Artist: Barbara Wisnoski, Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Interview 13: Barbara exhibited in the 2009 World of Threads Festival exhibition Common Thread International Exhibition Part 1 and Part 2.
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Interviews published by Gareth Bate & Dawne Rudman.
Biography
Barbara Wisnoski has a BFA in Sculpture and Fibres from Concordia University (Montreal) and a BA in Philosophy from Dalhousie University (Halifax). She also studied textile design for two years at the Centre de Recherche et de Design en Impression Textile de Montréal and before establishing a full-time art practice her professional background included lingerie design and arts administration. She is an editorial board member of Cahiers métiers d'art: Craft Journal, a peer-reviewed academic journal that publishes critical, historical and technical research on local and international craft.
Barbara's work has been exhibited in Canada, USA, Ukraine and China, most recently in Fiberart International and From Lausanne to Beijing international textile biennales. Website
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Barbara Wisnoski in her Montreal studio with a work in progress. Photo: Brooks Yardley |
Tell us about your work?
I create '2.5'-dimensional murals and wall installations from repurposed clothing using a method inspired by traditional quilt-piecing techniques. Cloth is sewn together and then repeatedly slashed apart, re-sorted and re-sewn, fracturing and dispersing individual fabrics in a process that melds surface and structure, and embodies the beauty, comfort and absurdity of repetition.
In recent series of work I've explored the effects of texture on the pictorial field, drawing on iconic modernist painting imagery (colour field, minimalist landscape, target painting) to see what happens when 'pure form' meets the physicality and emotional and semiotic baggage of cloth. In my current series I create immersive textile environments, using the same technique to render intricate decorative embroidery motifs in gallery installation scale.
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Detail: Field, fabric, thread, Machine-pieced |
From where do you get your inspiration?
I think inspiration comes from everywhere: an art education enables you to develop a formal language to understand and articulate the visual world, and maintaining an art practice allows you to cultivate and receive inspiration, whether encountered on the street, in books, in nature, in conversation, in a gallery, or whatever.
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Earth (repetition of an act of mourning), 68 x 76 inches, fabric, thread; machine-pieced. |
Why did you choose to go into fibre art?
It is definitely in my blood – my mother was a talented seamstress and I inherited her love of fabric. It is a medium intrinsically connected to the notion of time and the layering of time that creates texture, ideas which are central to my artwork.
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Folded Circle (redeeming vermilion), 2009, 60 x 60 inches,fabric, thread, Machine-pieced |
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Detail: Folded Circle (redeeming vermilion), 2009, 60 x 60 inches,fabric, thread, Machine-pieced |
What other mediums do you work in, and how does this inform your fibre work?
I have also worked in paper and wood, and at some point would like to focus on sculptural and public art, which may entail exploring more durable media.
Which is your favourite fibre medium?
I'm particularly drawn to the geometric abstraction of Gee's Bend quilts and the heavy, dense embroideries of Eastern Europe (where my ancestors come from).
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Grey Rain Sea, 2008, 60 x 62 inches, Fabric, thread, Machine-pieced |
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Detail: Grey Rain Sea, 2008, 60 x 62 inche, Fabric, thread, Machine-pieced |
What specific historic artists have influenced your work?
As for historical textile art, my work has been described in relation to traditional Japanese boro and Korean pojagi textiles, which refer to mended and patched textiles ('boro' means 'rag' in Japanese), although I was not aware of these when I first began making pieced murals. Discovering the Gee's Bend quilts of Alabama had a great influence on me in art school, and I took their strip-piecing method and improvisational quality as my point of departure in developing my own work.
It is notable that all three of these textile traditions gained attention in the North American art world for their strikingly modernist aesthetic. Indeed, my recent series make oblique or direct reference to twentieth century abstract painters, for example, the target paintings of Claude Tousignant, whose retrospective I saw at the Musée d'art Contemporain de Montréal a few years back; the minimalist colour field paintings of Mark Rothko, Jennifer Bartlett and other works of the modernist canon that I've had the pleasure of seeing in museum collections in New York, Washington and elsewhere.
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Latent Green, 2010, 120 x 160 inches, Fabric, thread, Machine-pieced |
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Detail: Latent Green, 2010, 120 x 160 inches, Fabric, thread, Machine-pieced |
What specific contemporary artists have influenced your work?
I admire the obsessive nature and conceptual purity of the work of Polish artist Roman Opalka. Since 1965 he has been executing a single artwork, entitled "1965 / 1 – ∞", consisting of canvas after canvas filled with painted numbers from 1 to infinity. I would of course dread the thought of spending my life this way, but he and others who work with time in extreme ways (e.g. Taiwanese-American artist Tehching Hsieh – recently at DHC/ART Foundation in Montreal – who performs and documents mundane activities over a sustained period) have a great affinity with all needle workers, who viscerally mark the passage of time with their repetitive gestures.
