Stitchin Fingers

I created a page on here to get advice on lace making and share my pictures, get feedback etc. What a wonderful supportive community!!
here is my page----> CLICK HERE OK

fingors

I went back to fingers yesterday, oh how i heart jewellery now! it was my most hated subject in first year for the fact it required delicacy and patience. first year amanda was a dick (no offense).
The way the present jewellery there is just like a shop, nothing inventive at all but a lot of attention is paid to lighting and having clean plain spaces so that nothing detracts from the jewellery. I will need to do this in my hugely hug space and somehow make these tiny objects work on the huge white walls. I worry about people not seeing my work but lets be honest here do i REALLY care?

on the. chong, Liyen.

ch ch ch ch ch check it out------> liyenchong.com
This Auckland artist embroiders using her own hair. She went to art school in ChCH and it deals with issues she faced surrounding her cultural background, creating a new place for herself in NZ. I love the detail in her work, and that she stitches things many times to get them absolutely perfect. The skeleton she made stitched from her hair has her exact proportions. I think using a material like hair you have to have some element of self portraiture in it if it is your own. At first glance you can't tell that her work is made using human hair, i like that my work is not like this because i want to keep that feeling of abjection towards the hair as being of the body, cast off and rejected.

“I started using hair because it is an expression of language: the way you wear your hair says something about you; it’s filled with your DNA."-Liyen Chong SOURCE

Wunderkammer! ya!

A cabinet of curiosities is usually related to the collectors profession and contains exotic oddities aesthetically arranged, each piece has a story behind it. These miniature museums were an attempt to classify science and civilization while the world was still flat. A lot of these home-classifications were hybrids of science, religion and superstition that are defunct in terms of facts and artefacts from our history but still relevant for the imagination and thought processes that you can see ... artefacts of human thought and relationships, experience, I like to se what fascinated people hundreds of years ago, what they thought it related to, where it came from, their explanations and reasonings for it being there. Ok so Wunderkammer are really things that fascinate us and we oogle at them, as oppsed to a curiosity cabinet which seeks to analyse the mysteries of nature. It seems ridiculous that these cabinets could be thought of as scientific, fish head on rat body next to pig nose on cat face, next shelf; rocks and a piece of coral, all shaped like jesus and other religious figures, next shelf, 34 dead butterflies arranged like a flower. These cabinets attempted to collect, categorise and define things, looking for similarities and differences. go here! and read more about cabinets of curiosity and see some beautiful photographs of them.
It was pretty hip to be having one of these in the late 15th century, they usually contained little artifacts all related to a theme, the one below as you can see is crochet. and it rules.I think this cabinet belongs to this creative Genius at Wunderkammer, Jessica Polka. She makes crafty little things using crochet and other sewing sorts of things and they are all awesome! especially the mustaches.
examining, collecting, cataloguing well there goes a use for the old library catalogues. Im sure that word has a U in it??? Victorian Gilt is one GIANT (a BFG scale giant) cabinet of curiosities. Being a pre-cursor to museums a Wunderkammer would compliment my work, making an heirloom out of my hair a-la victorian hair jewellery to remember the dead ones when i'm not dead yet or even old for that matter. It would be cool to display my little artefacts of myself in one of these, you would still need a magnifying glass though :( This method of presentation is something i think i would excell at because my bedroom/house is full of little strange objects and pictures that are arranged just so, these just really resonate with me :)

Célio Braga

'Célio Braga does not make jewellery. He observes people and their interaction and gives a reaction through the objects he creates. Those pieces can sometimes be worn as a brooch or a necklace. Truly applied art: the object that poses questions and hands you suggestions can accompany you all day. As a recollection, a confrontation or an act of wilfulness.'-Ward Schrijver [source]

Sorry I'm not allowed to download his images but if you click the link above you can view them or see his website here. Unlike most of the other artist that use hair i have come across his use leaves the hair looking very messy and hairy, very visceral. His work deals with the fragility, mortality and vulnerability (same thing amanda same thiiiing) of the human body so materials that are discarded like hair really compliment this idea.
He has some photography work which has been cut back in to and looks like reptile skin rather than human, the photographs are ECU and have the same translucent greyish look that hair has when viewed close up, you know like vermicelli?? I love this guys work, love the artists he references, his materials, his objects, everything :)

Jenny Hart

Oh Unicorn
9" x 9", 2005
hair embroidered on leather

These are single strands of human hair (artist's own) embroidered on soft leather.

