Catching Up / The Gopalan Gallery Show

Back in October 2010, I had the thrill of being part of a gallery show (my first!)  It was held at the Gopalan Contemporary Gallery.  I had the fun of doing it with dear fiber friends, Cathie Laska and John Salamone. Our fiber exhibit was paired with the work of Stephanie Doty, whose mixed-media really complemented the fiber.
Of course, so giddy and self-absorbed, my pictures are all of my own work, so this is a very one-sided presentation of the show.  It was gratifying and amazing to see my shawls, hats and sculptural objects displayed.  It was also a real challenge to figure out just how to do that!

I am especially proud of the stands I made for the hats - I knitted covers for vinyl balls and attached empty yarn cones to them. The cones fit fairly snugly into heavy-duty, yarn-wrapped cardboard tubes (saved from rolls of bubble-wrap.) For stability we had cans of beans at the bottom of the cones, wrapped in socks so they, too, fit snugly.  I really do like the way the hats look displayed on the round balls, rather than mannequin head-type display.

 Forest Floor Shawl (2007)
Wool, mohair, silk, nylon commercial yarn, woven, crocheted, stitched

 Wrapping Hat - Small Homage to Chakaia Booker (2009)
Wool commercial yarns, plastic button, knitted, stitched

 Joy After Sorrow  (2008)
Wool commercial yarns, crocheted, stitched

 Mangos For Breakfast By the Startling Bougainvillea (2010)
Cotton, silk, wool commercial yarns, woven, crocheted, stitched

 Motley (2010)
Wool, nylon commercial yarns, woven, crocheted, stitched

 Ritual Objects Series (2008-2010)

The Mermaid Breaks the Net and Wears It In the Deeps (2010)
Cotton, silk, wool commercial yarns, woven, crocheted, stitched

 Sujata Gopalan, the gallery owner, was very supportive of my wish to include a few of my poems that went with some of the pieces.  And I had to write an artist statement, something I'd never done before. I had a very difficult time, until I decided to think of it as another poem....

Zann Carter

Artist Statement

 

at first it’s all about process:

the rhythms of

the spinning

the weaving

the knitting

the crocheting

the felting...

endorphin bliss of process

and then it’s about transformation

(the unspun wool becoming

the yarn becoming

the object)

all happening in my hands

                        in my hands!

Oh, the lovely tools,

the healing ritual of familiar movements,

the spell cast by repetition,

the falling completely under that spell.

enchantment moves me through loss and sorrow,

                  the wound of the world in me,

into the sacred joy-space of creation.

it happens often enough that

i do these things again and again:

spin weave knit crochet felt

then it becomes about story

story told by bits of texture and form and color        colliding,

a wild trajectory of stitches, the way fibers meet

each other just so,

intersect, join, move away again, leap and arc

and play around spaces...

sometimes the story is whole,

sometimes there are only fragments,

solitary images that find poems to hold them, too,

pieces of a scattered puzzle, hints, clues

to a mystery that will never be solved

but wants simply to be.

i make garments to wear in dreams and fairy tales,

artifacts from a world permeated with magic and myth, a bearable reality’s

Incantations.

My friend Brian Morton did a review of the show and I love the way he described my work as "...airy, chaotic and bizarre..."
Next post (I hope): details of the Ritual Objects Series.