In Memoriam: Virginia R. Sheehan, Carol Ann Donovan and Michael Raffer

I lost my sister, brother and mother on August 24, 2007 in Los Lunas, New Mexico. Nothing can prepare any person or family for that much tragedy.

Virginia R. Sheehan, August 21, 1921 -- August 24, 2007

My sister called me on August 20th to tell me that our mom, after many years of struggling valiantly with Parkinson's disease, was dying. Within a day family members arrived from all over the country. My brother flew in from northern California and my husband and I from New York State. Grandchildren flew or drove there to join us. Mom couldn't talk but seemed to regain consciousness and smile each time a new loved one arrived. When everyone was together, she drifted into unconsciousness and on Friday morning passed away peacefully.


This is my mom in 2006 dressed and ready to attend the 85th birthday party held in her honor. She was always beautiful at every age.

August 24th was a sad day for our family but we knew Mom had struggled so long and so hard with her painful disease that her death was a blessing. That evening we headed off in three cars to go out to a nearby restaurant for dinner and celebrate my mom's life. My sister and brother lagged behind us a bit in leaving and they never made it to the restaurant. Their car collided with a passenger train traveling at 80 mph while they were crossing the tracks and they were both killed instantly.


Carol Ann Donovan, November 16, 1943 - August 24, 2007
Stanley Michael Raffer, January 9, 1953 - August 24, 2007

Here is one of the last pictures of the three of us together. I am on the left, my big sister is in the middle and my little brother is on the right at my mom's 85th birthday party last summer.
I miss my family. I pray their spirits are finding peace and love and comfort and that they can feel the love we will all hold in our hearts for them always. I want to picture them now with all the other family members that have left here before them, particularly my dad and grandparents. I miss them all. I love you, Mom. I love you, Carol. I love you, Mike.

Pittsburgh Adventure, Day 2: Chihuly at Phipps

This day falls into the category of, "just when you think an experience can't possibly get any better...it does!"

I would have voted to just drive straight home the second morning, since I was so excited and stimulated by visiting Fiber Arts International that all I could think about was getting back into my studio to work, but we all decided we'd just make the "briefest" stop at the Phipps Conservatory to see the gardens and glass exhibit there. Here is the entrance; already looks promising, doesn't it??? Supposedly there was a nice Chihuly glass exhibit inside -- I figured a few pieces in a few rooms and then, zip, we're on the road. SOOOOOO wrong....We wallked through room after glorious room, oohing and aahing. Each one grew from a collaboration between horticulturists and Chihuly to design unique installations that blended organic blown glass shapes and colors with natural plant materials. This is pretty much what we looked like every time we walked into a new room!

This room was filled with bright orange cannas in the background and Chihuly's brilliantly colored Cattails in the foreground.

Some spaces had water features as large as ponds, where Chihuly's blown glass forms provided contrast while complementing the natural environment.

The forms and colors of the glass varied with each space. Some of the forms were tall and frond like, some sphere shaped, and others open and fluted. I fell in love with the space below, the Victoria Room, where all the elements, including the reflections from the vaulted glass ceilings on the water, seemed more breathtakingly beautiful together than I ever could have imagined. Chihuly calls these fluted forms his Persians. They're the result of his search for new forms over the course of a year, during which his assistants crafted more than 1,000 miniature experimental forms.

You could look across this space and through a glass partition into yet another glass and plantscape in soft blues, a wonderful contrast to the warm colors in this space.

Above this beautiful display a huge chandelier style sculpture, one of Chihuly's trademarks,
seemed to float over the water and surrounding trees.

That blue glass that you could vaguely see beyond this incredible display proved to be an equally breathtaking site when we made our way into the space, called the East Room. The plant materials in this room were all silvery and cool in feeling. With Chihuly's blue floats, cobalt Reeds and turquoise Marlins, the collection is known as Cobalt Fiori or "blue flowers."

Here is a close up that shows some of the different color combinations and patterns that Chihuly creates by rolling molten glass in smaller shards of colored glass during the blowing process. The interiors and exteriors of these petal like forms are different colors. This is possible because they are separated by a layer of white opaque glass.

The bottom line is that we spent the whole morning in the Conservatory and only left because we were hungry! Barb took pictures until her memory card was completely full and I came home with over 150 shots of my own. By the time we started the drive home, we all felt our whirlwind adventure had far exceeded any of our expectations and look forward to another one in the future!