Jenny Hart makes embroidery look so cool, not that it was ever un-cool, not since i took it up anyway. She is the founder of the Sublime Stitching website which was launched in 2001 and with its cutesy slick un-granny fanny like design who wouldn't want to stick a needle in something. stick stick stick. She describes making the above piece with hair 'like embroidering with air', i know exactly what she means, you can't see or feel it until it breaks then its squinting over your creation trying to find the loose end. She is a fan of embroidery that serves no function other than to embelish which is what my work is doing, well mine is art so it was never going to serve a purpose hmm. The juxtaposition of human and animal materials is awesome but something i wouldn't do myself because I don't believe I can justify using animal products in my work, even found leather although i did plan to use a pair of leather boots earlier this year but the lame tattooist never got back to me. puck you. i think i will still make that work at some stage i just need to think about where i'm sourcing the material from because its kinda sorta permanent...

"La Llorona" ©2005 Jenny Hart

Her website is HERE!

Mona Hatoum again...

"Keffieh," by Mona Hatoum, (1993-99), human hair on cotton, 1993-1999, collection Peter Norton, Santa Monica

Mona Hatoum uses Human hair as well as images and footage of her own body in her work. In the above piece she has interwoven pieces of women's hair into a traditional Arab head scarf worn only by males. Issues of gender and suppression surround this piece. There is something beautiful and at the same time grotesque about wearing the hair of another human as decoration and I find this object quite unsettling and repulsive. The use of hair makes the work quite intimate and is a familiar thing as we all have it although it shifts to being uncomfortable when taken out of context and removed from our bodies.

"The macho style is an externalized response to the powers of domination; but it is also a form of domination turned inward, within the community poised against the presence of women, whose voices are either repressed, or sublimated in the cause of struggle. Hatoum's feminized headscarf reveals this disavowal of the place of women and re-inserts their point of view through the embroidered strands of hair that hang loose beyond the boundary, breaking the pictorial grid of the material in the process of redefining the symbolic surface of political struggle." source

A series of etchings called 'Hair, there and everywhere' are collections of hair which look as though some have been arranged into patterns and others just laid there. You can make out images yourself and imagine what creates could be hiding amongst the interweaving curling lines but you can't quite tell if she had intentionally made images amongst the hair.This work is very intense and involves a lot of human hair, I would love to know who it belonged to and how she obtained it because this has a lot of implications. I like to think that it is her own, that in a way she suffered for her art and what she believes in, putting a part of herself into the work. This seems to have been the case with previous works such as 'Corps étranger' (1994). I love the format of the video in this work, the close up shots and the feeling of grotesqueness and ‘Deep Throat’ (1996), installations that use endoscopic journys through the interior landscape of the artist’s own body.

This work also used leather and beeswax, materials from animals in conjunction with human derived material. The leather is durable, the human hair seems fragile, not holding the suitcases together, awkwardly fumbling across the gap.This work 'Van Gogh's Back' (1995) is very light hearted and fun. It reminds me of playing in the bath with shampoo in my hair and making fun shapes. I love her different uses of hair and the Human body, all of them have vastly different effects on me weather that be repulsion, fascination or just very thought provoking.

More Exhibitions

Wallace Art Awards-Aotea Centre
I went to see the shortlisted ones that didn't make the final before moving on to the main ones I guess you would call them. Its a shame they weren't displayed in a bigger gallery, Amy's work was up so high on the wall that I couldn't see any detail, the same with other works which had awful lighting or were just overshadowed by other works. Who cares, i saw works from a lot of my old lecturers which was awesome! Jim Cooper, Michelle Beevors, Peter Cleverly AMY POTENGER! yeah! I loved the painting of the little boy with his arm cut off, the lighting and colour were tumeke. There were heaps of paintings come t think of it, in comparison to how many of my peers are painters anyway. I loved the lego tree made of pine, and the...rest of it, the paint skeleton was cool!! go and see the exhibition.

