Newsflash: Moss grows on wheelbarrow!

OK, so maybe it's not actually moss...This week I decided it was time to start working on some of my commissions. One features a three-dimensional path through the woods on a large-scale format. The tree branches will need leaf clumps to project out of the piece, so a couple of weeks ago I started crocheting some yarns together to see if I could produce the effect I wanted. The initial result was disappointing, which convinced me I needed to dye some mohair boucle a deeper shade of green for the leaves. Around a month ago I ordered some big loop mohair boucle from Sheep Street in Morgantown for the project. A few weeks ago I picked it up, but I’ve been waiting for a block of time in my schedule to pull out my dye pots and experiment with it. Fortunately, I have several big stainless steel dye pots in storage. My father-in-law envisioned them for traditional salmon boil dinners, but they never got much use. They’re perfect for me—thanks Grandpa! The day’s success was some gorgeous greens that will be perfect for the commission piece. I was also feeling very experimental, so I decided to try dyeing with some fur scraps and old fur clothing I got from Marilyn Brackney a couple of weeks ago to share with Cappi Phillips. I took what I thought was a reasonable amount, throwing in the white and light brown fur pieces into the dye pot to fulfill my grand vision of fluffy green fur pieces to use in the ground cover adjacent to the trail. Unfortunately, I learned that when you boil animal skin it turns into a globby mess. Only a few small pieces survived the process. My inner scientist reminded me that every experiment is useful, even the failures. She thinks that will help rationalize having to clean up the mess, but she’s wrong. I just focus on the intense green boucles and some other wool that I threw in as a ‘what the heck’ kind of test. I always find a use for everything.

My other major art project involved an intense effort on completing the grassy blades for my ‘Sunrise over Goose Pond’ piece. I attached them to the background and I’m close to calling the piece done – I think that a wandering, half awake salamander looking for his “morning joe,” unaware of the distant hooded crane, will be the finishing touch.

The mail carrier has been my friend this week. When I think of our mail carriers, I fondly remember a family story involving a very young Jacob. We were sitting at the dinner table having an animated conversation about something. We asked him, with enthusiasm, “What do birds eat?” He shouted out “mail carriers!” Of course we all broke up laughing. Anyway, the mail carriers escaped the birds of prey to bring me a letter from Homeland Security inviting me to take my citizenship oath in about two weeks. As soon as I finished my citizenship test (did I mention I got a perfect score?!) I decided on a vision for a weaving I wanted to make. The piece will be called ‘A Home of my Own’. It’s really about my journey toward citizenship in this country with my wonderful extended family and the loving community I live in. It will feature a hand holding a trowel, digging a hole in a patch of garden soil. Adjacent to the hole will be a small seedling, ready to be transplanted.

The snail mail carriers weren’t the only ones on my side this week. My e-mail brought me the news that the Loring Park Art Fair in Minneapolis had chosen me to be a featured artist this year! I had to scramble to put together some text describing my work and my history, but that’s all in place. I’m really honored to be selected, and I’m looking forward to the trip out there this August.

The big local event on my horizon is the Trashion-Refashion show this Sunday at the Buskirk-Chumley theater. It is presented by the Center for Sustainable Living and Discardia, and it starts at 7 p.m. It’s all very hush-hush, but I’ll let you in on a secret—I’ve created a trophy for the show. I’ve been sworn to secrecy about the design, but next week I’ll post a picture. I also created some fashion for the show, which I will model this year. My son Jacob has an outfit that he designed and will model, and Tommie has volunteered to hand out programs at the event. Jim will chauffeur and applaud, and so it will be a family event. We had our first rehearsals this week and I know it’s going to be a lot of fun. I hope to see you there!

Until next week…

Martina Celerin

My animal self emerges among the herbs

This weekend I think I proved the axiom, paraphrased here, that one may not simultaneously create art and blog about it. And being a Mom only makes things more complicated! The theme of the week has been leaves, as everything around me seems to be leafing out as spring comes on. As I sat in the living room working on basil leaves, I was surprised to see that our lilac bush is leafing out. It seems undeterred by the recent cold snap and ready to embrace spring. Me too! To create my basil leaves I picked out about eight different green fleeces. I carded them into a match for the verdant color of my herb models from Bloomingfoods. My basil green is a rich, bright, crunchy spring-like green. I finished my giant basil leaves earlier this weekend, and yesterday I added the veins to complete that aspect of the project. Earlier in the week I had gone to my green boxes to create the right green for thyme, another component in my ‘Ratatouille’ piece. Thyme green is a deeper, richer green with more olive tones in it. Maybe even hints of pine needles. I can see that I’m not going to meet my goal of completing the two giant commission pieces by April first, but they should come together sometime during April. Art just doesn’t understand timelines.

