and recalculating how much length was required. As we got to the target number of feet, the faith in the math went out the door and we kept thinking, "We need more!"
Happily, with 18 feet of height at the Theatre Centre, we were able to go a bit bigger than the original plan and viewers won’t have to get their knees dirty to get inside the tornado.
What other projects has The Caribou Collective collaborated on? Do your projects involve recurring themes or interests?
Like I mentioned, the collective is actually a recent invention, formally. But the members involved in this project have created individual works with common themes such as natural and man-made disasters and the sciences. Aside from the tornado… a series of weather-related disasters would make a great show!–- although no Caribou have signed on for tsunami duty yet…
One other recurring commonality is things that are very big. Go big or go home could be our other mandate, besides all that stuff about collecting skills. If we had the time, money, space, we would only work on house-sized projects, turning simple things into spectacles and revealing the details of the small and inconsequential.
What, in your opinion, are some of the best things about working collectively?
For me, I really appreciate the communication aspect. You have to articulate ideas clearly enough that another person could carry out exactly what's in your head, using very specific details. So, pitching a project is almost like the piece’s first showing. You want to excite your collective with a “finished” idea in the way you want someone to be excited when they first see your art in person. As you discuss the idea, people give you their spin and the idea gets better. Together, you think further ahead into the details of the why and how. I think each person pushes themselves harder to make the project more compelling and that leads to healthy competition too.
I also hate the idea of being bound by my own personal ability. I strongly believe in the value of seeing works realized, rather than getting a credit. So, if I have an idea that I don’t know how to execute completely, I love that a collective acts as a vehicle for just putting something out there.
Roisin here, the Doer of Things That Need Doing. like banners! I'm a screenprinter, and volunteered to make a large banner that could be used at this event, and at other City of Craft events, too. I have previously made a very large banner for the halifax crafters, so I knew what I wanted to do right away.
Finally, the fun part. I then printed with my patterned screens over top of the newsprint, using a variety of colours and patterns. this is where the work to stick everything down with tape comes in handy - the newsprint curls when it's wet [like when it's screenprinted upon], and all those bubbles kept everything in place, and tidy.
Shanell Papp is a Saskatchewan-based artist who we're thrilled to have participating in this year's installation programming. Her contribution to City of Craft, LAB #4, is a life-sized skeleton and organs made completely out of knitted yarn. Much of her textile-based work deals with the human body and physical vulnerability. Read on to find out more about her process and her other weird and wild work...not for the squeamish!
*****
LAB is an ongoing body of work that you began in 2005. How has LAB evolved from 2005 to the present?
LAB evolved out of an earlier project, Body, that I did in 2005. I made an exact replica of myself from wood, pantyhose, spandex and plaster. Body was an important work for me (because) I was reconsidering materials and processes in my work. Before this point I was mainly a photographer. Body was my first more textile-based sculpture.
In the summer of 2005, I began making the yarn skeleton LAB, which took three months to complete. I showed the work in a student show and in 2006, I graduated from Univerity of Lethbridge with my BFA. I continued to work on LAB an made the primary organs for the skeleton (heart, brains, liver) and it was accepted into a few shows—a group show at SAAG (Southern Alberta Art Gallery), in Vancouver at Galery Gachette and in Calgary for The New Gallery. It was really overwhelming…I didn’t expect the work to travel that so much.
Every time I show LAB it is displayed differently and the work is still under construction—parts are repaired and other parts are being replaced. I think I may never finish it, which is okay. I like that the work is constantly evolving, changing and growing. I still need to make arteries, veins, muscles, skin, hair, eyes, etc.
In your statement about LAB, you refer to your interest in “the human body and textiles in combination.” How would you define the relationship between textiles and the body?
Textiles and the body share a close relationship with the clothing we wear to protect the body. Textiles are delicate and in constant need of repair and cleaning, and our bodies are in need of constant repair and cleaning, but over time, all our work will only extend the life of a material that will not last forever.
Textiles are essentially big, giant, organized knots, like the human body is a giant knot of cells that are somewhat the same, but different and bound together. And some textiles/fabrics are made from the flesh of animals, which I think is interesting.
What attracts you to slow, tactile methods of making such as knitting?
I do work slowly and with my hands, but this is part of a larger technique. I am interested in making objects out of low, familiar, everyday materials and adjusting them to be unexpected. I like to have a personal relationship with my materials, so this could explain my devotion to making handmade objects, but I think textiles are the best material to elicit an empathetic and familiar response, so I use (them) primarily to as a technique to aid the meaning of the work.
You are currently pursuing an MFA in Studio Art from the University of Saskatchewan, so I’m sure you’ve been spending a lot of time in the studio. What other projects are you working on right now?
Currently I am making several pieces-- (one is) a suit from old printing press mats called Pressure Suit and I think of it as an astronaut or deep sea diving suit that protects the wearer in harsh or unknown environments. I am also working on a series of Blood Pools (working title) that resemble blood pools made from head injuries. I was looking at a lot of crime scene photography and was thinking about how (crime seem photos don’t) seem real, (and) how (the people in the photographs look like) they are sleeping and I wanted to make the blood pools to enhance my disbelief. I also made a life size horse from carefully tailored garbage bags. I am interested in building objects about exploration, vulnerability and the 19th Century.
In the past I have made video, photography and comic book works. I plan to make an autobiographical graphic novel and/or a historical graphic novel about the Arctic…hopefully I will get around to this someday.
*****
For more on Shanell's installation LAB, take a look at her portion of the City of Craft installations page.
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