clock detail
Vegas slot machine and agriculture fields
stars and red eye
Phoenix
Souvenir shop and Dallas shuttle
suspender
My mapping project is about the various locations I have been to for flight layovers since starting school at Oberlin. Since there are no direct flights between Seattle and Cleveland, I’ve had layovers in a lot of different places. I spend a lot of time in airports, I realized, which are their own strange places - airports can be locations of arrival and departure, and for a layover, they are places of waiting and transition, while being a gathering place for hundreds of people at a time. The result of traveling back and forth between home and school is me physically having been in many places around the country but not necessarily having been to these places mentally. These locations exist in my personal map of places I have been but in an undefined, liminal space where they don’t really count as places I have visited but are not places I have never visited. Was I really there or not? Given that I spent a few hours at most at a time in each place, it wasn’t long enough for me to “experience” the location, especially since I stayed within the bubble of the airport the whole time I was there. For me, these layovers are not only a physical place I have been to but also an event in time. I thought it would be interesting to attempt to portray this in-between nature of my layovers across the country in a quilt that was chaotic, nonfunctional and represented the places I have been through different fabrics and techniques. I combined techniques such as crochet, embroidery, and sewing to create an effect of a variety of textures.
The largest parts of the quilt represent the places I remember the most vividly and have been to most frequently, including Chicago, Detroit, represented by the colorful and ostentatious light tunnels, and Minneapolis-St. Paul. The next most memorable place for me was Phoenix, which was where I had a layover during my flight home for spring break. For Phoenix, I made an embroidery patch of a certain cluster of mountains near the airport that seemed to sit apart from the surrounding mountains a little further out that surrounded the city. Next, I have an airport shuttle that traveled between gates at the Dallas-Fort Worth airport. I have only been to Dallas once, but it was very memorable because I missed my flight and spent the whole night there. I rode the skylink to a different gate and noticed all the bumps and curves in the track like a children’s roller coaster, but the shuttle was also eerily empty and the windows were reflective which felt very surreal at that time of night. I meant to add in my layovers on the east coast, which includes several trips to Atlanta and one trip to Charlotte, but I didn’t have enough time to do that.
I noticed that most of my flights coming from Seattle to Cleveland were red eyes. The red eye at the top symbolizes the name of these kinds of flights, but also seems like a watchful eye over everything else that occurs on the quilt, symbolizing surveillance and security within an airport. The security element is also echoed on the nature of a quilt, or a “security blanket”, but this quilt doesn’t seem to be quite as secure as most quilts because it isn’t the most structurally sound and cannot be functionally used as a quilt for typical quilt activities. The stars that stand out against the blue patch of sweatshirt fabric is a nod to the American flag and also the night sky.
The foundation of the quilt is on a patchwork of mostly denim and a few sweatshirt patches. These two fabrics are the ones I notice the most in an airport - sweatshirts because they are usually what I wear for travel, and are what most people wear as the most comfortable type of clothing for long periods of time sleeping or sitting around. The other fabric, denim, is one that I notice because of how uncomfortable it is. Denim stands out to me as an impractical choice for travel. Denim is also a very American fabric, being both made in America and generally blue, and if I had to choose a single fabric to represent America, it would probably be denim. I see a lot of people wear jeans to the airport if they are taking shorter flights, want to keep up appearances, or are rednecks. It is a patriotic fabric but also interesting to include in a quilt because of the discomfort associated with it that contrasts with the inherent comfort of soft blankets. I really liked the use of denim for this quilt because of its connotations and also because I personally like using the color blue a lot in my work. Blue is heavenly and serene, but also can represent opposite feelings of sadness, loss, and depression, which can be interesting to include in a quilt especially about air travel and the feelings of not quite having a permanent place sense of home.
A patriotic element of this quilt that I didn’t get around to mentioning in class is the song “A Rhapsody In Blue” by George Gershwin. This song plays along to the welcome / safety information video United plays on every flight so is a famous American piece of music I usually associate with air travel. This piece is really interesting because it combines a lot of different elements and themes from American musical tropes, each theme holding its own portion of the piece, similarly to my quilt. Gershwin is a famous American composer well known for his fusion of classical and jazz during the turn of the century, marking a new era of American music and is a great choice for United to play during their welcome videos because of this. This composer crossed the lines between opposing genres of music and created his own liminal space in a new genre. For my quilt, given all the denim, it seemed like it was a rhapsody in blue in itself. I also have a personal connection to Gershin’s music as a musician growing up. When I was taking piano lessons, my teacher made me practice a lot of his pieces, which I strongly disliked because of how garish the pieces sounded. They weren’t my favorite style of music to play. Later, I played the clarinet and bass clarinet in the pit orchestra for my high school’s musical and the entire musical was based off of the Gershwin brothers’ pieces. Gershwin was maybe one of the only composers that I saw in both my piano and clarinet practices growing up and I never particularly liked his music because of how obnoxious it sounded, and I feel like that exemplifies my experiences traveling in airports.
