This week and next, I’m gearing up for my newest participatory project to begin on July 14th, 2011. It seems like there are a million loose ends, but that seems to just be my way, it will all knit together as it needs to be!
‘Solstenen’ kicks off at Seattle’s newest multi-disciplinary art center, The Project Room, as its inaugural project. For the first event, I’ll be hosting a Community Crochet Party to coincide with Capital Hill’s art walk, Thursday the 14th from 5 – 8 pm.
This begins a year long documenting process for me; here’s what I have to say on the project’s blog {stonemandy.wordpress.com}:
Solstenen — a year-long project chronicling the process of learning about and the making of a new body of creative work — begins with a 7-week open-studio residency at the Seattle multidisciplinary art center, The Project Room.
July 14 – September, 2011
I will begin the first stitch of this project at TPR, inviting public participation through hands-on workshops, open studio hours, and other happenings – including interactive activities with guest artists during August 2011.
Inspired by an amalgamation of literary works, and exploring themes of weight and physical burden as external symbols of internal self-transformation — identity metamorphosing into the environmental — I’ll be crocheting together wearable mantels of stones, and ‘hair shirts’ of hundreds of hand-sewn feathers.
Spring 2012, I’ll journey to a 5-week residency in Iceland with my husband, artist Paul Margolis, where we’ll use the massive garments to immerse ourselves in the radically dramatic landscape, explore our themes, creating works of eco-installation, performance, photography and video. Our work will also be to learn about Icelandic mythology, clay and pottery, Icelandic wool and fiber arts, and how this history of traditional arts funnels into Icelandic contemporary art practices.
Solstenen renders visible the meandering exploratory process involved in creating fully-realized artworks that is often unseen, but a fertile ground that must be turned. For my artistic practice, that fertile ground is ‘auto-didactic learning, sharing, influence and confluence’. An overlapping strata of concepts layering and growing together like a kombucha mother, I’ll document the alluvial fan of making, researching and connections formed with other makers/thinkers/tinkerers, through in-depth interviews of guest artists both here in Seattle and in Iceland.
The project will book-end with a culminating installation at The Project Room in Fall 2012, as part of TPR’s year-long curatorial question, “Why Do We Make Things.”
If this sounds like a project you want to participate in, and want timely updates, you can connect and get updates about the Solstenen project events through Twitter and Facebook, or by joining my mailing list. Connect, join and stop by!
Connect, Tweet and Facebook with The Project Room, too!
I also am in need of your extra materials in grays and silvers. If you have anything, I would be oh-so grateful! Read more about it {here}
Mandy Greer 