not a lazy suzen

So, rather than stressing myself out any further with things that clearly do not need stressing about, I’ve moved on to something completely different. I’ve been doing a lot of reading lately. Historical and scientific stuff about icebergs and tidal waves. It’s super fascinating stuff. Here are some iceberg facts that I can whip out at the top of my head:

• By the time an iceberg reaches the Grand Banks of Newfoundland, it has been travelling for over three years.
• Icebergs can founder unexpectedly making them pretty dangerous things to be around.
• Icebergs are made up of fresh water that is up to 15,000 years old which means that its the purest water around (and great for making vodka!)
• A growler, the smallest of the iceberg categories, is often the same size as a grand piano.
• Icebergs can travel 48km per day while a glacier travels about 7km per year.
• When an iceberg breaks from a glacier they call it “calving”.

I guess my interest in icebergs right now is linked to my general infatuation with loose foundations and home. Icebergs break off from large glaciers, spend years drifting into coves and harbours, sometimes getting grounded into place but most times they drift along with the current toward warmer water where they melt and shift and break apart. They visit but they never stay because it is geologically impossible for them to. It would be a little cheesy to say “I am like an iceberg” so I’m not going to make that my official statement. I will say that I am fascinated with the image of a house bolted onto an iceberg and wonder often what living on a berg would be like. It’d be a constant state of tension, I think, between the serenity of floating in the sea on your own private island and the anxiety of flipping over at any moment. My stomach is in knots just thinking about it.

This imagery is fairly new to me–a house on a berg. I have to do a bit more drawing to figure all the details out but the bare bones you see above is essentially what I’m envisioning. I have this inclination to translate this imagery into hooked mats, irregularly shaped and maybe even with other non-hooked elements. I am working on a test piece right now just to see if the imagery will work in this format. I have a pretty good feeling it will but want to be sure before I bite off way more than I can chew.

For this test piece I am working over an old piece of burlap left over from last semester when I was teaching myself how to hook. As a result, pretend the heart shape isn’t there. And also pretend that it is flipped to the left 90º and has a house latched onto it. Since this photo was taken a lot of things have been drawn and added to it. It’s like a big jumbly mess of Sharpie lines that will all make some kind of sense in the end.

Last week I ordered a new rug hooking frame. I’ve been dreaming of this frame for months now and I cannot wait to add it to my collection of studio equipment. No longer will I have to struggle with large wooden embroidery hoops that have the potential to destroy the rug as I am working on it. No longer will I have to keep screwing up my posture to balance the frame between my stomach and the edge of the table in order to work. Soon I will be free to make as irregular shape a rug as I want! Boo-ya!

In the meantime, however, I’m stuck with the hoop until I get that lovely box in the mail.

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.

hooking quidi vidi from suzen green on Vimeo with “Fireflies” by Jenn Grant.

Like interpreting drawings from months past!

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

hooking from suzen green on Vimeo.

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.