Here's the Phipps website: http://www.phipps.conservatory.org/

Pittsburgh Adventure, Day 1: Fiber Arts International

I vowed to finally make it to a Fiber Arts International exhibit this year -- after all, there won't be a chance again for another three years! - and invited my crit group to consider a field trip. The exhibition closes August 19th, so we couldn't delay. Four of us headed down to Pittsburgh bright and early last Wednesday morning in Marcia's comfortable SUV, made it in less than five hours and arrived easily at the Society for Contemporary Craft by 1:30 PM. This turned out to be my favorite of the two spaces that house the FAI exhibit. Large open ceilings, plenty of windows and natural light and freestanding portable walls added a lot of visual interest and architectural detail to this space, which felt open, airy and contemporary.

It also seemed that most of my favorite works in the exhibition ended up being in this space. We were permitted to take pictures of the overall space at SCC but not individual works -- although the second venue, Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, allowed us free rein with our cameras.

The works in the joint exhibitions represent every type of fiber art. I found the diversity of materials and mediums, that included felted pieces, weavings, mixed media, assemblages, fashion, handmade paper, quilts and books, most stimulating. I find that same diversity when I attend the Surface Design Association conference exhibitions.

Another pleasing addition to the venue at the Society for Contemporary Craft were several cases that displayed samples and sketches and notes from a number of the artists in the exhibition. This opened a window into each artist's creative process and inspirations, which always intrigues me; here is one of the cases, which also serves as display works for some of the pieces.

Below are some reference materials and notes from Cynthia Corbin.
After visiting the gift shop and purchasing copies of the catalogue. we headed over to the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, shown below, to see the rest of the exhibit.

The first floor gallery spaces (there were four) offered ample wall space to appreciate each piece but the galleries felt more subdued.

As you can see from the picture below, the scale of the works in these exhibits ranges from huge to quite tiny. The lighting carefully highlights the works on pedestals as well as those on the walls.

We capped our day off by meeting an artist friend of Marcia's, Petra Fallaux, who took us to a wonderful little Italian restaurant on Reynolds called Pino's. She acted as our navigator so we could drive to the lookout point at the top of Mt. Washington, where we got to enjoy a view of the city and its rivers.

Here is our satisfied group at the end of long, full and stimulating day. From left to right are Marcia DeCamp, Petra Falloux, Nancy Murty, Barb Seils and me. If you'd like to see all the individual works in the show, you can purchase one of the excellent exhibition catalogues at http://www.fiberartinternational.org/ for $25.

To "Execute": Livin' the Verb

Is it any wonder that the verb "to execute", in addition to meaning "to carry out, accomplish" and "to perform or do", also can mean "to put to death"????


After I laid out all these tiny page pieces on the water soluble fusible at my studio last week, I tested some different adhesives and how well and easily they wash out and the winner was: Elmer's Washable School Glue Sticks! My only complaint about these gems -- sold two to a bubble pack in Wal-Mart's Back to School sales blitz at 5 packs for $1 -- is the sad realization there is more packaging than glue, only about .6 oz per tube, and I can envision the piles of packaging and empty glue containers creating new mountains in land fills. I used five tubes to stick -- yes,one piece at a time -- all the pieces down to the water soluble fusible backing, then sprayed the whole surface with basting spray and covered it all with a second layer of the water soluble fusible. All well and good, but the basting spray on water soluble only seems to hold for the short term. It is now four days since I first sprayed them and some are lifting off the fabric and base layers. So now pins also assist in the process. It all is a learning curve and I'm ever the explorer, so while the sandwich stabilizing and stitching are tedious, I am sure that I'll streamline and refine my process with each new piece.


Since this is a series and ideas hammer on my insides begging to get out as I resolutely sew line after line after line, I did veer off course from sewing to do samples of the ideas for Pages #3, #4 and #5. The idea for #6 popped out yesterday and I managed to get a quick sketch down in my notebook. It amazes me how long the list of ideas are -- and working quietly and repetitively on the stitching gives my mind even more opportunities to free associate.


I am wondering if an industrial machine will look better and better to me after completing a few of these!

New Pages Piece Under Way

Busy and productive day at my studio today as I started laying out all the little rectangles for the next "Pages" piece. The basic composition is the same for this second one, but I've added a separating line of grey silk dextrined fabric pieces around each of the black rectangular frames within the piece. Since I'm working with the Solvy for this first time -- for the last piece I had a roll of Floriani tacky water soluble that made holding all these small pieces in place much easier, but this product is more economical so I'm doing some R&D and hope it works as well.

