Reams and reams of ice-cream hued tulle spilling from a French castle? Yes, please! This is the work of Argentine born, US based artist Ana Maria Hernando, and everything you see gently falling from these windows, staircases and doors is part of her 2020 installation, titled “Flood”. Where is this magical place, you ask? Château de la Napoule, not far from Cannes on the coast of France… and yes, I want to go to there. Right. Now.

{NOTE: This is the final week that new posts will be going up on the blog. Starting next Monday, March 15th 2021, all new content will be packaged up and delivered directly to YOUR INBOX! If you haven’t already become a member of ‘The NO SUCH THING AS TOO MUCH ART Society’, you can SUBSCRIBE right here.} 

I don’t know which noise to make first!? *Sigh* because of how beautiful and magical Bali is, or *Gasp!* over this insane installation! This is the jaw-dropping work of Jakarta based artist Agnes Hansella aka @macrame_id. Giant macrame made with thick rope, twisted and tied to reveal the “Sunset”, “Mountain” and “Ocean”. Each large-scale piece was on the corresponding side of the building, beautifully reflecting the area surrounding Locca Beach House Bali. Here are Agnes’ words about the project:

“The project involves 8 people including me, to knot a 16mm manila rope to the roof construction.
We finished 3 enormous pieces during 12 days of work. With the height from bottom to top measures 766cm, this enormous piece is fun and challenging for me to work with. With macrame, sometimes we can’t plan the whole thing in one go. The ropes have their own nature and we are the ones to follow. The design keeps evolving every time a knot was made. {Thankfully, I made it in time to finish all three just before the coronavirus outbreak in Indonesia.} This project is commissioned by Flowerbloom Studio.”

See? Sigh and Gasp are both required. Oh great, and now I want to go back to Bali. Someday.

{via Colossal}

The exploration of “movement through space and time using textiles as a drawing tool, creating labor-intensive meditative works that recall natural wonders, landscape, and psychedelic visions, exploring relationships, touch, intimacy, and tactility.” Yes, please! This is the colorful, meticulous, I-wanna-touch-it work of American artist Andrea Alonge. Her recent artist statement is a beautiful look at where most of us are at this very moment:

“Our lives are colored with human interactions and relationships. We build lines of intimacy with each other and our environments. We hope to see ourselves reflected, catch a glimpse of a familiarity that spurs us to bridge the distance between us. In a time of digital interactions and a need for physical distance, our concept of distance becomes heightened yet blurry – we see and interact with each other and our environments through a screen. Sharing a physical space is something we all crave, yet out of necessity we are forced to translate the experience of the physical into the digital. We are finding our way through the unknown, the compulsion to touch, the need to meet even if in a truncated form, and the balance between isolation and socialization. We are more aware of the physical presence of others, the distance between us, and the subtle ways we have to communicate care for others because of the danger of getting too physically close. Our environments and nature have become solace, we can still touch the trees and the sand and the water. Our bodies are grounded in different relational indicators, and our intimacy now takes a different form. If we’re lucky, we still have someone we can touch and receive the chemical and tactile stimuli so necessary for our sense of well-being. A thought that comforts me is the idea of our connections to everything through our chemical makeup – we are made up of the water, and the same elements as the stars and the trees, and the air that we breathe, and our universal consciousness. We are all touching. We will touch forever.” 

Sigh. I needed to hear that.

Okay, I cannot deal with how much I love this series… Pop literally meeting culture. To be clear, she also works with gloves, objects, and textiles, but these beautifully beaded socks were calling my name!  This is the intricate and personal work of Audie Murray. Here’s part of her bio, and description of her practice:

Audie Murray is a multi-disciplinary artist who works with various materials including beadwork, quillwork, textiles, repurposed objects, drawing, and media. She is Michif, raised and working in Regina, Saskatchewan, treaty 4 territory. Much of her family and family histories are located in the Qu’Appelle and Meadow Lake regions of Saskatchewan.

Audie’s art practice is informed by the process of making and visiting. Her practice explores themes of contemporary culture and how this relates to experiences of duality and connectivity. Working with specific material choices, she often uses found objects from daily life and transmutes them. This practice is a way to reclaim and work through various subject matter, much of it relating to the body, space, and relationships with a focus on the intersection and expansion of time.