My life was complicated and enriched by my cultural calendar for the weekend. Jacob took the family to see the IU’s spring ballet “New York, New York” on Friday night. We all enjoyed the three pieces, although perhaps not equally. I was particularly enamored with the first piece (Cloven Hooves), which I found to be the most cerebral. It’s really a statement about society and how we follow along in our roles, while somehow deep within us are bubbling animal instincts. They periodically surface and interject themselves in our otherwise socially constrained lives. It was well done by incredibly athletic dancers. The performance was really a fusion of ballet and modern dance, with animal interpretations slipped into the movements. It inspired me to release a little of my inner athletic and animal self. I did a two-hour Zumba marathon, taught in fifteen minute blocks by the eight instructors who teach at BloomZum. It was a wonderful sweat-fest. After watching the ballet, followed by two hours of my kids doing Taekwondo Saturday morning, participating in the Zumba had me thinking about the different styles of movement. The martial arts are very aggressive, with punching, kicking and kind of a classical macho feel. The ballet dancers are so graceful and elegant in their precise and practiced movements. And then came the Zumba dances, filled with real people and real sweat and salsa dances filled with an in-your-face sexuality. That took me back to the first ballet, with the animal instincts just taking over in the movements. What a day! After all that, I still had the energy to go out Saturday night with my friend Ruth to the Trashionista Fashion Show. That was fun to watch, although I really had hoped to contribute a dress made of Barbie doll legs this year. The sheer weight of the creation stood in the way of true fashion and sank the piece. I’ll be back next year, assuming Project Runway doesn’t call me first.

Until next week…

Martina Celerin

Entering the Fourth Dimension

The big event from my week was the Trashionista show. I’ve been so excited all week to see how my dimensional fashion creations would look on the runway. Both of the scheduled rehearsals were lost to the snowy weather, but Saturday the big day finally arrived. There was an afternoon rehearsal at the convention center. The backdrop for the show was very cool and professional. They used a crinkled metal meshwork and played different colored lights over it that changed as the music changed. It had a mesmerizing effect on my two young assistants who came to help or play Yu-Gi-Oh, whichever seemed like more fun at the time. For my gowns, the coordinator picked out the tallest models. I was armed with my clear duct tape for hem adjustment if needed, but everything fit beautifully. The professional models were just that, and they brought the gowns to life. When I designed the River Rapids I was imagining turbulent waters rushing over rocks. I included design elements such as hanging beaded strings that cascaded over the blue dress and black swirls. I was really pleased with the movement of the piece, and I thought I heard a little gasp from the audience when the dress came out. My inner fashion diva has really good hearing, and that’s how she remembers it! In conversations after the show, everyone seemed to like the translucent shawls made of dryer sheets. For me, that was the crowning element for the recycling aspect of the show, to create a wearable and attractive piece from material that everyone discards without a thought.

My world isn’t just about art and design, though, no matter how new and exciting it is to me. My two boys were real troopers through both the rehearsal and the show. When the focus was elsewhere they held Yu-Gi-Oh duels, which let me concentrate on the fashion. During the show, my son Jacob took my fancy-new-Christmas-present camera in hand to document the events. He was guided by his composition consultant, his brother Tommie. They homed in on different aspects of the show and captured some nice images from heights and angles that professional photographers feared to access. By the end of the evening I had 160 images to sift through. Jacob was also quite partial to the Blue Sky soda served at the show, since sodas aren’t part of our home routine. After a long evening of four dimensional art, where three dimensional creations are brought to life with movement, we all came home and crashed.

My art world, of course, kept moving along last week too. My life has felt full with much going on, more than I can describe here. I’ve felt as if I’ve had to sit still and keep an eye on a lot of things, blending into different worlds at will, so I felt it was appropriate to be working on my chameleon piece. He will be sitting on some fern fronds, which means I had a lot of frond leaflets to make. I spent a lot of time cutting brass flashing, purchased at the secret M33 supply store in Michigan. After this project, it seems that I’ll have to make a pilgrimage there this summer to replenish my stock. I found a really nice rich green to finish the leaves from the batch of yarns I dyed last week. After I wrapped the leaflets I started attaching them to a couple of the fronds, which turned out well. I have a few more to do and then I can literally flesh out my chameleon this week. I’ve sent my inner fashion diva off for a long nap to improve her disposition, but I’m sure she’ll roar to life when she has some new ideas. I promise that you’ll be the first to hear about it!