Forget me-Unitec
well... It really shined through that this was photography and not Fine Arts. I was a little disappointed with the exhibition not being enough like an exhibition, I can see now why we put so much emphasis on resolution and presentation. All of the photos were great, but they were all A4 sized so you couldn't see any detail, they looked amazing when a few of them were being projected but other than that they really didn't have much impact. Technically the photos were brilliant ron, and after talking to one of the students who explained the course I could see why the exhibition was the way it was. They are not encouraged to extend beyond the use of photography, presentation has to be in the same format obviously and this was so restricting!!! I also found that the images didn't really relate to each other or flow a lot of the time, they just pick a few technically beautiful photographs and put them on A4 mount on a shelf. i blame unitec and its air of insane asylum and wahine written on the toilet door. oh and the catalogue.... it was ll green!! it did look cool but i can understand why people were poo poo about it, why have it green when its a showcase of technical photography? What about the poor guy that spends hours getting colours right only to see it apple green and white in the catalogue???

Dust 1.2- AUT Gallery
Stopped in here passing by, there was a thing made from pig stomachs which i found FOUL, little shrivelled gloves made from piggy insides, no thank you.

'aren't these great?!'
'oh, the little globes inside the glass houses, yeah.'
'what do you like about them?'
'ummm, the glass is cut really nicely, it can be hard to cut glass straight'
(thinking back to cut feet in first year)

'aren't these great?!'
'no, they're shit. The paint job on those globes looks ridiculous, and the glass houses look manufactured they are so perfect'
'what do you like about them'
'nothing, it's a one liner... much like the inverse dog house from Site06'
*shit eating polite grin*

Gallery Visits

I spent a day in town last week looking around galleries in the central city and there were some amazing exhibitions on.
John Ward Knox 'Toward a still Life' was showing at the Tim Melville Gallery and was outstanding for me. I remember his work from one of the graduate catalog, that little ripple in the linoleum, so subtle that I didn't see it at the show!! When I walked in to the gallery I thought he had painted fabric on to the wall but it is actually carved straight from the wall. READ ALL ABOUT IT and see photos on his BLOG<----(click it) His drawings with biro pens are stunning!! dreamy detailed feathery not all there blobby fluffy strokes. yums. I visited Fingers and saw a lot of the same jewellers I had seen at the NZ jewellers show a couple of months ago. Maybe its just me but I always see a lot of NZ influence in jewellery, maybe its just this gallery and every other gallery I have visited but the influence seems to be very strong. There were some things i liked but I've lost the piece of paper I wrote the artists names on. fork. There were some really nice embroidered pieces and things that used a lot of textiles and sewing techniques which was good to see. Amanda likes this. Sandra Bushby is one of these artists, i love her embroidery and felt work! You can see some of her photos on the fingers website, I'm too scared to post pictures of NZ artists work because it's probably breaching copyright and it won't harm you people to click the link.

Oedipus Rex Gallery.. well, i loved the paintings in the second room, not to say I didn't enjoy the paintings in the first BUT the second room reminded me of Emma Catastrophic so naturally I was drawn to that. The Paintings were by Lorene Taurerewa and are muted colours and very simple figures. The empty space around them gives them an eerie ethereal feeling.Lorene Taurerewa

Story 3 (Detail)
Oil on canvas 122 x 122 cm

listening to kasabian and its so frickin sweet

I posted on Stitchin Fingers asking for help making lace and got responses within a couple of hours! The ladies are all so helpful and encouraging :) Here are a few tips i picked up
-Use jewellery crimps and wire for the spangles
-Use hat pins for separating bobbins when not in use
-Print the prickings on to light blue paper and cover with clear contact
-12 bobbins is not enough! I need 24-30
-A round pillow of 18-24" is the ideal size, and can be made from polyethylene, felt, wadding (old woolen blankets) and cotton with a plywood base

worth your time?