I've silkscreened and dyed a lot of new fabrics to build a collection for the various ideas I have for a series, rehearsed a number of them and decided these work together well. When I cut the printed yardage into the 1.5" x 2" rectangles, the words become fragments. Some are readable, others -- particularly the large ones that fill the centers of the black rectangular outlines -- look more like calligraphic forms. I am pleased with the look of them and am considering adding some machine or hand stitching to create some more obvious horizontal lines of "text."

All the pieces are laying on water soluble fabric at the moment. I plan to finish the layout, adjust any wandering pieces and then tack everything in place with basting glue when I return on Thursday. Once that's done, I'll layer more water soluble fabric on top and secure the layers for stitching by pin basting, then bring it home to stitch.

Responding to Other Artists

There are lots of reasons why I love to visit art exhibitions, but two stand out in my mind today. First, other artists' ideas and the ways they approach translating their subject into visual images inspire new ideas for my own work. Second, there is an energy that develops when a group of work is assembled from diverse artists that creates an interesting and original dialogue of its own (even if only in my own mind!).

On Friday I revisited the Made in NY Exhibition at the Schweinfurth Memorial Art Center in Auburn, where I was fortunate to have one of my mixed media fiber pieces accepted this year. "Destinations" has a lovely space at the center of one of the walls in a side gallery.

Aside from the obvious pleasure in having the piece I entered juried into the show, I gathered a lot of insights from spending time with many other artists' works juxtaposed next to each other. Since I'm exploring written language in my Pages series, I paid a lot of attention to the works in the exhibit that reference language in some way. A mixed media work, "Lascaux," by Sean Ward hung to the left of mine. Sean uses a very primitive, almost graffiti-like text in this piece. His artist statement, written like a prose poem, sheds some light on his use of text: "a single stroke, may invoke a new, language to tell the, tale of our days and, ask the right, questions..." The piece draws my attention because the tiny twigs on the right hand side seem to echo the marks of the written text. The word "wall" is printed out, but the characters in "Lascaux" require a bit of time to assemble visually and decipher. There is a sense of ageing and decay in the surface, heightened by the use of textured materials and paint processes and the skeletal twigs lashed to a stained piece of wood with marks incised in it.

Equally intriguing from my perspective of language imagery is a huge drawing of tiny, repetitive marks by Katherine Sehr from Buffalo , which was displayed unframed. In her artist statement Katherine writes: "I record small, rhythmic movements on paper. The time invested results in an animated landscape. In the private act of drawing one gesture leads to another...I wish to illustrate time through process." These small marks on a huge surface really do communicate the passage of time and the presence of the human hand. In my own work, I rely on dextrin resists and silkscreens to capture some of this feeling of organic, repetitive marks, but I will definitely explore more use of repetitive hand-drawn marks on my own surfaces.This next piece uses text as it might be seen in letters, diaries or journals. This sculptural tree form installation by Kim Waale, a Central New York artist who is a faculty member at Cazenovia College, casts a natural shadow to the left of the piece. However, the shadow on its right is an artificial one, hung upside down and completely filled with handwritten text that gives some sense of continuity of meaning, but not enough to provide an entire narrative.My own new pieces cast shadows when moved away from the wall. The idea of creating intentional shadow shapes filled with lines of written text will get filed with my rapidly expanding collection of ideas to consider in the future for my "Pages" and "Interior Landscapes" pieces. Finding inspiration in works that are similar to our own style and subject matter is a pleasure, but it is always a delight to happen upon a work that is so totally different from my own that it makes me stop and consider what draws me to it. In contrast to my own organic, more subtle style of working, this small painting by Hope Zaccagni, has a very graphic, hard-edged contemporary feel to it. The strong contrasts in color and value command attention and draw my eye to it even from far across the gallery. What intrigues me as much, if not more than the actual piece, is the artist's inspiration for her subject matter. In her artist statement she writes: "My most recent work has grown out of a fascination I have for abandoned chairs, old lawn chairs, chairs left in hallways, offices and classrooms, chairs used to hold doors open for people who have long exited, chairs basking in sunlight and chairs left out in the snow or on the curb... The images evokes a sense of a distant memory, a journey taken, a lost love or an old friendship. They often elicit a feeling of loneliness, distance, dislocation." Isn't this a wonderful artist statement as well as a rich subject to explore visually? Normally, after spending time observing and recording ideas and inspirations from other artists' works I would be able to rush home, get to my studio and experiment. But I was headed off to our cottage on Panther Lake, a tiny lake north of Syracuse, for a weekend with my husband. I did have my camera with me, though, and Hope's chair painting came to mind as I saw these old Adirondack chairs haphazardly arranged at the edge of the lake. They felt solitary and somehow expectant at the same time. I saw them in a new way because of experiencing Hope's work and ideas.