Brilliant. The photo of Audie is from a few years ago, but I love how the socks are incased and just had to include it in the post. Happy Friday.

 

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A post shared by Vanessa Barragão (@vanessabarragao_work)

Oh my word, watch that video! Sigh. Well, she’s done it again. This dreamy piece is the most recent work by Portuguese textile artist Vanessa Barragão. It took over a year to complete, and a few trips around Portugal to gather all of the recycled materials* required, but it’s finished. I’ve written about Vanessa’s tapestries and installations before, but this is her first “rug tapestry”… and it’s stunning. The palette, the scale, and… you can sit on it {that’s much harder to do with wall tapestries}. Oh, and did you notice that little * up there? Here’s what it’s referring to:

*The process, techniques and materials used are a very important point in the studio as they are the main foundation of this project. The creation process is slow and it requires passion and dedication … The techniques are based on ancestral textile practices like latch hook, crochet, felt, weaving, embroidery and macrame. All the materials used come from wastes, leftovers and deadstocks of Portuguese factories. All the yarns are submitted to a cleaning and selection process before being used.

Fabulous! Happy Monday.

Gasp! This beauty is “Evanescent Permanence” by Atlanta based artist Hannah Ehrlich Haney. Hand-dyed fabric woven, tied, and twisted into beautiful – and sometimes tempestuous – landscapes. Here’s part of Hannah’s artist statement:

Her work focuses on the abstraction of landscapes to portray human emotions and a tearing away from normality to question the true being inside us. A space is created where the self can be questioned and the chaos versus order in our emotions can be revealed.

Gorgeous. ps. Follow her on Instagram to get a peek into her studio… looms, dye, and lots of ladders!

Rope! … on the walls, on the floor, on the ceiling! This is the absolutely breathtaking work of Brazilian artist Janaina Mello Landini. Perhaps it takes my breath due the lung-like pathways? Either way, I’m in awe and feeling the need to take a deep, cleansing breath. With a background in both architecture and fine art, Janaina twists and ties twine into the most magical of artworks:

Her artistic output encompasses her knowledge of architecture, physics, and mathematic and her observations about time, to weave her worldview. Her work transits between different scales – from the object to public spaces.

Aaaand exhale.

 

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A post shared by Claire Oliver Gallery (@claireolivergallery)

Fabric, beads, leather, semi-precious stones, string… oh my word. This is the painstakingly meticulous work of New York based artist Leonardo Benzant. His artist statement is equally as powerful, so I’ll hand it over to him:

“My practice is driven by my connection to the trans African-Atlantic diaspora. I recognize both my ties and disjunction from an ancestral past by considering the possibilities of genetic imprints, cultural identification, innate and intuitive beliefs and a conscious seeking of links that reveal continuities that are hidden or largely unsuspected by the mainstream. I imagine myself as an Urban Shaman exploring both my familiar visible world and the hidden dimensions of other realms that lurk beneath the surface of daily life. The sense of personal cosmology in my practice grows from both experiencing and observing the details of everyday life and ritual. Artworks emerge out of the crossroads of life, history, memory, and imagination, a place between that suggest multiple layers of meaning. Inspiration is derived, in part, from the various modes of communication that I have studied and encountered in African-derived rituals.”

An ‘Urban Shaman’, indeed. Leonardo is represented by Claire Oliver Gallery in Harlem, and his work is currently being shown at the Taubman Museum of Art {Virginia} until February 7, 2021.

Jeans! Yep, a zillion pieces of cut up denim transformed into installations, “paintings”, and sculpture. This is the jaw-dropping work of London based artist Ian Berry. Using old articles of clothing, scissors and glue, Ian creates everything from News Stands and Living Rooms, to Secret Gardens filled with blue-hued wildlife…

[Denim] is simply his medium for seeing the world, his paint, and what a material to use in this modern world; with all its symbols and dualities, as well as being such a common item of clothing that unites many around the globe.

Okay, this makes me miss wearing jeans. Jeggings don’t count, do they? Anyway, Ian’s work can be seen all over the place these days. Take a peek at the NEWS section on his site for current and upcoming exhibitions. Happy Monday.