I don't know if these existential artists have directly influenced my work, but they certainly inform ideas about time, work, the social value of artistic labour vs. other kinds of labour etc. that entertain me while I sew.
Similarly, painter Agnes Martin's subtle, focused rendering of straight lines also is inspiring, as are her writings, and although my riotously textured surfaces seem the antithesis of her restraint, I somehow aspire to that kind of single-mindedness.
For a way more exuberant approach, I love the work of Polly Apfelbaum, who makes grand decorative floor installations with painted velvet and sequined fabrics. In my upcoming solo show in October at Centre Diagonale I will be decorating the gallery by creating an all-over textile environment that plays with the scale of a repeat embroidery pattern. I'm fascinated by both the uselessness and ubiquity of decoration, and by what I see as the conflation of our decorative impulse with contemporary installation art.
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Long Cold Embrace (she's sleeping), 2010, 120 x 145 inches, fabric, thread; machine-pieced |
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Long Cold Embrace (she's sleeping), 2010, 120 x 145 inches, fabric, thread; machine-pieced. |
What other fibre artists are you interested in?
Although they may not necessarily identify as fibre artists, I admire the textile-based work of Anna Von Mertens (USA), for its combination of abstraction plus narrative premise; of Lyn Carter (Toronto) for its elegance and wit; of Malou Zryd (Switzerland) for its quiet glamour.
Artists working in large-scale installation that I admire include Karilee Fuglem (Montreal), for her subtle, ethereal environments, Janet Echelman (USA) for the massive scale and Ernesto Neto (Brazil) for his humour.
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Platonic Target, 2010, 81x162, Fabric, thread, Machine-pieced |
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Detail: Platonic Target, 2010, 81x162, Fabric, thread, Machine-pieced |
What role do you think fibre art plays in contemporary art?
As a medium ideally suited to artistic discourse on the body and other postmodern concerns, it was gratifying to see the fibre medium take its place within a wider contemporary art context in the past decade or two. However, medium-specific practices still remain marginalized insofar as they are not concept-driven, so in order for the discipline to evolve it's important that craft-based artists be aware of the broader artistic context in which they work and that their work become part of that conversation. Fortunately, at the same time, new craft theory has gradually been shaping a critical language unique to craft media, enabling craft criticism to develop on its own terms.
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White Rag Quilt, 67x77 in, fabric, thread, Machine-pieced. |
Tell us about your studio and how you work:
I am very fortunate to share a beautiful, warm, light-filled studio that has a huge wall of windows overlooking the Lachine Canal (it's in the same building as the Centre de Recherche et de Design en Impression Textile de Montreal, a textile design school which I attended for two years when I first moved to Montreal). My space is quite bare, just a sewing machine, boxes of fabrics, a current visual reference or two and a seating area, so it's good for focusing on sewing labour and reverie (the windows). I like and need to keep these activities separate from home, where I have a space for books, drawing materials, computer and endless clutter and distraction.
Where do you imagine your work in five years?
I would like to be focusing on site-specific installations and commissioned work for public spaces.
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Barbara Wisnoski's Montreal studio. |
What was your motivation for submitting your work to the World of Threads Festival?
I had seen that a few artists whom I knew (or knew of) had exhibited their work in previous years, and I thought that it would be a good opportunity to participate in a large and well-publicized show in a region to which I have a long connection (I was born in Toronto and have relatives there and throughout the Niagara Peninsula). I liked the fact that there were several venues, to allow for work to be grouped into mini-shows, and thought that the curation at b42 Gallery resulted in a particularly successful exhibition.
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Platonic Landscape (57x32 in) in the 2009 Common Thread Exhibition Part 3 as part of the World of Threads Festival at b42 Gallery, Oakville, Ontario, Canada. |
Is there anything else you would like us to know about you or your work?
To answer the question I'm often asked: 'where do you get all your fabrics?': My inventory of fabrics is not sourced i.e. I don't seek out and purchase fabric for its colour or texture, rather, it represents a kind of personal or household archive that I've accumulated in the course of living, sewing, mending (and, more recently, receiving cast-offs from friends). Like most North Americans, I consume and waste too much of everything, so it's gratifying in my art practice at least to honour that original quilt-making ethos of sparingness, of using up otherwise useless scraps to make something pleasing. This vestige of peasant values, combined with a classically Freudian fabric fetish (i.e. motherly love transferred to inanimate objects), creates my aversion to discarding any waste fabric and great satisfaction in being able to redeem a box of scraps.
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Interviews published by Gareth Bate & Dawne Rudman.
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Platonic Landscape (57x32 in) in the 2009 Common Thread Exhibition Part 3 as part of the World of Threads Festival at b42 Gallery, Oakville, Ontario, Canada. |