Something I noticed from all my time spent in airports is how patriotic and almost obnoxious they are. There are American flags and signage everywhere, even including airline names like United and American. There are kitschy souvenir shops, posters of famous musicians and fun facts about the location everywhere being shoved down visitor’s throats. Airports display all their city’s best parts but in reality, the cities’ may not even be all that interesting. All this propaganda can create an overwhelming environment in an already mentally exhausting trip, which is what I wanted my quilt to demonstrate. The white stars and red stripes across the top and the loud colors show how the quilt is obviously patriotic and obnoxiously present in a room.
For this blog post I interviewed my sister about a map that she used in the past. She told me that the BART train map in San Francisco was integral to her life as she was getting used to Berkeley. My sister said “the map helped me navigate a new space when I moved to college because I was not familiar with the Bay Area at the time. The BART map helped me get to know how to navigate Berkeley, Oakland, and San Francisco because I had classes in San Fran in the fall as a freshman and worked in Oakland throughout my junior and senior years. It also allowed me to explore more in San Francisco and help you get more integrated into the Bay Area. It involved a lot of trial and error though. I got lost several times. There can be a lot of sketchy people who ride the BART. Even during rush hour I had friends who got sexually assaulted and / or harrassed. I had to be careful and brought pepper spray wherever I went. I was also always aware of people who were stealing. Rush hour was super busy and packed with different people but this kind of knowledge of how to navigate the BART just comes from a lot of experience.” The longer my sister lived in Berkeley the less she used the BART map and it became an occasional tool for reference. The heavy reliance on the map during her early days at school to the occasional use for reference meant that my sister began to feel more like a resident of Berkeley. Of course, when somebody uses a map every day and takes the same routes, they will eventually become familiar with the routine and rely on the map less. I think that the use of a map can show some discomfort with the area, the need to categorize and chart a place you are not familiar with, and shows you are an outsider. This discomfort comes from a place of not understanding where you are. Once you shed the need for a map, you grow to understand a place, and you finally belong.
My mapping project is about the layovers I have had while starting school at Oberlin. Every time I travel between Cleveland and Seattle I take a layover because there are no direct flights between the Cleveland Hopkins International Airport and the SeaTac airport. As a result, I have been to many different places across the country over the past few years and want to map out these locations in a quilt through embroidery, using the memories I have of each location. My idea for this project came from my last trip from Cleveland to Seattle where I had a layover in Phoenix, Arizona and was really inspired by the landscape, colors, and topography of a place I had never seen before. I saw how beautiful the desert and mountains were and felt sad that I could not really experience this place even though I was physically there. I think this quilt is going to map out the places I have physically been to but not mentally experienced. I think the idea of airports as a liminal space is really interesting because there is a physical and mental disconnect, and a location for gathering and dispersion at the same time. I want to emulate these ideas in the quilt through embroidery of my memories of each place that overlap with one another to create a confusing, distortive map of an idealization of a variety of locations across the country.
CROCHET
Basketweave and griddle stitch-
I learned how to basketweave crochet and was trying out different ways to work with color in basketweave, which resulted in the beige and brown checkered swatch. I decided I didn’t like the effect much and couldn’t get a clean transition from color to color so I tried a gingham pattern in a griddle stitch which I liked a lot better. The gingham griddle stitch is below the basketweave.
Herringbone crochet -
This picture shows a sample of herringbone crochet, which I found had a really nice texture, but the stitch didn’t really feel natural in my hands so I never went back to make more herringbone crochet.
Single stitch crochet -
These are some test patterns for a potential sweater I tried to make using single crochets, which is rare for me because I don’t like the look of single crochet. Because I dislike single crochet, I thought working in a little color to create the V patterns would make it not only more visually appealing but also more interesting to work with. I also gave up on the sweater I planned for this because I decided to make other things.
Circle practice with crochet -
circles are really difficult for me to make and I’m constantly experimenting with new ways to decrease gapping at the start of a new row or make the finished circle look completely circular. These are practice for my fortune cookies.
