Monday 1 March 2010

The forest or the tree?

I will wait for you in the forest -- Side A

When I submitted my original proposal for the Calgary Allied Arts Foundation st[art] residency, I identified two projects that I would do in the space.

One was Craobh/Tuinn, the large Shetland-style lace shawl I knit last year that blocked out to six feet diagonally.

The other was a then-unnamed knitted installation that I had started fiddling around with, but really didn't have much enthusiasm for or final concept of. That changed, and fast, when I was notified that I had been awarded the residency!

I started by frogging* everything I had knitted so far, which, thankfully, wasn't much, and almost entirely commercial yarns I had plucked from my stash. The overwhelming quality they shared was the colour green.

(* Frogging is the knitterly term for pulling out expanses of already-knit work. Personally, until I joined a guild when I moved back to Calgary in 1997, I had never heard the term, but the fact that it references "rip it" is fairly obvious!)

I will wait for you in the forest -- Side B

Well, I finished it last Thursday and installed the work the next day. Unlike the original concept, this one is entirely handspun, with the yarns spun while I was in residence (except the yarns for the smallest and largest squares, which was spun last July during the Tour de Fleece). The piece is approximately 1 meter wide (a bit over a yard) and 70 cm or so (27 inches) high.

While it is in three dimensions, and there is no specific "right" side, I've had to give each view of it a name for identification purposes. The top picture is A and the bottom one is B, if you need to catagorize things that way....

But the title has, to some extent, eluded me: in various messages, the press announcement sent to the local paper to publicize the work, and discussions with friends and other artists, I've referred to it as either I will wait for you in the forest and I will look for you in the forest.

So which is it? I'm still not sure. But I need to figure that out soon, as I'm including pictures of it with the next residency application that I need to send out this week.

If you'd like to see the work up-close-and-personal, you can come down to the basement of Art Central (Room 6B, in Art Loop) First Thursday, March 4, from 5 to 8 p.m. (or until we run out of wine!) and check it out.

Addendum on the new-home search: it continues. We've seen one place that was the perfect size and layout but triggered severe allergies and was in an unsecured building; a basement suite without a private entrance, a proper kitchen, or a bathtub; and an apartment that had everything we wanted except my studio. The search continues....

And this week, this blog turns three human years old -- how many is that in computer years?

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