- PLEASE CHECK OUT MY NEW WEBSITE MANDYGREER.ORG
- NOW OPEN for Registration: Camano Island Weaving Retreat, Oct 26-28, 2018
- PRINT SALE: Limited edition photography prints available now from The Ecstatic Moment
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Oregon Coast Farm Weaving Retreat registering soon!
Save the date! I’ll be posting the registration page for my newest Weaving Retreat on my website mandygreer.org, in the next few days! Join my mailing list if you want to find out when it drops, or when any of my other classes and projects happen! Sign up HERE!
NOW OPEN for registration: Camano Island Weaving Retreat, Oct 26-28, 2018
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Weaving Retreat on Camano Island, June 15/16th, 2018
Learn ALL about my upcoming Camano Island Weaving Retreat Here!
Deadline to register is May 14th, 2018
Only a few spaces left for lodgers, and 4 spaces left for those that just want to come to the workshop as Day-Trippers, or get their lodging on their own.
Winter Holiday 2017 Workshops Schedule
My Winter Holiday 2017 Workshop Schedule is up! There won’t be any more added dates beyond this so make your plans and sign up soon before the classes fill up!
I have scheduled my Basic Weaving Wall Hanging Tapestry Class, as well as Wool Snowball Pom-Pom Garlands.
Wall Weaving:
NOV 12, SUN, 11am – 4pm
DEC 23, SAT, 11 am – 4pm
DEC 30, SAT, 11am – 4pm
Wool Pom-Pom Garland:
NOV 12, SUN, 6pm – 9pm
DEC 17, SUN, 6pm – 9pm
DEC 23, SAT, 6pm – 9pm
DEC 24, SUN, 11am – 2pm
If you are interested in Upcycled Cowl, Beaded Neckpieces, Pom-Pom accessories, Felting or Headdresses — All of these are by On-Demand only, meaning I will schedule one for you if you gather a group together of 5 people, then I’ll promote to fill the rest of the class. Or you can schedule a Private Party and get a discount if you have a group of ten people. Dates are limited so don’t wait until the last minute to reserve your Private Party. Prices are on the registration page for each workshop or contact me.
Spread the love…
pom-pom headband, Come make your own!
Fall Studio Sale with Magpie Mouse jewelry pop-up, Oct 28-29, 2017
As we all hurtle towards the long winter, come to my studio and warm your feet by the fire, drink mulled wine and tea, and cake, and pick out something wonderful to take home with you.
It’s time for me again to open my studio, for my Fall Sale!
The Silver Studio
Oct 28th SAT 10am – 4pm
Oct 29th SUN, 10am-4pm
Art, Weaving, works on paper, Photography, fiber-based sculpture, Garlands!
And a collection of Vintage collectables, clothes and sewing materials including vintage buttons and beads, fabrics and quilts.
AND special guest Magpie Mouse Studios! Sarah will have a beautiful selection of organic metal enameled jewelry and other delights!
Cash and Credit Cards accepted.
Talk to me about a payment plans for pieces over $100! We can work something out!
Please lend your support of my studio by joining the Facebook invite and inviting people who you think will love what I do. We all can use some love, my studio included!
https://magpiemousestudios.tumblr.com/
PARKING: Street parking is available but leave space uphill from my studio for my elderly neighbor. thanks!
Metamorphic Exhibition and Workshop in Ellensburg, Wa.
“Stone Mother”, 2013, archival ink jet photograph on rag paper
Now until April 29th, I have an exhibition of work up at Gallery One in Ellensburg, Wa. called Metamorphic.
Here…let me quote myself from the Gallery One website!
Mandy Greer is a Seattle-based multidisciplinary artist who works in a symbiotic way with fiber-based installation, photography, film, performance, and social and environmental interactivity. For Metamorphic, Greer presents a collection of works from the last several years that explore the connection between the flux of our inner life and the geologic, translating the upheavals of stone, ash and magma into soft and malleable fiber that becomes a shadow of the domestic. This exhibition spans several bodies of work, and has been informed by an on-going series of residencies Greer does with her family in remote or isolated places, distilling into artworks imagery that questions assigned roles, the social and intimate projections on the family, and the boundaries between body, environment and imagination.
