SHIMMER: Virginia Fleck's Can-Tab Moth


Post consumer can-tabs, safety pins, woven backing mounted on wooden substrate. 
Photo Credit: Tyeschea West

Virginia Fleck made this work from post-consumer aluminum can tabs. 

She notes that, "I was at a scrap-yard, seven months pregnant, perusing scrap metal, when I came upon a treasure-chest- sized bin overflowing with gleaming silver aluminum tabs. The sight of these tabs, separated from the cans, sparkling in the bright sunlight was like a mirage among the rusted scrap. I was overcome by their unexpected beauty and traded the few dollars crumpled in the pocket of my maternity dress for a bucket of sparkly tabs." 

I am in awe of the power of serendipity, the craft that went into this piece, and the luminous, intricate beauty the intersection of the two has produced. 

Post consumer can-tabs, safety pins, woven backing mounted on wooden substrate. 
Photo Credit: Tyeschea West

DELICIOUS STITCHES: Natalie Chanin's Soul, Stories, and Stitchery

A generous gift card from a friend allowed me to treat myself to the next visual book on my list, clothing designer and textile historian Natalie Chanin's Embroidery: Threads and Stories from Alabama Chanin and the School of Making (Abrams, 2022)....and what a treat it is.

In addition to acting as chief designer of the sustainable clothing company called Alabama Chanin, Chanin has made a short film focused on the stories of quilters, collaborated with a variety of artists and organizations in her home community of Florence, Alabama and beyond, and founded The School of Making, which offers textile supplies and a variety of workshops. Embroidery: Threads and Stories is her fifth book.

Before I rhapsodize, let me declare myself. I don't sew, stitch, quilt or embroider. Tempted as books like this one or Kaffe Fassett's occasionally make me, I'm fairly certain never will.

Happily, that doesn't matter. This isn't so much a book about how to sew as about how to live. Live soulfully. Live creatively. Live sustainably. Live generously. Live in a way that balances self and community, past and present, present and future, patience and eagerness, beauty and utility. Full of resonant images and searching stories, Chanin's journey speaks to, witnesses and embodies, all of that.

Plus, she's a born storyteller. The Introduction begins with the line, "Some years ago, I stood on a stage in New York City and believed I was dying" and ends with this: "Every step I've taken since that day has led me closer to home. Twenty-one years later, I sit here and think that this may not be redemption, but it looks like something that veers in that direction. Creative process is filled with fear and vulnerability, and yet, we rise up every day and keep making stories." Amen, sister.

Double plus, it's a gorgeous book. Quotes from Chanin and others set on images of fabric or knitting. Two-page spreads devoted to small things like a traveling sewer's roll and big things like the Southern sky. Textures everywhere: a boll of cotton, a jacket embroidered with a story, hand-scribbled notebook pages, a bevy of old bone needles...and of course, stitches and stitchery galore, photographed so perfectly I could swear it was possible to tug at the threads.

Wisdom, story, beauty. In my world, a book doesn't get better than that.


From Embroidery:
Threads and Stories from Alabama Chanin and the School of Making
(c) Natalie Chanin 2022


From Embroidery: 
Threads and Stories from Alabama Chanin and the School of Making
(c) Natalie Chanin 2022


From Embroidery: 
Threads and Stories from Alabama Chanin and the School of Making
(c) Natalie Chanin 2022



From Embroidery: 
Threads and Stories from Alabama Chanin and the School of Making
(c) Natalie Chanin 2022


Picturing ALICE EASTWOOD

The many accomplishments of pioneering botanist Alice Eastwood (1859 - 1953) include publishing or co-publishing over three hundred scientific articles, authoring hundreds of plant names, helping to add hundreds of thousands of specimens to the herbarium of the California Academy of Sciences, and saving priceless Academy books and specimens just before the CAS building was destroyed in the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake.

I've been inspired by Eastwood ever since botanist Peter Raven, who had the good fortune to meet Eastwood at the CAS as a child, made me aware of her. Joyous and adventurous, brilliant and kind, her personality shines in her papers, scientific work, and the memories of those whose lives she touched. As always with these pieces in progress, it was a delight to think about her, her life and her legacy while at work.

There are wonderful images of Eastwood throughout her adult life. I chose the larger one below, which was taken around 1910, because I loved both her expression and that wonderful period hat. The smaller image below captures Eastwood examining the earthquake's fault trace near Olema, CA in 1906.

The plant I've used here is Fritillaria eastwoodiae or Eastwood's fritillary. In my collage, the  bottom label acknowledges her standard botanical name.

It felt odd to incorporate a book about birds in a collage about a botanist, yet something drew me very strongly to this cover. As I worked I realized that its wing-feathers and eggs seemed to speak of the role that teaching and mentorship played in her legacy. "My desire is to help, not to shine," she is quoted as saying; certainly, she helped hatch and nurture many "baby birds" in the scientific community.


Alice Eastwood, pioneering botanist. Sources:
Eastwood photograph
Eastwood observing earthquake fault
Fritillaria eastwoodiae, permissions pending
The Home Life of Wild Birds, 1901 (book cover), permissions pending

WOMEN ARTIST WEDNESDAYS: Hortense Haudebourt-Lescot

Hortense Haudebourt-Lescot
Self-Portrait, 1825
Louvre Museum

Haudebourt-Lescot is believed to have modeled
her self-portrait on this image:
Raffaello Santi
Louvre Museum


 

Picturing DAPHNE DU MAURIER

Daphne du Maurier's personal papers speak of her sense of the duality in her own nature, her sense of herself as existing in more than one identity. This sense of the divisions in her own nature, as well as the nature of those alternate or suppressed selves, was necessarily something she shared with few people. Not surprisingly, secret selves and doubles throughout du Maurier's work. It's explicit in du Maurier novels including Rebecca, The Scapegoat, The House on the Strand, My Cousin Rachel and Frenchman's Creek, but it shimmers to some degree in all of her other texts as well.

The background of this piece uses digitally altered stock photographs representing Rebecca's two contrasting motifs and their symbolic colors: the blood-red rhododendrons that represent sexuality and the shifting blue-greens of the sea, which promises both purification and danger. The quotation too is from Rebecca; the second Mrs. De Winter thinks these words about her predecessor, but as I re-read them recently it struck me that they could equally well speak to the ways that du Maurier, and even all of us, think of our alternate and possible selves.

The photograph of the author was taken by Bassano Ltd., the photography studio originally founded by Alexander Bassano, in 1930, when she was about twenty-three. All of the images in this series held by the UK's National Portrait Gallery (I have used this one under their non-commercial Creative Commons contract) are striking. I appreciated this one in particular for its unreadable expression and the way du Maurier seems to be looking over her shoulder at someone or something. When our selves include identities that are secret, wariness—the habit of scanning the world for risk, of checking others' reactions—is perhaps inevitable.


 Daphne du Maurier ©Suzanne Fox 2020
May not be downloaded or reproduced without permission
Sources: stock and personal photographs plus
Author portrait by Bassano Ltd. from the National Portrait Gallery

THROWBACK THURSDAY: Felix and Ernestine pretend to fly

Félix Nadar (Gaspard-Félix Tournachon),
Self-Portrait with Wife Ernestine, c. 1865

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