"The Thread's theThing," for artist Patricia Resseguie

Patricia Resseguie

CQA's March 8 guest speaker, artist Patricia Resseguie of Camano Island, may have had no formal art training before entering the field in 1990…but she's surely made up for that in the 15 years since! In her talk, "Material Risks," Resseguie described her willingness to try every type of material that she came across as she let her creativity come forth.

Often, Resseguie will start a piece doing something she's never done before: "Everything that happens in my pathway always moves the work forward," she said. In her earliest work—done at a community arts center workshop—she experienced working with clay sculpture and was hooked. "This was the first art I'd done since elementary school," she said with a laugh.

(Clockwise from upper left) Pieces in plaster, felt, sisal

The clay soon gave way to other materials, including plaster, sisal, felt, etc. Once she had created a body of work she applied to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago…and was accepted, finally earning an MFA. Here she experimented with an even wider variety of materials including, in several pieces, stretched hog gut! 

The red is stretched hog gut!

Continuing in the graduate program at the School, Resseguie had a studio that featured a large window overlooking Lake Michigan. One day while looking at the view, she focused in on the smudged glass itself and noticed a liberal sprinkling of fingerprints there and on the windowsill.

Resseguie began to collect fingerprints...

"I became fascinated with fingerprints and how these tiny fragments of human identity look like topographical maps," she related, "and with fingerprint dust, just like 'CSI,' I lifted some prints and began a series of collaged prints."

...ultimately turning the prints into collages.

Some of these pieces feature details filled in with a Sharpie on a panel of organza floating in front of the original print, to produce desired depth and shadow.

Detail of a piece with organza overlay to create shadows

 Later pieces in this series have physical "wrinkles" that resemble physical landscapes; she achieves this effect with thread that, once woven into the work, will shrink with heat.

Heat-shrinkable thread creates topographic relief

Another unusual material caught Resseguie's attention as well. "I was unpacking some delivered furniture and became fascinated with the packing materials--corrugated cardboard with a hexagonal, honeycomb structure." Combining the cardboard with beeswax and paraffin, she created two large-scale pieces, the first representing the life of a queen bee: "Maiden Flight to Killing Drone." Another piece, "Losing You," was created at a time of personal loss.

Honeycomb corrugated cardboard in a large sculptural piece

 

"Losing You"...created with corrugated cardboard, beeswax and paraffin

Labels from consumer products provided the raw materials for a wall hanging now on display at the Schack Art Center in Everett as part of the NW Designer Craftsman exhibit "Tangible Evidence." Resseguie used the labels to create a sort of net, but then found that the piece sagged too much to be properly displayed. The solution turned out to be ironing the net onto a piece of Pellon interfacing, then painstakingly cutting away the Pellon to open up the "holes" in the piece.

Piece created from consumer labels, once stabilized for hanging

 

Detail of labels piece

Next, Resseguie began with the material that now marks the majority of her work: thread, of all kinds. Beginning with an old, second-hand sewing machine (since replaced with a modern home-sewing machine), she started experimenting with free-motion embroidery of thumbprints on silk fabrics. Her series "Of Eyes" ranges from those of humans to those of birds, done with dense threadwork on fabric, measuring either 4x4 inches or 2x2 inches: large-scale eyes in small-scale pieces. Her "Lichen" series, where the sizes are 3x3 inches, also features dense threadwork. 

"Wind," thread piece that led to the "Of Eyes" series

"Crawl," in the "Of Eyes" series

"Squawk," left, and "Startle" in the "Of Eyes" series

 

Two pieces from the "Lichens" series, each 3" square

Soon she began experimenting with the available varieties of dissolve-away stabilizing materials and bobbin threads, with the result that much of her current work consists primarily of thread—lots and lots of thread! Resseguie attends classes at the North Cascades Institute each year, fascinated with the mosses, lichens and other natural elements of the Institute's forest/mountain-foothills setting.

With this inspiration she has created a number of complex, delicate, hanging installations that are created entirely of thread once the supporting dissolvable "stabilizer" material has been washed away. Some of the current pieces in this genre are what Resseguie calls her "hobbit holes," spongy-looking masses of silk threads (7.5 miles in some cases!) over an armature.

