JOYFUL MAKING IN PERILOUS TIMES
by
Carlyn Yandle
BFA, Emily Carr University of Art + Design, 2010
BA, University of Victoria, 1985

A THESIS SUPPORT PAPER SUBMITTED
IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS
FOR THE DEGREE OF

MASTER OF FINE ARTS

EMILY CARR UNIVERSITY OF ART + DESIGN
2020

© Carlyn Yandle, 2020

Yandle

“Meanwhile, all the kids in Silicon Valley have no screens and are learning to crochet.”
— overheard parent at an East Vancouver elementary school
PAC meeting, on how to manage kids’ preoccupation with digital devices

Abstract
What may seem like a fuzzy retreat from devastating personal, local, and global realities is in
fact a tactile, humane action to seek alternatives. This thesis explores object-making in a world
of hazardous objects and conditions, intertwining the gathering of found materials, rote-making
and community engagement.

The supporting document is presented as a matrix extending across five case studies of
projects over the course of one calendar year. It is set in a journalistic format to engage a wide
range of readers. Each project picks up threads of ideas and weaves them through information
sources from both inside and outside the privileged space of the art institution, in looselywoven support of a complicating cultural practice.

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Table of Contents

Abstract

2

List of Figures

4

Acknowledgements

5

Preface

6

Position

9

Method/methodology

10

Case study: Scaffolds

14

Case study: Resurge

18

Case study: Space Craft

22

Case study: Foundlings

26

Case study: Hearth

29

Reflection

36

Works cited

39

Works consulted

42

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List of Figures

Fig. 1: Scaffolds, 2019……………………………………………………………………………… 17

Fig. 2: Resurge, 2019…………………………………………………………………………..…… 21

Fig. 3: Space Craft, 2019…………………………………………………………………………… 25

Fig. 4: Foundlings, 2019……………………………………………………………………….….… 28

Fig. 5: Hearth, 2020……………………………………………………………………..……..……. 35

“Touch comes before sight, before speech. It is the first language and the last,
and it always tells the truth.”
― Margaret Atwood, Der blinde Mörder

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Acknowledgements

To Trish Kelly, thesis supervisor and recently-appointed Vice-president Academic and Provost,
whose proven crisis-management skills serves as a reminder of the importance of
creative thinking in perilous times

To Bob Krieger, whose legacy of editorial cartoons illustrates the value of
handwork and humour in social discourse

and

To all the aunties who took a moment to share through hand-making.

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Preface

This graphic is a colour-coded summary of five material explorations interwoven with elements
of time, motivation and activity over the course of one calendar year. Each colour is separated
out at the heading of each of these five case studies to visually capture the scope of the work.

The calendar year is pictured as a circle, with the longest days arching above like the sun’s
trajectory, and the shortest at the cold, dark bottom: the inward months of retreating from the
noise and demands of the high-consumer holidays and regrouping, one stitch at a time. Thin
threads of ideas unfurl into bigger projects in brighter days, back out in the world.

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There is no hierarchy here in the colour-coded tracking of a year’s work, no distinction between
the value of exploring the tactile world with children and academic research, or between
producing objects for purchase or exhibit and knitting up community, creating to quell anxiety
and to add voice to the growing public dis-ease and dissent.1 All these various engagements
with found material and simple domestic-craft methods interlock, strengthening my
commitment to a low-waste, process-led way of working, independently and collaboratively.

ENTANGLEMENTS: SOME QUESTIONS

My ever-expanding process of material exploration resists easy categorization. “Critical
making” or “maktivism” grapples with “the mediated and direct experiences of interacting with
the material world” (Ratto and Boler, 2014) that speaks to socio-political engagement.
However, this focus eclipses the other, multiple layers of meaning in the concept-centred
objects themselves. In search for a more inclusive “flexible matrix” (Bryan-Wilson, 2017) I
connect closer with the notion of the “super-object” offered by by Louise Mazanti (2011). The
super-object is a positioning of the object both within art discourse — in conversation with
craft, painting and sculpture, installation and performance — but also with the everyday, as an
artifact of labour, of collaboration with others, and of memory of other makers.

This framework that encompasses the multiple possible meanings of the object of my material
exploration releases me from the need to engage in specific art genres and any remaining
boundaries among sculpture or painting or craft or installation. It allows me to weave in
domestic craft traditions, conceptual craft and the feminist art movement of the 1960s and
’70s through various materials and method, modes of display and communities of
collaborators, toward the larger project of creating meaning.

1 At the time of this writing, U.S. President Donald Trump has been impeached, RCMP have

been arresting protestors of a gas pipeline through unceded Indigenous territory on this west
coast, and the world’s human population is cowering from a coronavirus pandemic.

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The super-object, then, can be seen as an “independent lens” (2011) for assessing work
through a vantage point that embraces conceptual hand-crafted objects and critical making
with all its complexities reflective of our highly complex, conflicted culture. This thesis, then, is
a joyful resistance “to definition, positioning and classification” (2011), beginning with the self
within a personal practice and engaging with others who may or may not self-identify as artists
or craftivists. In this effort to create space and time to reflect and to connect I have two main
questions:

• How can material explorations contribute to the shared desires of personal wellness, social
connection and political engagement?

• How can I embed into my crafted objects multiple levels of meanings and a grounding in both
the privileged art context and the everyday, real world?