Greer centers mothering as a generative and artistic medium for her work, and challenges the dominant notion of the ‘solo genius artist’, rather focusing on the symbiosis within groups and defacto collectives. The maternal becomes a map for approaching social and ecological healing. Caring for and carrying children becomes a way to understand the collective body, the family as body, the body as ever-changing environment.
Transformation is central; chaos is woven into order and back into chaos. Using the physicality and metaphor of weaving, the subtle metamorphic passage of flesh and time is represented in glittering stone, erupting ash, dust, animal and flesh again. Greer transforms the detritus of our contemporary textile waste stream into timeless, elegant and raw conglomerations of inscrutable nature and the underbelly of human ceremonial imagination. By reclaiming the cast-offs of ‘fast fashion’ and reinvesting the material with painstaking hand-work, we are invited to enquiry on how value and meaning are ascribed, erased and altered.
Double Green Man, 2011
Snaefellsness Glacier Boy, 2012, archival ink jet on watercolor paper
Needles and Thread at Gallery One
This show also coincides with another show that I juried, called Needles and Thread, a national juried fiber show that I feel quite proud of! Many tender and strong artworks, so please visit if you are in Eastern Washington.
Needles and Thread at Gallery One in Ellensburg, Wa. now through April 29, 2017
AND I will be traveling to Ellensburg on April 22nd, to do a Wall Weaving Basics Workshop at Gallery One. I’ll be featuring a sampling of Icelandic yarns from local farm Green Bow Farm. I just heard that it is sold out (yea!) but if you are interested, please contact them anyway and get on a wait list. Or you can encourage them to invite me out again!
Gallery One
11:00AM – 5:00PM
408 North Pearl Street, Ellensburg WA 98926
509-925-2670
Green Bow Farm visit, in Ellensburg, Wa.
I also wanted to share some pictures of just a really happy day! When I drove my work out to Ellensburg, I was able to stop by and meet Farmer Christina of Green Bow Farm! I adore all their products; in Seattle you can meet them at the West Seattle Farmers Market, as well get their incredible eggs at The London Plane.
Anyhow…my real goal was to meet George Costanza! One of the charming Icelandics in GBF’s flock who is Instafamous!
And I did! The sheep were all sheared, so not as photogenic but definitely comfortable, but follow GBF on Instagram at @greenbowfarm for some truly lovely pictures of farm life, especially now during the lambing season.
Farmer Christina took time out of her busy day to show me around their new farm, a huge project restoring an old family farm back to its natural functionality. The snow was just beginning to really melt, so the land was like a sponge; dried dormant plants beginning to soak in huge water flows.
I am thrilled to get to use their yarn!
George!!! I love you!
Brown and dormant, but full of spring snow melt. Green Bow Farm
Restoring a family farm…
Many curious and many pregnant ewes…
New Weavings in my Weaving shop!
You can get your own little petite weaving from me, now a bunch are in my weaving shop!
OR you can take one of my workshops and make your own!
‘The Metamorph’ performance and participatory installation, Oct. 7th, 6-8pm
I haven’t known how to describe a transition my work and myself, my focus, are going through in the last, perhaps several, years. Perhaps this new work is a way to touch and describe some things, along the passage to some other state.
I have been cultivating this new work since April of this year, and for a good portion of this time I have had the generous and vigorous support of movement artist and dancer Lorraine Lau to bring things into being. I’m so grateful!
Please come and share in what we have to give. As with most of my work, ‘The Metamorph’ will remain in an on-going state, as we evolve it and learn more about it. So, more to come. But for one night, you will see it the way it will be for that one time only. Please come!
“The Metamorph”
by 2016 Neddy Artist Awards Finalist Mandy Greer
Friday, October 7th
Performance 6-8pm, with light refreshments
Audience members are free to come and go anytime between 6-8pm, participate, touch, or just watch. Performance space is limited to 25 people at a time but free movement and wandering in and out of the space are welcome. “The Neddy Artist Awards: 20 Years” Exhibition will be open, as well. All ages. Free. Presented by Cornish College of the Arts.
An installation of ceremonial bread and sweets will be offered by Fallow Collective.