Time-consuming? Yes, and then some…anywhere from 150 to 300 hours of stitching can go into these works. Yet viewer reaction to her pieces means a lot to Resseguie, and she tells of what she calls her "hubris piece"—11 feet tall, created with 69.8 miles of thread. But when she found that "viewers were looking at this from the head and not the heart," she related, "I took it down and took it apart." (This elicited a few gasps from the listeners!)

Resseguie has survived two major life events where "all moorings were cut." She had open-heart surgery six years ago, then, three years later, literally dropped dead during an exercise class and was rescued by the use of a defibrillator. It took her a year to return to health. She was just starting on her art again when the Bellevue Arts Museum issued the call for entries for its 2012 Biennial "High Fiber Diet" exhibit. She decided to enter, and was accepted.

"Finding Home" as displayed at BAM "High Fiber Diet" exhibit

After experiencing her own "rebirth," Resseguie wanted her BAM piece to feature a lot of lightness as well as some shadows. The result, "Finding Home," is 10 feet tall and features stitched contour lines and threadwork lichens—all done on tulle, a fabric notorious for being slippery as well as delicate.

"Finding Home" closeup

 

Detail of lichen element in "Finding Home"

She first created a paper tracing of the contour lines with a tissue overlay for placement of the "patches" of lichen. 

Contour-line drawing (right) and overlay for lichen placement (left)

Then, after stabilizing the tulle with wash-away thread and dissolvable material, she stitched in the contour lines.

Stitching contour lines (left); closeup of lichen placement overlay (right)

 

She "hooped" and embroidered the lichen pieces separately, then affixed them to the panel of tulle.

Stitching lichen elements in embroidery hoops

Hooped lichen element (left); affixed elements (right)

In the shower, left, before wash-away materials removed; right, finished piece.

 "I had spent 250 hours on the piece before reaching the final step—putting it in the shower to dissolve the stabilizer and wash-away thread," she said, adding "I felt I was recolonizing my life." The piece will be featured in the indoor portion of the Anacortes Arts Festival later this year.

What's next? Among the classes Resseguie has taken at the North Cascades Institute is one on "Personal Mapping" as a way of preserving one's personal history in the form of maps. For this she is thinking of creating a bit of nostalgia by putting her maps on yet another unusual material—vintage handkerchiefs.

Resseguie's work has been widely exhibited both nationally and internationally. For more information on the artist and her work, go to http://www.zhibit.org/patriciaresseguie.

"How does she do that?" Carol Milne knits with glass

Carol Milne, speaker at February 8 CQA meeting

At the group's February 8 meeting, speaker Carol Milne showed a fascinated Contemporary QuiltArt Assn. audience exactly how she "knits" with glass.

Milne can produce colorful knit gloves  in yarn...

...and even more complex knits in yarn...

...these may be simpler...but they are glass!

The Canadian-born, Seattle-based artist came to the knitting part naturally--she's been a knitter since age ten, and has no trouble turning out knitted gloves exhibiting complex color combinations. But she went through education and training in landscape architecture, the sciences, and cast-metal sculpture work before moving to glass work in 2000; even then it was "hot-casting" glass. The process for her knitted glass, and the one that she's been using since 2002, is kiln casting. She still thinks of herself as a sculptor; it's just that the final objects are created in an unusual way.

Milne's studio

...and her tool wall

The wax strands for Milne's "knitting." To start, each is wrapped around a large needle.

Once off the needle, the coils are opened up.

Milne's basic "knitting materials" are wax strands that look like a close cousin of Red Vines candy! The strands are completely flexible, but non-stretch. She will wrap the strands around a really hefty knitting needle, then pull the resulting coil off and open it up, with the result looking like old-fashioned ribbon candy (to extend the simile). And here's where the knitting begins.

Each "stitch" is pushed up into a loop. It looks like a knitter's Garter Stitch.

Yarn markers show the turned heel and the top of the sock.

A different kind of wax finishes off the top.

Each "stitch" is pushed up and through an adjoining loop, creating a Garter Stitch appearance. Working in the round, Milne will build up one of her typical "glass socks" row by row--even using yarn row markers--and turning the heel as in standard knitting. The top of the piece, again assuming it's a sock, is usually finished off with a rim of another type of wax. As one can imagine, the process is quite time-consuming, often taking a day or more to complete. However, says Milne, the knitting is only 10-15% of the work each piece requires.

