Category Archives: Craftwork

Making strange

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When I first moved to Melbourne from Sydney 12 years ago, I heard a saying I’d never heard before. “NQR”, people would say with a wink, and the conversation would end.

“NQR?”, I asked one day.

“Yeh, you know, Not Quite Right.”

Turns out there was a bulk grocery store of the same name that sold food in damaged packaging. Cans with dents, sacks with tears, that kind of thing. And the name of the store had been adopted as the shorthand for communicating something was “off” with a particular individual. Sort of like saying “he’s a few sandwiches short of the picnic”, only without the effort.

“NQR?”, one would ask. “Yep”. Enough said.

***

If you’ve ever had any dealings in the professional craft sector you’ll know people talk a lot about what makes something art and what makes something craft. Usually, they end up rolling out a very old and tattered premise: that craft is about the useful and art is not.

It occurs to me now the real distinction lies in the “not quite right”. Making the “not quite right” is what all artists, consciously or unconsciously, are setting out to do.

This isn’t an original idea. It has a long provenance. The Russian formalist literary critic, Viktor Shklovsky first used the term “defamiliarisation” in 1917 to refer to the strivings of the poet, the painter, to make strange the familiar.

The European philosophers of the 20th century, people like Heidegger and Derrida, standing on the shoulders of people like Shklovsky, deliberately sought to extend and exploit language that was defamiliarised. If language could be made strange to us, they speculated, what new things might we glimpse outside its usual remit?

The idea extends all the way to the field of artifical intelligence and computer programming with the postulation of the “uncanny valley”, the small region of human perception lying on either side of a norm, which I’ve written about previously in relation to Michael Jackson. The not-quite-right of art is about creating in the uncanny valley, and the best art has happened upon the sweet spot in that place.

The best, the most successful art has an indisputable effect on us. There’s no gainsaying it. We’re hooked and mesmerised in front of it, and it has everything to do with the tension between the familiar and the strange.

***

Image: One of the famously disturbing works of Australian artist, Patricia Piccinini; photo taken by me at Bendigo Art Gallery, Victoria, Australia

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Resurrections

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“It’s a life of crucifixions and resurrections,” said the priest. “Of course,” I thought, “that’s what Easter means.”

***

Last weekend, my mother’s quilting club put on their bi-annual quilt show. It was held in a white art gallery overlooking a bay. The sun was out, the gardens just starting to turn gold.

They’d set up a table selling raffle tickets at the local shopping centre in the preceding weeks, and on the morning of the opening one of the club members talked about the show on a major Sydney radio station.They were overwhelmed with visitors, some who’d driven for hours. The gallery staff were caught off guard. Having advised the club they could not provide their own tea and cakes, the cafe was now overrun with quilters desperate for a cup. The queues persisted for hours.

My mother had several of her quilts on display, as well as three quilts for sale. So many were the quilts, they had room to hang only one of the quilts she had for sale; the others were merely draped over the nearest spare object.

She could have sold the quilt on display at least 10 times. She had people fighting over it, and scores of people asking her about the colour palette and technique. Afterwards, she had a phone conversation with the woman who bought it and the woman told her she had come to the quilt show with an academic in textiles who had described the quilt palette as outstanding.

It was the same story with the quilts that weren’t even hung. She had numerous offers for each. One woman, on learning someone else had just bought the quilt she wanted, asked my mother if she would take a commission to make another. In fact, my mother not only sold all the quilts many times over, she got several requests for commissions and offers for the quilts which weren’t for sale.

My mother and her quilts were the talk of the show.

***

My mother will turn 80 this year. For most of her life, she has considered herself shy, and she frequently suffered in social settings. She was often unhappy and frustrated. Then about 12 years ago she discovered quilting and her life has been transformed. She found something that satisfied her need for creative expression, for passion, for friendship and sociability, and since then everything’s been different.

My father died in July 2010 after being married to my mother for 51 years. The first nine months were awful, and I feared for her life too. Now I see she’s turned a corner. Another resurrection has occurred.

***

Image: The classic Roebuck quilt (not my mother’s version)

Possum magic

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I’ve got a case of second sock syndrome at the moment. I’m stuck on knitting first socks only.