I’ve been dying to share this episode with you! My podcast guest today is Bisa Butler, a New Jersey based artist who, “paints with fabric”. Looooove! I wrote about her jaw dropping, life-size portraits, made entirely from bits of beautiful colorful patterned fabric, a few months ago {posted below} … and then immediately reached out to invite her onto the podcast. We cover everything from being a child of the rainbow {that will make sense in a minute} and flirting with Tupac, to how she found her way to quilting and eventually to where she is now… which is an incredibly exciting place to be. As we speak, she has just arrived in Chicago for the opening of her exhibit at The Art Institute of Chicago! WHAT!? Anyway, we’ll get into all of that and more. You can listen right up there underneath Bisa and “Dahomey Amazon,”, or subscribe on Apple Podcasts / Spotify.

First, the pieces I wrote about a few months ago. Again, THIS IS ALL FABRIC:

Allllllll fabric!? Stunning. And her subjects? They tell the African American side of the story about American life, because as Bisa’s artist statement says:

“History is the story of men and women, but the narrative is controlled by those who hold the pen. My community has been marginalized for hundreds of years. While we have been right beside our white counterparts experiencing and creating history, our contributions and perspectives have been ignored, unrecorded, and lost.”

I love that she has chosen to tell these stories in bits of vintage fabric. Here is the first story she ever told that way, during her Masters program in 2001:

The second piece is the rework from a year later. Look how much she’d honed her skills! This is a portrait of “Grandpa Zakani”.

Next, “A New Dawn, 2020”, which features the young boy Bisa talked about:

So beautiful in so many ways… his repaired overalls, bare feet covered in a pair of Converse, the WWII airplanes on his pants, all of it. Oh, and I had to throw in a sample of  “Devaluation” so you could see what Bisa was referring to. She hasn’t used this fabric in any of her pieces yet, but it’s ready and waiting.

Ummmm, how did we not talk about either of these huge career milestones? :

The cover of TIME Magazine, and a feature in the New York Times! Clearly I’ll have to have her back on so we can discuss this properly. That fabulous shot of Bisa from the Times article was taken by @gioncarlovalentine.

Up next… oh you know, just a giant show at The Art Institute of Chicago that happens to include an absolutely huge piece {144″ x 108″}, titled “The Warmth of Other Sons”. Bisa spent seven months making this. Take a peek:

Gah! She just posted this jumping-for-joy photo to Instagram! Oh my word, can you even imagine seeing your work like that? I would sob. I’M SO HAPPY FOR YOU, BISA! She also included this caption with a sneak peek of the exhibit and I just have to share:

“I am beyond grateful for this opportunity to share my work at such a beautiful institution. I was told today that not only am I the first African American woman to exhibit in the 2nd floor European Painting galleries, but I am the first living artist in the museums 141 year history. I walk in the path left by the African American artists who have come before me, and I hope to leave a path for others to follow.”

I’m not crying, you’re crying. Oof. Okay, deep breath. Back to that insane work… I mean, seriously, the amount of detail in that one piece alone is staggering. And where does this magic happen? In her dining room, of course:

Yep, that’s Bisa’s crazy sewing machine… I kinda wanna take it for a spin around the block, don’t you?

And finally, let’s wrap things up with these two stylish graduates:

Ha! I had to, because Grad 91 RULES! Thank you to Bisa for hanging out with me for so long, sharing all of her stories, and for emailing me her graduation photo!

Isn’t it kind of wonderful that a little girl who started school at “Children of the Rainbow” is now creating artwork filled with colorful, rainbow-hued people? I think that’s exactly how this was meant to play out. Bisa, if you happen to be reading this from Chicago, have an amazing time! What an incredible, well-deserved moment for you. And of course, huge thanks to all of you for listening. There will be more ART FOR YOUR EAR next weekend. ~ Danielle

Other links:

1. Bisa on Instagram
2. Claire Oliver Gallery, Harlem
3. Howard University
4. AfriCOBRA / Jeff Donaldson
5. A Big Important Art Book – Now With Women 
6. Simone Leigh, Venice 2022
7. Montclair State University
8. Dutch wax fabric
9. Natalie Baxter {textile guns}
10. Art 1-54 Fair
11. Art Institute of Chicago: “Bisa Butler – Portraits” Nov 16, 2020 ~ April 19, 2021