Until next week…


Martina Celerin

Warm from the dryer…

This has been a good arts week. My inner fashion designer was validated when I got a nice e-mail from the Trashionista show coordinators. Not only was I juried into the show, they asked if I could make a second piece! Of course I couldn’t pass up a challenge like that, so off I went trying to design another ball gown. I was channeling river themes when I started, and the piece ended up blue, silver and black. I started off by repurposing an old blue sundress—the high-waisted variety that was popular back in the eighties. Then I trimmed out a bit of material from a pair of pants that was part of an old Halloween costume. It has a smooth, crushed velvet texture that’s now the waistband. You can’t live in the eighties, I say. I needed some decoration for the waistband, so I went to my collection of silver things and found a bag full of handles from fancy paper shopping bags. I had a vision that involved the bottles of glue left over from last year’s Children’s Booth project at the Fourth Street Festival where they glued all sort of found materials onto large panels in the colors of the BEAD logo. I added water to several of the glue bottles, dunked the bag handles into the diluted glue, then laid them out as a swirly pattern on wax paper to dry. The handles became the little swirly whirlpools on the waistband. Of course I had to maintain a little continuity with the first piece, so I zipped over to Opportunity House and snagged a nice black bathing suit for the top. It also secretly fits into the water theme, although the casual admirer might not notice it. As I was in the process of dress design I stopped in at Yarns Unlimited (celebrating 30 years in business) to see their beaded handbag display and ran into Suzanne Halvorson, which is always a pleasure. I was amazed at the intricate work, and one thing that caught my eye was the dangling triangles on the beaded handbags. I decided that’s what I needed to add some width and flounce to the gown. I achieved this on the dress by cutting slits into the bottom two thirds of the sundress and sewed in triangles of shiny black raincoat material. To top it all off I pulled out some leftover black spray paint. How often do you hear the top fashion designers say that—look for the technique to be big in the spring shows! I realized I could stencil nicely on the blue material, so I introduced a few black swirly patterns to give it a more industrial feel. I can’t make a ball gown with out a dryer sheet shawl, but this time I went with silver and black. The good news is that it looks great, but the bad news is that I ran out of dryer sheets. I’m going to need more for the ‘Edible Lotus’ project that I volunteered to participate in, so I’m on the lookout for more used dryer sheets. Yes, I blend the real and the surreal in ways unimagined by the greats of the renaissance.

While my dressmaking project has taken up a lot of my time, I haven’t lost track of my tomato project. I’ve been poking tomatoes and I’m up to sixty-five, three short my goal for ‘Homegrown Tomatoes’. I’ll need to make a few more stems and hopefully I can begin pulling that piece together this week. To celebrate I bought a single red tomato from Bloomingfoods, which I’ll enjoy on a veggie burger sometime soon. Nobody else in the family likes raw tomatoes, so this one is all mine!

Until next week…

My inner fashion designer emerges…

This was a week when, even with two boys to entertain and ferry about to play dates, I was able to keep my nose to the sewing machine and finish my ball gown for the Trashionista fashion show. I’m delighted with how it turned out! I call it ‘Elegance Reclaimed’, and now my budding fashion career is in the hands of the jurors. My inner scientist can handle either outcome, since all my expectations as an artist have pretty much been fulfilled. Still, I think I really met the challenge to reclaim and repurpose materials from the trash flow. The shawl for the gown is made from dryer sheets that I painted gold and black and stitched together. To feed my emerging inner fashionista I discovered a new stitch on my sewing machine—a compact zig zag stitch to fuse the diaphanous material. Wow! Now I’m even talking like a designer—this is great! The top is built from a favorite but failing black bathing suit. I stretched and abraided the bottom beyond the point where my modesty no longer allowed me to wear it. Instead of tossing it I transformed the sturdy part into my elegant gown top. I reshaped the neckline and stitched on a piece of an old black t-shirt, and at the junctions I attached well-worn black leather belts I acquired from the Backstreet Mission here in town. The antique gold trim is from a family friend, Kathey Gibson, and in its former life it was used to decorate Christmas gifts. The swirly doo-dad is a piece of plastic I’ve saved so long I don’t even remember where it came from (but of course I knew I’d need it someday!). The skirt itself is basically a crazy quilt made from old men’s and women’s shirts that I picked up at the recycle center. It’s built from a black leather skirt, bits of black lace bra (no need to go into that here), samples from a discarded upholstery book and animal print scraps. The animal print fabric was in scraps because my son Tommie and I made a shirt where he cut pieces out of the fabric and sewed them on a fading but favored grey fuzzy shirt, and now it’s still one of his favorite winter shirts. Back to the gown—the back is held together by scraps of Velcro and the buckles from the belts keep the whole thing closed. There are also a couple of old eye-and-hook closures that were left on cards priced at 19 cents for 25. That speaks to how old those are, but they still found a purpose.

In other big family news, we went to see the Cardinal Stage Company’s ‘Sound of Music’, featuring a charming neighbor of ours as Gretl. She was great, as was her supporting cast and the production. It’s actually amazing that a town of this size supports such fabulous theater, and we’re very fortunate to have them. They’ve never let us down. My boys really enjoyed the play, but I have to admit to having been jolted a few times with some of the staging devices. When the swastika banners dropped down, and the machine-gun toting Nazis came on stage, I was a little overwhelmed. These cast sinister shadows from my family history, even though my young kids (thankfully) don’t yet appreciate why.

Anyway, I’ve got to run. The phone is ringing, and the caller ID says it from New York City, some fashion design shop. Ah, the life of the nouveau fashion diva!

Until next week…