Fortune cookies -
This is my most recent creation. Lately I have been thinking a lot about food and it’s role in communication or socialization especially within a family. Food is a vehicle for community and gathering, which my family uses to connect with each other as most families do. I grew up having family dinners with my dad’s side of the family every other Sunday. On special occasions we would visit the Chinese Buffet, my dad’s favorite cuisine. The idea of an Americanized version of Chinese food is very interesting to me because this is the kind of food that people in America associate with China or other East Asian cultures. For example, a fortune cookie is so associated with Chinese cuisine but it isn’t even from China. I’m not even Chinese myself, my family on both my parents’ sides are Taiwanese which adds another layer of irony to this work.
KNITTING
Basketweave knit -
this was one of the first stitches I learned how to do besides the basic knit stitch. It didn’t have as much texture as the basketweave stitch in crochet and ended up being pretty flat which I didn’t like as much.
herringbone knit and garter stitch -
The top is a herringbone knit stitch, which felt more natural to make than the herringbone crochet, so I made more swatches of this knit stitch. I like the effect of the crochet herringbone better but the knit stitch is more uniform. On the bottom is a basic garter stitch, using knit stitches on both front and back rows, which creates a very squishy texture that I wanted to use to make a sweater, which I am currently working on.
Cable stitch -
This is my first attempt on the cable stitch. This was a tricky one to do because it involves the use of another needle and the ability to maneuver the needles but once I got the basics down I feel confident in future projects possibly creating my own cable patterns.
Ribbing-
This is a simple rib stitch which I am using currently for a skirt. It consists of two knit stitches and two purl stitches alternating.
SOCKS
These are some socks I made. I first started making socks with crochet, but they were not the right kind of shape or texture that I wanted. I then retaught myself how to knit and tried knitting in the round with double pointed needles for the first time which was a fun challenge because I had to navigate my way around five needles to create this sock shape. I think socks were a great re-introduction to knitting for me because they are practical, functional, and historical.
SEWING
When I make clothes I want to make things I know I am going to want to wear. In the past, I would spend a long time working on something that in the end I realized wasn’t my style or wasn’t very functional. In the fall, my friend donated a lot of spare clothes for me to work with and gave me flannels, which are my favorite fabric to wear. I like how warm they are, their layering capacity, and the plaid patterns are really visually appealing to me. I was really exited to make a flannel dress which I could use for layering and used three different flannels to make the dress. The green flannel scrap with the button comes from one of those flannels. The black scrap on the bottom comes from a different fabric that I recently completed a skirt for from scratch.
CYANOTYPE
It seems like the type of crochet stitching I worked with the most was Tunisian crochet. I had a far greater amount of Tunisian crochet swatches in comparison to any other type of stitch. I think that I was drawn to this style because of how simple and easy it looked, different to a typical single crochet which I find boring, but also a bridge between crochet and knitting. During the time I was getting back into crochet, last summer, I wasn’t knitting because I felt as though the skill was beyond me and felt daunting. I thought that the Tunisian crochet stitch was a way for me to access the knitting world through crochet. In this image on the left, I have a border pattern I created myself based off of a paper placemat that depicted the Chinese Zodiacs that I would see when I went to a Chinese Buffet in Seattle with my family. The pattern isn’t an exact replica, but a simplified version of it, or an appropriation, just like a Chinese Buffet. It looks similar enough to the original to where it reminds Asian Americans of this similar imagery they may have grown up seeing around their families like I did, but also is a pattern that I can’t find anywhere. On the right I have some cyanotype attempts on crochet. They didn’t work out in the way that I wanted to, so I consider them failed and gave up on cyanotype crochet. The quilt these were made for was originally conceived to be completely made by crochet, which is something I forgot about until I found these pieces again. Cyanotyping these crochet pieces absorbed too much chemistry and didn’t produce a clear image so I couldn’t afford to work with crochet for the actual quilt. I realize that a lot of my decision making in my design and aesthetics of the pieces I work with are due to practicality and functionality of my resources.
These are my cyanotype tests on fabric. I tested different negatives, my final negative tests being the tiny cows or clouds. Older negatives are not as defined or high contrast.
This archive is a meditation on the failures I encounter while constantly creating new projects. There are many more scraps to add and show but the ones I chose I felt most clearly represented my process and focus on trying again and again to make something "perfect." Each sample reveals something about myself, a new skill I learned, and a new lesson in how I spend my time and resources. I always knew I was a perfectionist in terms of the art I create but looking at these pieces all sewn together feels extremely revealing of my attempts and failures, because of the vast amount of scraps and diversity of stitch types, methods, and objects.
single stitch
quilt border (left), cyanotype crochet (right)
slightly more successful cyanotypes on crochet
cyanotype prints
knit socks (left), crochet socks and mitten (right)
circles
fortune cookies
basketweave crochet (top), gingham griddle stitch (bottom)
herringbone crochet
Science Library -
In the Science Library I wasn’t really sure what to look for- my research question doesn’t seem like it would be related to science in a way that I could browse for in a way that would help with my project. I ended up looking through the neuroscience and genetics sections to look for anything that could give me a scientific outlook on the self. There were definitely interesting books that I saw, but I didn’t find anything I would be interested in incorporating into my work.
