wordplay: gossamer
Thursday, May 15, 2008 at 04:12AM 
so there you have it. gossamer. my first contribution to wordplay.
and can i confess something? i love it. and i feel awfully proud of myself about it. (though i do wish you could see it in person, because it looses a bit of its impact in the photos.)
it was a journey, this gossamer creation. starting with lots and lots of brainstorming - notes and notes and pages of notes in my moleskine. i imagined a painting. or a series of paintings. and then a collage. and then i got fixated on the definition of gossamer, the one from the dictionary. like, the actual words out of the dictionary. merriam-webster, page 312. and that fixation, with the collage, an idea started to form.
in the meantime, i was also fixated on finding gossamer-weight fabric. i knew it existed. but what i didn't realize was that it's really (according to my research. if you know something more about it, please let me know!) a synthetic gauzy fabric that's used for prom decorations and bridal veils. not what i had in mind; i was hoping for a gossamer weight linen, or something else with natural fibers. in the end, i settled for a very fine handkerchief weight linen. and i'm so glad i did.
so as i was fixating on the collage and buying the linen, i spent some time with my friend pam (who is an amazing textile artist and one of the most lovely human beings you could ever be lucky enough to know. and who really ought to have a blog. or at least a shop. really. are you reading this, pam?), and i shared my ideas with her. and she encouraged me to develop the notion of the collage further, to incorporate the fabric, to expand on my idea of the stitching. all of that, and she let me use her bernina.
really, my conversations with pam were integral to the development of this piece. and i'm so grateful to her for that. it's a gift, to have a creative person in my actual life. it's a new gift for me, and one that i'm so happy about. more on that subject another day.
so there were the notes. and then there were the photocopies; lots and lots of photocopies at staples, enlarging and adjusting and trying for just the right combination of lightness and darkness and grain-i-ness to suggest gossamer. and there was the linen. and then there an earlier version of the project (which you can see here), it's the one i shared a peek at last week. i really liked that one, but i knew there was more to do.
so last weekend i used my big stack of photocopies to burn myself some screens and print with my gocco onto the linen. i incorporated all of the lessons i learned printing on fabric in the gocco swap - about how much ink to use, and about how to burn a screen that will (or won't, which is what i wanted in this case) print crisp images. and i was really pleased with the results.
and then this week, the whole thing came together. these pieces cut and stitched and hanging from threads that remind me, just a bit, of a web. the float-y nature of the whole thing dangling together.
i had always thought that i would mount this project on paper. that's what i had imagined from the beginning (well, from some point after the beginning, really. but i had imagined it for a good while.). but pam (again, pam) pointed out how delicate and floating-in-the-air the whole thing is when it is suspended. and so i built a frame (i'm almost as excited about that as i am about the actual project!) with some canvas stretchers, brass tacks, 2 pieces of foam core, some super adhesive, a large piece of my favorite mid-weight linen, a staple gun, some encouragement, and a bit of courage.
and then i pinned the piece to the board with three red pushpins, suspending the fabric away from the board to create dimension. to let the piece float. to enhance its gossamer-ness. it's an installation, really. and it does lose something in the photographs. but i hope that you can get a sense of how delicate and float-y it is from the photos i've taken.
so there you have it. my interpretation of gossamer. something delicate, tenuous, gauzy, flimsy, floating in the air. gossamer.
(word #2 arrived in the mail yesterday from an amazing artist. i haven't opened the envelope yet, wanting to post this first. i'll open it in a bit, and share the word here tomorrow.)
Reader Comments (23)
I am really looking forward to the next project.