Multi-media artist Mandy Greer presents an aggregation of durational performance, participatory fiber-based installation and knowledge sharing, inviting you into an experience that upends the hierarchy of audience and artist. Using the physicality and metaphor of weaving, all who touch and twist fiber are intertwined in the subtle metamorphic passage of flesh into glittering stone, erupting ash, dust, animal and flesh again. Greer transforms the detritus of our contemporary textile waste stream into timeless, elegant and raw conglomerations of inscrutable nature and the underbelly of human ceremonial imagination. By reclaiming the cast-offs of ‘fast fashion’ and reinvesting the material with painstaking hand-work, we are invited to enquiry on how value and meaning are ascribed, erased and altered.
Participatory installation by Mandy Greer
Choreography and direction by Lorraine Lau and Mandy Greer
Performed by Lorraine Lau
with Berit Astley, Mandy Greer, Paul Margolis, and Hazel Margolis
Sound by Mandy Greer and Hazel Margolis
See The Metamorph Preview video here!
#neddyartistawards2016
#themetamorph
We are all both monster and ocean, soft blanket and hard stone, ridged endurance and tender ripple. The lightest touch that lasts beyond time. To survive, we must weave ourselves into the lives of others. We are all melting back into the universe from where we came. We are all in this together. Hands working together build not just a fabric of reality, but invisible potent emotional ties. Layers of time become a text that only fingers can read, ash and dust transfigured into line. Nothing is stable, not even the ground beneath feet, as unseen forces bend, melt, shift, make and remake. Ties to this life are tied and untied. Love is such magma, pulsing and crushing twisted layers that rise and fall, blending one into another. Smooth stone washed, hardened scarred lines and silver stretches become who we are. Out of chaos, weaving is about two opposing forces that balance to create something stable, functional, vital. Without the tension and subtle force on thread, all would fall apart. You can trace a thread through time, touch made into protection, cloth into refuge, and sensation the mediator of the fragile body. Thread, a line, a narrative of human invention strung together. An asking, a hiding. We are all both monster and ocean.
‘The Metamorph’ is formed from giant garments and weavings influenced by how the geologic record hidden below our feet becomes a text recording the every-changing passage of matter through time. Ground seems solid to human perception, but it is not. This disconnect mimics our own human sense of time, where upheavals and traumas become hidden or revealed in the body, where layers upon layers of healing and psychic scarring through time make up who we are. The body and geologic time move through tumult, stillness, destruction, age and rebirth. Throughout human cultural production, weaving has been used to describe the way we construct space and time, making order from chaos. The free, non goal-oriented weaving process of this experiential installation allows all hands to record the layers of time spent with The Metamorph as she moves through the passages of transfiguration.
image film stills by Dylan Ward
Fallow Collective: “Bonds” happening/performance this summer in Seattle
Fallow Collective presents the second edition of ‘Bonds’, an in-city family residency that will take place in a series of public leisure sites around Seattle this summer.
Join in this performance of ‘Bonds’ on a picnic blanket in Volunteer Park. You will find us in a small grassy field, just west of the Seward statue, in front of the Conservatory. 1402 E Galer St, Seattle, Washington 98112. From 5pm – 8:15pm (sunset)
This edition of Bonds falls on the full moon, and also on the 12th anniversary of when one Fallow Collective member began feeding another Fallow Collective member (….my milk came in, after giving birth two days before). To celebrate the cycles of fertility we ALL were born of and our connection to this celestial orb, we’ll be offering you ‘moon bread’ and red velvet cake!
To give back to the cycles of fertility, we are asking you to bring menstrual supplies that will be donated to All Cycles, an outreach project that provides support for menstruating folks who are homeless. http://allcycles.org/
The work doesn’t get done without you.
Help create weavings on the bodies of Fallow Collective artists.
We’ll have additional circle weavings set up so you can put on your own fingers to see what it’s like. It’s wonderful.
Feed yourself with Fallow Collective home-made bread and experimental desserts.
Feed us while our hands are tied up in the mode of production.
Experience the pleasure of making, giving and receiving, in a no-goal, no-skill, no-judgement framework bolstered by the energy of hands in motion together.
Bread, Fruit, Flowers, Desserts, Risk, Vulnerability, Companionship and Touch will be available on the picnic blanket from about 5-8:15pm (at sunset). All are welcome, All ages. You are welcome to bring your own blanket, and things to share. Come rest with us, linger, pass the time, make, eat.
What is Fallow Collective?