I bought these four place mats with tatted edges at the op shop on Khyber pass. A lot of what you find is machine made but these are authentic crafted one of a kind masterpieces. I feel so sorry for women...

Victorian Gilt

For the past six months i have been travelling through Epsom on a bus every single day. The bus stops right outside a shop called Victorian Gilt,(<----Don't go to their website it uses comic sans) it looks like an op shop but you can tell it's expensive so I never went in there until yesterday.

THE LACE!!!! oh my fucking god was there some lace. every kind you can imagine in varying stages of decay, completion and skill. From handkerchiefs to table cloths, tatted collars, shirt cuffs, e.v.e.r.y.t.h.i.n.g. It was intense. The shop looks a little bit like my bedroom, masses of organised piles of amazingness, The lady who owns it knew exactly where to find everything which was amazing you can't even see the walls and only small sections of the floor.

Looking through the piles of lace it was a little overwhelming, hundreds of thousands of hours of work were right here in a jumbled pile in Epsom. $8 for a little irish lace doily that would have taken weeks to make with a skill and neatness that would have taken years to perfect. $8? It's not art is it? One lady in the store who was looking at a hand made lace tablecloth was shocked when told it was $250. If you were to pay someone what they were worth to make that i hate to think what it would cost. She probably then went to living and giving and bought a mass produced pile of synthetic prettiness that was oh so not contemporary. I wonder how much machine made lace can be produced in the time it takes to make a lace handkerchief? One particular one i saw was made for a wedding, the thread was finer than strands of my hair and I could barely see the stitches it it was so elaborate. Dizzying. I tried to think of this handkerchief while i was stitching with hair earlier today and the hair was breaking and catching on things and i was frowning and fuck fuck you-ing. Ladies don't swear. I have realised I have absolutely no patience.

I want to go back to the shop and ask her if I may photograph some of the laces because they are just tooooo beautiful for words. There is also an unfinished piece there which would have been huge, it had many different styles of lace within it and i would bet $8 that the woman who was making it was too blind or too dead to complete it. It was great to see the process involved, the outine, the backing on the lace, the drawn pattern template. awestruck

Andres Serrano

Pretty, reminds me a little of the colours in Nicholas Lampert's work, the surreal landscape that is formed from extreme close ups of objects. I wish he had come up with a better title. I would have suggested Fecoids. The titles of the individual works are awesome though; evil shit, Freudian shit, mother shit, self portrait, Hieronimus Bosch Shit... the list goes on.
His photos are quite intense and involve a lot of bodily fluids and rude bits.

Ever heard 'rude box' by robbie williams? ridiculous.

Serrano does not digitally manipulate his photos, they are all technically excellent and he is right to say that 'effects are always better when they're real'-source


Andres Serrano on Artnet is the best place to see images and find information on this BC.
This article is also what i would call ka pai, 'The interpretation of Dreams'... gives a good description of his latest works and what it is like to see them in real life and larger than a computer thumbnail.

Melanie Bilenker

Melanie Bilenker

Brooch (2004)
1 3/8" x 7/8" x 3/8"

Materials: Gold, sterling silver, ivory piano key laminate, epoxy resin, hair
Thanking you Emily!
I love the everyday MUNDANE AS scenes depicted in Bilenker's works, and the delicate thin lines of hair make them delicate and liney. You don't realize how thin hair is until you try to weave or sew with it using singular strands what a fucking mare i may as well sew it in to my fingertips i prick them so often.

