Part 1 – Firestorm

There’s often no telling how an idea will evolve.
A piece may start with a specific destination in mind, but logistical snags invariably crop up and I soon find myself on a different path. The serendipitous twists and turns that result take me to a place I hadn’t imagined, but one where I am ultimately quite happy to have landed.
What follows is the story of one example of this phenomenon unfolding.

News of the devastating wildfires out west, paired with having a son who has been navigating dreadful air quality at home in the Bay area, has gotten me to thinking what a malleable canvas these little houses can be for making a statement beyond COVID-19.

Reporting on personal wildfire stories has stressed the horror of being surrounded by fire as it rages all around. While I can’t begin to imagine such a scenario, I wanted to make a piece that in some way expressed that sense of being enclosed or trapped.

My original plan was to make a small house that would sit in the center of a larger, house-shaped shell, and to use a translucent fabric for the outer house. Silk organza would allow one to see the house within, while also being a worthy medium for portraying the amorphous nature of fire which I planned to suggest with dye. Unfortunately, organza’s porosity, a characteristic I expected to work to my advantage, was also a downside. When undoing the resist stitches I’d sewn before the dye bath, I discovered that the dye had seeped right through many of them, leaving only a faint pattern. That fact, paired with relatively weak color, resulted in a rather anemic appearance.

However, there are always ways to work around an issue.
While dyeing the unstitched areas of the fabric, I discovered a way to create an effect reminiscent of the striations of flickering flames (as seen in the top section of the silk in the photo above). So I dyed more organza, employing that process with stronger color, figuring that layering the two lengths of fabric, one on top of the other, would achieve the effect I was looking for. It worked rather well.

Not wanting to compete with the impact of the fire-inspired cloth, I decided to leave the inner house a blank slate, covering it with un-dyed raw silk and stitching with neutral-colored thread. Spent daylily flower stalks gathered from my garden, varnished and sewn to the house, enhance the effect of the natural coloring while providing support.

Once this stage was complete, I ran headlong into the problem of how to then create and support the organza casing that would surround it. I have a full page in my sketchbook with various brainstorming solutions, none of which ended up being right or feasible to execute. It became apparent that I was going to have to switch gears.

The “fire” would have to run up the sides of the structure rather than fully enveloping it. I was still undecided as to whether or not to support it so that it would hover above the roof and be held out from the sides as in my original plan, or lay it directly upon the roof, letting it fall naturally down the sides. If it hovered, the stalks’ prongs could be leveraged to support the fabric, but even if not, their physical resemblance to a flame still added significantly to the overall impact.

In the midst of deciding how to attach the fabric, I discovered that using both layers of dyed organza together (discussed above) was unworkable; the layers became just too thick and unwieldy. However, reverting to using the originally dyed piece alone worked beautifully. Layered upon itself as it was gathered and folded to fit the narrow roof space, the previously bemoaned lack of pattern and color suddenly came alive.  Pressing folds into the silk to create a tactile pattern that is reminiscent of flames added to the overall effect.

Running my progress by the discerning eye of a trusted artist friend, she rightly commented that the house, left white, appeared “unscathed and disconnected” from a fire’s devastation. My decision to keep the house neutral was meant to suggest universality, but she was of course right — the piece appeared inappropriately light – even upbeat. The solution was charcoal.

In the end, I decided to leave the dyed organza resting directly on the roof rather than elevating it. The top edges of fabric have been left raw and uneven which not only suggests the upward movement of flame as it consumes a building but, with the bottom edges of the organza sweeping around the base of the piece, I could maintain the suggestion of the house being enveloped.

I’ve learned not to be surprised by the unexpected issues that present themselves as most of my pieces come to life, or the need to puzzle my way to a solution. It is the rare work, for me anyway, that runs a straight line from conception to completion. But to be honest, that is one of the perks of art-making — it’s what keeps each day fresh, interesting, and ultimately rewarding.

Part 2 – Isolation

The addendum to my blow-by-blow tale above is that going down a different path doesn’t preclude one from getting back to the original starting point. After finishing Firestorm, I was still anxious to find a way to make a piece that mimicked my original sketch. I thought of all sorts of options for how I might construct a wire structure to support an organza “envelope”, but in the end they were all a bust. Any wire I tried was too soft and flexible to hold its shape. What could I use that would maintain the stiff, straight lines I wanted?

It took my architect father less than a moment to offer a solution: coat hangers. We talked through the best way to form the frame and how to attach the various pieces to each other. In no time I had the structure I’d envisioned and after that everything came together very quickly.

After making the inner house, I suspended it with clear thread so that it would appear to be floating. The next step was to make a house-shaped sleeve out of silk organza to tightly fit over the wire frame. I didn’t mind the idea of seeing seam allowances, in fact, that seemed preferable to me aesthetically.  Joining the seams via the hand-stitching method used in Pojagi (Korean Quilting) was the best way to complete this step.

Now complete, the outer casing was stitched invisibly to the frame to keep it taught. The final piece appears exactly the way I had hoped. Whether describing the fraught emotions of being caught in a fire or isolated by the coronavirus, it strikes the note of removal and disconnect that I had originally intended.

Time and again, I’ve found that hitting stumbling blocks and being forced to rethink my approach allows for an idea to evolve into something greater than I might have come up with in one shot. The roundabout discoveries often provide a suitable proving ground for finding my way back to an idea that needed additional “simmering” before it could be realized. It makes the detours well-worth the time, and perhaps ultimately a sort of secret weapon.

Thanks so much for hanging in with me to the end of this very long post!
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