"Soldering" with extra wax stabilizes the loops

Cup "funnels" and wax "stems" are attached

To be sure the junctions of the different strands are solid enough to withstand the eventual insertion of liquid glass, Milne will often use a soldering iron and a firmer strand of wax to bind them together. She also attaches "stems" of wax to the piece as sort of an armature to prepare it for the kiln. It's also at this stage that she attaches cups to the bottom of the piece that will act as funnels to channel in the poured glass.

Plaster-like refractory material is added to make the mold

Wax is removed from the mold with a wallpaper steamer

Then the piece is covered with refractory mold material much like plaster, leaving the "funnel" cups uncovered. She then uses a wallpaper steamer to melt the wax out of the plastered molds, saving the wax for other projects. The molding and wax-melting process usually takes about a day.

Multiple pieces are put in the kiln, this time with terra-cotta pots as funnels for the poured glass.

Milne "suits up" for the kiln work

When one or more pieces are ready and placed in her kiln, Milne pours the liquid glass--frit melted at 1500 degrees--into the molds to fill in the spaces that were created by the knitted wax. After two hours, she can open the kiln and pour in more glass if she wants to add different colors. Milne keeps detailed records and photographs of each piece she makes, both before and after. Even then, apparently the blending and/or final appearance of colors within the piece are often a surprise to the artist! "I did learn," she says, "that the longer pink glass is in the kiln, the paler the color." The kiln process takes several days, and then another couple of days for the glass to cool slowly so that it anneals properly.

A partially cleaned "sock" with inset showing original wax knitting

Piece at left shows how it was filled, from the top down, in the mold; at right, how such a piece might be displayed.

Once out of the kiln, the glass-filled plaster mold--which can be quite heavy--is ready for the cleanup process that itself can take two to three days. First the large, outer chunks of mold material can simply be broken off. Removing the next  and especially the subsequent layers requires a great deal more care. Here Milne will use dental tools and even a pressure-washer to remove all the mold material. Even as careful as she is, breakage occurs all the time. Depending on the piece, Milne may add wax and recast it...or leave it as an example and play with its title!

Little finger-like pieces, among Milne's smallest.

Much larger finger-like pieces at Bellevue Arts Museum. These are 6-8 feet tall.

Some of her earliest pieces were 18-22" tall and could weigh up to 40 pounds. In the mold, these would often top 100 pounds and were a lot of work to handle and clean up. No wonder then that Milne moved most of her work to smaller units--but not all of it, and not everything involves glass. In 2012, she had an exhibit outdoors at the Bellevue Arts Museum, titled "Grow Lights," that consisted of a number of finger-like pieces that were 6-8 feet tall, decorated with ropes and LED lights; no glass. Even though the pieces comprised hollow concrete cores they still weighed from 75 to 100 pounds each.

Closeup of a glass knitted piece

Knitted glass bowls were among Milne's earlier pieces

Milne reserves part of her creative time in the studio (she works there full time and often weekends) for learning the best ways to photograph her work, achieving the best angles of each piece, etc. In this way, she says, she has time to think about each piece and how it fits into her philosophy of her work: "I think of these works of glass strands as a metaphor for social structure--weak on their own, strong when bound together; strong yet fragile..."

"Imperfect for You," above, selected as part of the permanent collection of Notojima Glass Art Museum in Ishikawa, Japan

"Lena" and "Tilta," each 16 inches tall

Milne was invited to be part of a teapot show...

...and yes, this is a teapot! The taxidermy eyes on the teapots were added after the firing and cleanup processes.

Milne's sense of whimsy comes through in this piece where hands are knitting hands...

...but some of her pieces are more serious, as this "Scream" with a raku figure inside a glass "cyclone fence."

The artist has often shown her work in galleries but at present, "since the economy crashed," she's found her sales to be more successful at fiber shows and similar exhibitions. Many of her pieces are in museums in the US and abroad as well as in private collections. For more information on Milne, photos of her work, and her extensive resume, see her website: http://www.carolmilne.com.