While first socks are wild and unpredictable, second socks are the duty socks of the sock world. Already known in advance, these poor creatures limp off the needles. And they’re not even limping at the moment.

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Turning pro in a creative enterprise

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I write only when inspiration strikes; fortunately, it strikes every morning at nine o’clock sharp.

So said Somerset Maugham when asked if he wrote on schedule or only when inspiration struck. It is quoted in the book by Steven Pressfield, The War of Art, subtitled “How to break through the blocks and win your inner creative battles”.

The book is not a great one. It’s light and the content feels re-heated. And using a war metaphor is as tiresome and melodramatic as it is in all contexts other than war.

There are some useful distinctions, however. One is the distinction between the amateur and the professional.

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In a bend of the river

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The act of bringing beauty into the world is always available. At any time, and for all people.

It’s been available for the last hundred years or so in a small bend of the Alabama River where a group of women, poor and uneducated, have been creating patchwork quilts that rival the greatest of modernist paintings.

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Vienna in Melbourne sans pen, sans pencil, sans camera

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The Vienna of 1900 has come to Melbourne in the exhibition at the NGV – Vienna Art & Design – and it is spectacular.

Room after room is packed with exquisite paintings, furniture and household objects from the capital of the vast Austro-Hungarian empire at the moment of its apogee: when Modernism was being born, when Freud was writing about dreams and discontents, when artists like Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele were painting real women and an architect called Josef Hoffmann, with Freudian brio, was burrowing his way into the most intimate recesses of the daily lives of the populace with his genius for beauty.

Hoffmann (1870 – 1956) is the star of the show.

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Planning meeting for “People of the sock”

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We’re having a planning meeting for the People of the sock project next Wednesday, 3 November, 5-6pm, and you’re invited.

Just to jog the old grey cells …

People of the sock is a community project.  It’s about bringing together experienced sock knitters and people who want to learn to knit socks in a knitting workshop.  The socks knitted as a result of the workshop will be distributed to people who are homeless as Christmas presents.

The project is about spreading the joy of making, and about nurturing and caring for others.

Inspiration

I was inspired to start the project after meeting a spry and youthful 80-year-old knitting socks outside a hospital while her husband was parking the car.  The woman told me she knits socks for a Sydney organisation that distributes them to people who are homeless.  Socks are particularly valued, she said, because they’re warm and easily portable.  When not wearing the socks a person can stuff them in their pocket for the day, unlike the gift of a blanket which has to be carried around or hidden while the person goes about their business.

The meeting venue

The lovely Tal at Morris and Sons is letting us use their space for the planning meeting.  Morris and Sons — if you haven’t already discovered this veritable oasis of craft in the middle of the city — is on Level 1, 234 Collins Street, Melbourne.

Everyone is welcome at the planning meeting:

  • people who may like to be teachers at the knitting workshop
  • people who may like to be students at the knitting workshop
  • people who like getting involved in community projects
  • people who like contributing ideas
  • people who knit socks
  • people who knit
  • people.

Remember, for the planning meeting …

Wednesday, 3 November, 5-6pm, at Morris and Sons, Level 1, 234 Collins Street, Melbourne.

If you can’t attend the meeting and you want to be involved in the project, that’s excellent too.  Just contact me by email, Twitter or Ravelry.

Email: peopleofthesock [at] gmail [dot] com
Twitter: @sockppl
Ravelry: solidgold

These obscure and unobscure objects of desire

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Dearest iPhone, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

No, no, maybe not.  Too much like another hymn to Apple and its tiresome CEO.  Too much fetishization of the gadget, not enough genuine delight.

So, forthwith, genuine delight.

The iPhone is the handiest thing I own.  It knows what I want to do before I do, it never makes me read the f – - king manual and it takes photos like these, turning a simple weeknight dinner at a friend’s house into an artistic event.

Of course, it helps if said friend has lovely, obscure objects to share.  For example, what do you think this is?

And how about this?

Or this?

And what about this?

Here’s a hint or two.  The top three concern knitting, the bottom one, playing.  All are made from bakelite.  Answers in an update tomorrow.

*****