In Bed: Brooch (2004) Still In Bed: Brooch (2004)
7/8" x 1 1/8" x 5/16" 7/8" x 1 1/8" x 3/8"

I prefer her earlier works to her more recent ones from 2008. I'm not such a fan of the faces and portraits in her work i think the more abstract ones appeal to me. This woman must be so incredibly patient as would be the case with any jeweller. I think her hair is straight which would make things 100 times easier. maybe i should straighten mine then try and work with it? I think the curliness is important because if i am adamant that i use my own hair i may as well incorporate features of it. The curls make it form wicked swirly patterns, fluffy ball and crazy 3D chaotic shapes. My hair is so not mundane maybe i should make trippy ridiculous patterns with it. so art.

mummies

Neo-Maternalism: Contemporary Artists’ Approach to Motherhood
by Sharon Butler

I came across this article from a link on Kate Kretz's blog page. I'm not about to go and have children but from looking at feminist art and what it means to be female i think pregnancy and child birth is quite relevant. Its crazy to think that Judy Chicago worked for five years making 'The Birth Project' and yet never had any of her own children, it almost feels like she is lying? The birth project included artists from... wait for it... as far away as NEW ZEALAND quote unquote well how about that! I can't find the name of the NZ artist though. tear.Birth Tear/Tear from 'The Birth Project". 1982
Thompson, Jane. 20"x 27" Embroidery on Silk

History. its necessary i guess.

Victorian Hair jewellery and hair in general, read this website---> CLICK ME! i'm not going to type a summary of it because
a)can't be fucked
b) pointless
c) im listening to music and typing would distract me
Ladies! Ladies use to keep their hair from their brushes and put it in a hair receiver. odd. the hair was then used to stuff pin cushions or make the afore mentioned jewellery. mean. Another use for this dead hair was to make ratts, which essentially are giant hair balls that were stuffed inside your hair do to make you look like Amy Winehouse. This was because back in the day they had very little in the way of makeup and everyone was heinous so they would style their hair elaborately in hope of attracting the male gaze. Sounds kind of eew but then again it is your own hair and it was dead on your head at one stage its just that its now in ball form. om nom nom?

LACE IN FASHION
Well.... before the 16th century lace was for decorating household furnishings, by the 17th century it was all lace collars, cuffs, veils, you name it... It had no function whatsoever than to decorate, enhance, embellish and distinguish the upper class who wore it. It required great skill and great lengths of time and patience to create lace so it is no suprise that it became a symbol for the wealthy. With the industrial revolution beginning in the late 18th century many lace makers lost their jobs as they were replaced by machines... their craft was rendered almost useless. In the 20th century lace began to be used more for undergarments and subtle embellishments on clothing rather than flambouyant cuffs and collars. The 1980's ruined lace making it tacky and whorish. I'm talking out my ass but its kinda true

original flavour means what exactly?

Sara Bomans

Coolest hair embroidery ever, very contemporary, digital influence, themes of abjection, reading her artist statement on the saatchi site she covers a lot of the issues i want to explore in my own work. Her embroidery is more like drawing, and the hair still looks like hair trailing of the page with a life of its own. She has a facebook page made of hair, and a second life symbol. She pretty much ticks every box there is to tick in the whatamandalikes category.The Artist. Human Hair and paper, 30X30cm. 2008

Kate Kretz

Insane textile works, Dita will love them! vagina dentata om nom nom nom scary... her hair embroidery is amazing! inspiring... it has a repulsive feel to it, and of course very feminist themes. Read this post she has written it is so beautiful!!! makes you think, and makes you take a second look at her work and your own, what inspires you, what is real, what matters and what you feel like you are qualified to say... read it and you'll know what i mean :)Threat of Heavy Weather (detail). 20X30X10" Human hair on pillow case, pillow. 2003

Laura Normandin

Best website design i have seen today, usually craft sites look like word document and have bright red text and are horrific to try and navigate but this one was epic! You can tel she doesn't work with hair specifically as the works she has posted pale in comparison to others i mention... they're still quite nice though. Trivet 1. 4X6" Human Hair on Linen. 2003

hairyness is godliness

Here are some websites i found where people have uses hair to craft things, embroidered, woven etc.

Lindsey Adelman
LOVE her work, need to spend more time looking through her blog... more performance is involved and her work moves away from craft a little. Her drawings are cool, they look like the patterns you find on 60's formica bench tops. I wonder how different curly hair is to straight hair when you try drawing with it???