Fallow Collective places itself at odds with the dominate narrative of the art world for the maternal artist, that residencies = no children allowed, that children are a distraction, that studio time = ignoring your child.
Fallow Collective chips away at the frustrations that the maternal artist must choose between studio time or having friends, must choose between studio time or spending time with your partner and family, choose between childcare costs and participating in cultural events, choose between drinking with other artists or being alert to care for children. Fallow Collective rejects that the maternal desire to be near your child is at odds with studio practice, that maternal desire is only of importance/of consequence to a maternal audience and that care-taking is of little value to the art world unless done by a man…..all this we aim to resist even as we acknowledge the times it feels true. We aspire to a shift. A shift where the maternal is not hidden behind an artist identity, a shift where the artist mother is visible, is not swallowed whole by the dominant culture’s notion of what the maternal should be.
Visibility is a political position. Fallow is what happens when ‘production’ slows , but health and fertility returns. The Un-health of market capitalism only views the artist as ‘productive’ when they are churning out luxury goods to be bought and sold on a rarefied market.
Fallow Collective takes its cue from a lineage of relational and maternal aesthetics. Not presenting a fantasy or imagined vision of reality, but an actual mode of living and plan for taking action within the world as it is, even on the smallest scale of a social picnic. Rather than viewer and object, meaning is held and passed between all parties involved collectively.
Who is Fallow Collective?
Fallow Collective is an incubator and laboratory of an inter-generational core group of artists consisting of Mandy Greer, Hazel Margolis and Paul Margolis, who together –thicker than water and thicker than thieves– create installation, performance and media works. Primarily generating works through an on-going series of ‘family-in-residence’ projects, both independently generated and supported by traditional residency programs, Fallow Collective challenges and upends the arbitrary boundaries between art-making, leisure, care-taking, family and exploration.
http://mandygreer.org/fallow-collective/
Interactive Performance Installation with Alice Gosti
SAT JAN 23rd, 7-9pm
Olympic Sculpture Park
2901 Western Ave, Seattle, Washington 98121
‘Before You Were Born and After You Are Gone’
The first in the series of Art Encounters at the Park – SAM Olympic Sculpture Park Winter Weekends
Event is free and open to the multi-generational public.
RSVPs requested: visitsam.org/winter
#SAMWinter
Mandy Greer and Alice Gosti join together to dip into their already flowing works-in-progress to offer a forum for play, experimentation and connection -reinforcing communal bonds, that in uncertain times seem tenuous, but like love, must be activated to remain strong.
Immerse yourself in the flux of works being built around you, your hands joining others in the present moment. This evening event is an aggregation of durational performance and multi-media immersive installation, workshop and laboratory, exploration and game; where teaching becomes ritualized movement and making as choreography. Play becomes research that upends the hierarchy of audience and artist, adult and child.
A multi-generational performance company of professional and non-professional performers guide you through a labyrinth of cyclical and gentle prompts, tasks, connections and gift exchanges based on ritual childhood games, craft projects, and childlike urges. Through this, learning and teaching others becomes a way to test our ability to open to others around us, and the physicality of handwork accesses the immediacy of the communal instinct.
Set against an abstracted environment of mountain and sea, that seeming permanence is rendered in the soft contours of raw fibers reclaimed from the domestic sphere. The hard rock and crashing waves become both a metaphor for our inner world, familial tensions and release, and the site of social and political flux and upheaval.
Both artists meet at the desire to examine the physical and psychological weight of the connections we have and need with other living beings. The threads that bind us to each other in responsibility are represented by the weight of the child in society, either abandoned or carried by all.
Through carried weight, this project functions as a reminder that the human community has always been on the move, that burdens have always been shouldered as humans have thrown their fragile bodies to the mercy of the natural world, crossing sea and land passes to seek peace and a way to just live. And how we choose to care or not care for each other is one of the heaviest burdens we bear.
Greer and Gosti both work to make the invisible visible, through both political and poetic metaphor, whether it be the buried inner life or putting front and center the experiences of those pushed to the margins. Join us and immerse yourself in exploring the invisible and mysterious bonds of being human.
More info on Facebook Invite. Join and spread the word!
Performers include:
Brit Karhoff
Emma Klein
Wyly Astley
Paul Margolis
Hazel Margolis
Callaghan Crook
Eila Crook
Mandy Greer 