Art Library -
In general, I spend a lot more of my time in the Art Library and find more helpful sources for my research question when I browse there. I used OBIS a lot to categorize and search for specific subjects like textile arts and historical Chinese art that was really interesting and informative. I found some interesting books about an artist I’ve been inspired by the past few months, Faith Ringgold, a painter and textile artist whose work deals with the intersection of gender and race as an African American woman. Reading a book in her words about what her creative process was like as she made her quilts was useful for my own processes in working with identity and the medium of textiles.
My archive is a collection of scraps from previous and ongoing textile projects. I usually work with textiles and in my process I collect all of the swatches, samples, and fabric scraps that come from planning a project or as fabric excess. I have crochet, knit, and fabric pieces saved from the past few months and each tells its own story of where I was in my process of learning how to make a piece, learning a new technical skill, testing out a yarn or new pattern, and cyanotype testing. I always think that I am going to reuse these pieces for something else and sometimes I do, but more often than not they become compiled into a bin and are forgotten about. Looking through each piece I'm reminded of where I was in the moment I made each scrap. Compiling these pieces, I realized how I was in different places both physically and mentally. This project is related to my research question because a lot of my identity comes from what I have learned from my parents and home, and the way I feel like this is best expressed is through textile arts. These are skills that have been passed down generationally from mother to daughter, and are a familial activity as I often crochet or knit alongside my mom and sister. The nature of textiles suits my purpose because of their functionality and portability, and many of these projects I work on I have brought back and forth between Seattle and Oberlin.
An interesting artist I found when researching for this project is Barbara Shaw who uses fabric scraps to create
"paintings". Her projects (which I don't think could be necessarily classified as archival but relate to my work) include scraps leftover from patchwork quilts that she has made.
https://societyofdesignercraftsmen.org.uk/our-makers/barbara-shaw
Most of the time, the art I make comes from my own experience. Art is a way for me to navigate my identity and understand who I am in relation to the rest of the world and myself. I often struggle with finding my “place”, which I think has to do with my relationship to my identity as an individual who does not align with a typical, acceptable person in America. Although I am American, sometimes I don’t feel American. As an Asian American I am surrounded by white people in my majority white community and neighborhood in Seattle, and the PWI that is Oberlin College. I am drawn to my family’s roots in Taiwan, where they emigrated from, but at times feel like a fraud because I don’t know much about Taiwan and haven’t been physically there since I was a child. I have two homes, one here and one in Seattle, and feel as though I am constantly on the move. The feelings of uneasiness and being unsettled, as I exist in a liminal space in between two physical locations, while my mind constantly searches for a place to belong, is carried with me no matter where I go. Sometimes I feel like I am invisible, and could fade into the background, but at the same time feel like there is a spotlight on me. I am easy to ignore, but appear as if I don’t belong. In another art class, my professor dropped his phone on the floor, to make a point. When you walk into a room and see a phone on the floor, you stop and look at it, wondering, why is this here? This object, a phone, on the floor, is taken out of context and demands you to stop what you are doing and look at it. Sometimes I feel like I am that object. Most of the art I create is comes from my own experience and is a way for me to comprehend the world and my place in it.
The question I am going to research this semester is how our identities function within any given context, and how physical space can become a determinant of how we conceive our self image, present ourselves, and how other people perceive us. How can art be used a vehicle for self understanding and exploration? How does the artistic process foster a deeper understanding of oneself? Why do I choose the methods, medium, and imagery that I do and what does that say about me?
Josie Brane-Wright: https://josiebranewright.wixsite.com/my-site
Indie Caldwell: https://artashealing.wordpress.com/
Katherine Chambers: https://complexconceptcomics.wordpress.com/
Wilson Crook: https://lcrook7.wixsite.com/my-site
Ella Fruchter: https://workart970157289.wordpress.com
Sean Fu:
Mikala Jones: https://thedreamjournal555.wixsite.com/the-dream-journal
Eugene Kang: https://eugenkang.wixsite.com/eugenekangcontent
Jack Lichtenstein: https://jacklichtensteinphotography.com/new-blog-1
Clara Rosarius: https://clararosarius.squarespace.com (password 093)
Ava Sato: https://lebr0nk0be.wordpress.com/
Vincent Zhu: www.vincentianxing.com