So, I’ve been hooking a mat when I’ve been too annoyed with the giant sweater. Mostly, I’ve just been too excited about the new tilting lap frame I received–it’s pretty much impossible for me to resist playing with a new toy, no matter how much work I have to do. This mat is pretty intuitive since it is more or less a sample for bigger works. I’ve been having a bit of a hard time figuring out colours–I keep hooking and then ripping stuff out, only to re-hook everything again. Working with somewhat representational imagery is hard but I’m letting my naiveté take the reigns. You can’t really fudge lack of skill. Heh.
My sweater is almost complete. I only have one more sleeve to knit and then I get to weave in all those pesky ends. I’ll be photographing it for installation and taking some action shots of it being worn before I send it off to the gallery. While I won’t be attending the exhibition opening myself (thanks to being a super poor graduate student), I’ve been informed that there will be some documentation taking place. I’ll post it here as soon as I get more information.
In other news, tonight is Nuit Blanche here in Montreal and I’m trying to figure out what to attend. I’ll probably pop the Belgo to see what’s happening throughout the galleries there but mostly I’m interested in attending the performances in nearby churches (one choir performance and another pipe organ event) but we’ll see how far I get. Last week I got lazy and didn’t go to any events, blaming it on the subzero temperatures, but this year I have no excuse–It’s 5º above zero, it’s freakin’ balmy out there.
So, in a bit of a temperamental rage, I did something dramatic that caught many of my studio peers off guard:
I sliced up the hooked mat I’ve been so diligently working on. I didn’t even think twice about it, I just whipped out those scissors and didn’t look back. Why would I do such a thing? Well, it was after a studio visit with a prof and fellow students when we all kind of decided that the imagery was really restricted by the frame of the mat. It just wasn’t vast enough–not nearly enough tension. So, out came the scissors. I still don’t think it’s all that successful but it’s a helluva lot better than it was before. At least now I can play with perspective and tension.
While my actions were a little rash, some good did come out of it. I’ve decided that for the time being rug hooking is not suited for this kind of exact imagery. My skills with a hook aren’t nearly up to par to achieve the results I’m happy with. Plus, in order to get the scale and tension I want so badly, the mat would have to be like a million feet long and I don’t have the time to invest in something like that. I’ve come to realize that hooking is much better for other things.
Over the summer I did a tiny series of drawings entitled Pond & Lake where I sketched bodies of water around my hometown and wrapped them in yarn. Now I see the drawings as a great jumping off point for a larger series of things, more specifically hooked mats! I really think that the nature of rug hooking, especially with wool yarns instead of fabric, suits this better than the househauling imagery I had attempted earlier.
So I’m using all shades of blues and purples to give Quidi Vidi Lake a watery, stained-glass feeling. I think the reason I am loving this much more than the other hooked rug I was working on a few weeks ago is that I feel like I am drawing with the yarn. It’s a lot like embroidery. Unlike the mat before, hooking lines to give the illusion of rope is exactly the same procedure as drawing. Thin, delicate lines that overlap and collide. When the mat is finished, I’ll be hemming the burlap so it can be hung on the wall vertically. It’ll have this strange body-like quality to it. Ambiguous is what I’m aiming for.
Needless to say this thing is taking me a little while to do. I’ve been breaking up the obsessive task of hooking lines with drawing in effort to give my hands a rest. Unfortunately, I believe drawing is worse for my hands than knitting and hooking combined! Oh well, the pain was worth it:
I’ve decided that the househauling imagery is better suited for very detailed large scale drawing. I’m totally digging the results:
I think the scale definitely works with this. And! I’ve gotten so excited about it that I already have two more drawings sketched out and waiting to be pursued. The tricky thing, though, is trying to figure out where to trim the paper and how to hang the drawing without causing too much damage with pins and clips. Plus, I really don’t want to distract away from the delicacy of the drawing with giant metal clips. I’ve never had to figure this kind of stuff out until now. In the past, I’ve always done sculptural/installation/wearable stuff, avoiding the wall as much as possible but now I’ve become dependent on it. My, how the tables have turned!
Anyway, that’s my little update for now. I’m hard at work from now until Dec 9th and then I’ll be breathin’ easy until Christmas. I’ll update some more once things get a little further along
See, the thing about hooking a mat is that it appeals to my obsessive side. It’s a lot like eating those free baskets of homemade potato chips at the Hotel lounge on Rue de la Montagne off Ste. Catherine: the saltiness and creepy onion taste makes you want to drink more which in turn makes you want to eat more chips. A vicious and highly dehydrating cycle that won’t stop until some outside/uncontrollable force makes it stop. In the case of those hotel lounge chips, usually the end of Happy Hour means no more chips and no more cheap drinks so everyone heads home. When it comes to hooking a mat, the only thing that has been forcing me to stop are my hands as they kink up over the stress of holding a rug hook for five hours straight.
Needless to say, I think I am becoming a hooker. Ahem. Everything about this process has been so exciting for me because it’s coming to me as easily as knitting (but with a much shorter learning curve, thank goodness!). I’ve always been able to produce exactly what I want with knitting. I get an idea, do a little sketch, and start knitting. When everything is done, it looks pretty much exactly the way I was expecting. For me, knitting is a given. What really excites me is that mat hooking is going along that same path. I think I have found another way to work (and another way to totally destroy my hands with repetitive stress injuries…sigh).
Anyway. Even though I’m so excited about hooking a mat, I’ve decided to step away from it for just a little while. I have a lot of other things to do and mat hooking has become a pretty good diversion from more pressing matters. Like working on a presentation/paper about Liza Lou and Janet Morton. One of the easy things about this presentation topic is that I did a lot of research/writing about these ladies in undergrad, I just have to come up with a more critical approach to reading the work (my biggest struggle). The fun part with that is I’m crocheting cookies for the potluck part of the presentation, continuing my pattern of bringing in food that people can’t eat. Heh.