Here are a few other photographs that my visit to the Made In NY exhibition inspired. I can definitely translate the various lines into my work, from the softly curving, organic plant growth to the heavy, bold lines of the boat hoist on the neighbor's dock and always the hypnotizing, shifting patterns of light and shadow on the water.

Printing and Cutting Marathon: The "Pages" Pieces

I have been studying and working through some sample ideas and compositions based on written language for over a year. I started first by researching ancient scripts, some of which are so obscure that they are not even able to be deciphered by linguistic experts. In one of my first pieces, "Forgotten Language," (2006), I made language-like stitched marks with embroidery floss across a surface that I wanted to look and feel like a fragmented, ancient tablet.
Here's the complete view of the piece. It felt like a good beginning but not quite what I was striving to communicate

Then, early this spring, after trying several other ways to express language in my compositions, I had the idea to make a semi-transparent single layer piece using water soluble fabric and thread. This piece is called "Pages" and will be on exhibit at the International Quilt Festival in Houston this fall as part of an art cloth exhibition juried by Jane Dunnewold and Claire Benn.

I cut tiny 1" x 2" rectangles from silk screened text on white silk. I sometimes search for old letters or diaries at antique shops, borrow old family letters from friends to make copies and then turn them into silk screens. On this piece I selected pages from an old dictionary and a fragment of an old love letter and created screens from that. I also bleach discharged and potato dextrin resist dyed silks and cottons, laid them out on water soluble fabric, stitched them with a loose grid and then washed away the water soluble. A sheer, floating length of fabric with rows of these tiny pages remained. From that point on, a wave of ideas started and I seemed to be recording one right after another in my sketchbooks and journal. I envision hanging these pieces at least six inches away from the wall (and hopefully my talented husband will be able to help devise this hanging mechanism) because the pattern of shadows created behind them adds another dimension to the piece that I find most interesting.

Ideas continued to fill my sketchbook and journals while I was teaching at Pro Chem, through the SDA conference and class, trip to New Mexico and class in Ohio. When I got home from all my teaching and travels around mid-June, even though I had another three day class to prepare for and teach locally, I went right to my studio and started designing new screens, printing them on cloth and doing more discharge and resist patterned yardage. Here's a sample of black and grey silk-screened on white silk:

In the past few weeks, I've made numerous patterns and combinations, all working with greyscale. There is something fascinating and freeing in working without other colors for now. I can always add them in numerous ways down the road when I feel they become important to the idea for a piece. I see so many incredible ranges of hues in simple greys right now, for example, that I will enjoy exploring their subtlety and variety for a bit.


For the second "Pages" piece I've decided to cut the pages a half-inch larger in both directions -- 1.5" x 2 ", so it is possible to read whole words now, although their relationships remain ambiguous. Because I am more interested in the calligraphic look of the large text than creating a readable document or story, I enlarged this writing with the idea that the fragmented text would read as calligraphic marks rather than actual words.

I still have many more ideas for making fabric components, but have settled on the ones I'll use for the second piece, which will be twice the width and length of the first one. I'll be laying it and stitching it over the next week and will post the piece as it progresses. I thought it would be exactly the same as the first Pages piece, just larger, but am already "seeing" some ways I want to modify the patterns of rectangles for this new piece. The cutting down into little segments is tedious and time-consuming, but also very meditative because it is so repetitive. My mind plays with design and composition variations as I cut and stash each yard or so of fabric into small plastic storage baggies. I'm working on being patient, although my mind tends to leap ahead and wants to get right at the design and construction part. But making marks and patterns on cloth and then creating the little page components are what I'm doing for now.


What fascinates me most about this exploration is that I turned to visual arts over 10 years ago to get as far away as possible from words and written language. Visual art has been a way for me to go to what I call my No Words Place, an intuitive world of color, pattern, line and shape. I find it hard to speak or think coherently when I'm in this mode -- sometimes there's a kind of instinctual monosyllabic thought chain -- "Here.... blue...." --then that fades and there's just movement and gesture and strong instinct.

Not that working from instinct always work out initially! Even though at that moment it feels like I am connecting to some incredible creative wellspring, the intuitive flash abates and I'm left in my regular, thinking mind considering what I've just done and what needs to be done -- or undone -- next.