Lush 01. 6X9". Human Hair on Paper. Lindsey Adelman

Jennifer Perry
I love her 'container' works, the clean lines with stray hairs shooting off in all directions are beautiful. I don't like her embroidered versions of Goya's 'Los desastres de la Guerra' so much, they just aren't as interesting! They are too much like the hair works of the presidents i mentioned below, focused on looking perfect and not really letting the hair do its own thing and look like hair. HAIR
Container, detail, 2000, 22" x 30", human hair sewn into paper


Portraitr Of American Presidents (Egnlish Vresion)
they use comic sans. booooo. boourns.

Nina Sparr

This makes me cry, my work will never be this good!!! Where the fuck do you get that much hair from? I guess she would be using hair that has been cut from your head and not manky shampooey tangled malting amanda hair collected in a falafel container.


These are exactly like the Victorian hair jewellery i have seen photos of, so detailed and beautiful, the hair is so smooth! Maybe i should try straightening mine then malting as it tends to just curl up and go spastic when i try working with it. sigh.

Anne Wilson

Stumbled across this woman through a google picture search of lace, then stitchin fingers, then forums, then then then and THEn here is her website.
She uses hair, lace, wore, thread- very domestic crafty materials CRAFT
She created a website for her art project Hairinquiry from 1996-1999 that asked the questions, 'how does it feel to loose your hair? What does it mean to cut your hair? After reading a few of the stories it seems that it is not that uncommon to collect hair you have been shedding. I'M NORMAL! now i want the biggest hairball i don't think i'll top this lady tho.

lace on your face

so, this looks so hard i hate to think how shit house it will be trying to do this with hair. i like the narratives within some of the ,ace, the plain decorative stuff i find boring although it is very finely made. my lace will have some big D&M story woven in to it, not saying that these don't of course but yeah. art

Carson Fox

Carson Fox 'Pink Slut' Mixed media, 30w" x 32h" x 5 ½d ". 2004

Brooke showed me some works by this lady, the above is less relevant to my own work but totally awesome. She makes these for people she knew that have passed away, i think they're great. reminds me of the song by that aussie comedian, 'even cunts turn in to top blokes after death' or whatever it says. funny.Filigree #8 (installed at Jersey City Museum)
7’ x 30’, wire, artificial hair, 2006

Her filigrees are made with synthetic hair, here is her artists statement taken from her website

I am interested in beauty, but I mistrust it. Instead, I look for beauty that exists in tension with the materials or the circumstances that invent it.

The selection of material is very important to me, and no material is too mean or humble if it is expressive. I appreciate non-traditional items, and I work on several things at once, often in series. As a consequence, my work usually falls into distinct groupings based on my material or media choices.

My series of “filigree” sculpture was originally inspired by Victorian hair sculpture and jewelry. Historically, these objects were crafted out of the hair of a deceased loved one and acted as a memento of the departed. My own sculptural works are elaborately crafted tapestries of delicate, hair-thin wire that bring to mind lace work on a large scale. Often these objects are hung in such a way that allows the resulting shadows to become important elements of the work. In these sculptures, while the decorative patterning may soothe, the hair like materials impart a sense of dread and mourning.

I Know About Your Broken Heart
wire, artificial hair, 25.5" x 106", 2004

I like the words woven in to thefake hair, if i were to do this it would be a lame quote of some sort thats meaning is subverted by the use of material... or something... just... whatever....I realised today that i will have to work on a much smaller scale than what i had planned to unless i want to spend 80 hours a week fiddling with hair. ufuk.

Fencing

Google. aaaah yes google lace amanda that will get you started. Pretty cool fence i must say, must be a little tricky to bend the wire. what about making a lace fence instead of fence lace? I thought about this before seeing this design and still may do it as a little experiment

Lace Fence from Dutch Design House Demakersvan

Lace Fence is a design of Dutch Design House Demakersvan. It is a high-end metal fabric that gives new insights in how you can create unique environments.
It combines the ancient craft of lace making with the industrial chainlink fence. Every fence is unique in its design by its craft and assembled patterns, which come in a variety of themes. From antique lace floral to contemporary designs and custom art patterns.
Lace Fence shows how something which was meant purely functional can also be decorative. Hostility versus kindness, industry versus craft.-http://www.lacefence.com/