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Position

My family history is one of privilege that also includes the trauma of mental illness, addiction,
poverty, homelessness and childhood sexual abuse but none of it as a result of systemic, racist
subjugation. My ancestors had the freedom of mobility and opportunity to settle here,
uninvited, in the unceded territory of the Coast Salish Peoples, including the territories of the
̓
̓ m (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and Səlílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh
xʷməθkwəyə
(TsleilWaututh) Nations. I acknowledge this in the faith that the national project of reconciliation can
be tackled one personal gesture at a time. Mine include sharing common methods and space
of handmaking, weaving together threads of personal connection across our conflicted pasts.

Sisters Not Lions, 2018, by Carlyn Yandle. Embroidery and paint on linen, 10” diameter.
First known as”Ch'ich'iyúy Elxwíkn" (Twin Sisters). Read more on this traditional story and
on learning Indigenous history through modern artwork.

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“One minute you're waiting for the sky to fall,
the next you're dazzled by the beauty of it all.”
— from “Lovers in a Dangerous Time”
music and lyrics by Bruce Cockburn, 1984

Method/methodology

A PROCESS-DRIVEN PRACTICE

Making is tangled up in my DNA, passed down through my father (painter/sculptor) and mother
(fibre-arts hobbyist), and incubated in a DIY 2 1960s/'70s counter-culture ethos. Creating
‘something out of nothing’ is a driving force in my practice that extends back to early scrapquilting, invigorated by the long legacy of material explorations of fibre-based artists like Sheila
Hicks and Ann Hamilton. It continues as a low-waste approach to making that feels urgent in
the face of the social and environmental horrors of advanced capitalism. I carve out time and
space to make/do outside the dominant economic system of over-production/consumption in
an increasingly distractive culture. By doing so I am taking matters — and matter — into my
own hands in “rejection of the idea that you overcome problems by paying someone else to
provide a solution” (Gauntlett, 2011).‘Do-it-yourself’ is an ethos of taking personal
responsibility and direct action to engineer methods and solutions, individually and with others’
knowledge of making. It is an uncomfortable intertwining of idealism and fatalism, a belief in
the possibility of effecting change and the inevitability of global capitalism’s environmental and
social destruction.

2 ‘Do It Yourself,’ a craft vernacular that connects to the growing subcultures of Preppers and

Survivalists with whom I feel increasingly aligned, to my dismay.

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Working with my hands is a coping mechanism, a practical skill, a meditation, an endurance, a
form of self-expression, a way to socialize and engage with the world, and a knowledge
generator. Every skill I absorbed from an early age (papier-maché, collage, embroidery,
calligraphy, macramé, painting, quilting, knitting, crochet, woodworking, metal fabrication,
mold-making, etc.), every material (paper, wool, thread, jute, textile, paint, wood, clay, tin,
fibreglass, plastic, etc.) deepens my fluency in my own methodology within an enduring
language that carries human culture. It begins with one knot, one stitched block, one
needleworked row. It builds up over time, transforming the discards into imposing, labourintensive objects with roots in domestic labour, decoration and utility and which aspire to
transcend their subjugated history.3 This action that starts from the body as a reflex, an urge,
may gather others through the sharing of this vernacular of common materials and methods. It
is, in contemporary philosopher Rosi Braidotti’s terms, indicative of a distinctly feminist political
action that begins in our own “situated practices” (2014), our here-and-now circumstances that
extend outwards, collecting up other voices as it expands into the public, political sphere.

The rhythmic, rote tasks at hand cross over media and methods, opening up space and time
for thinking, turning threads of ideas into object-form, and exploring “new possibilities for
significant engagement with our world” (Johnson, 2011). The work is shared, physically and
locally through social engagement events, artist studio meet-ups and workshops for different
communities of adults and children, but also digitally through an expanding virtual craft
community beyond national borders. These various modes of creative exchange form practicebased research identified as “a/r/tography” (Irwin and Springgay, 2008) for its generative
connections between art and education, as seen in my play-think-write-share cycle that leads
to new ideas, projects and relationships.

3 This acknowledges the important work of the 1960s-’70s early feminist art movement that

contested the systemic omission of female fibre artists in the privileged art space of the gallery
and academia.

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GATHERING: MATERIAL AND PEOPLE

Collecting a wide range of ‘useless’ materials, ranging from plastic toy fragments to outmoded
or worn-out garments to debris from sites of construction and destruction, is a form of
community-building as those who contribute to a specific category of discards become
invested in the outcome.4 That
collaborative component thickens as
others are invited to participate in the
physical making, as seen in The
Network (2011-ongoing), an actual,
tactile social network that has
become increasingly complex with
every public hands-on installation.5

The motivation for others to engage
in the work may be to learn or share
technique or it may be the interest in
taking part in upcycling, hand-making

The Network at the Vancouver Art Gallery for Family Fuse,
2015. Co-created with Debbie Westergaard-Tuepah.
Photo: Carlyn Yandle

or simply being in the space of other
makers. At the core of this methodology is the larger project of acknowledging and enhancing
the shared desires of personal wellness, social connection, and public/political expression,
whether in celebration or protest.

4 Past contributors include construction-industry day labourers, children (assisted by their

parents and teachers), residents of a rural island community, friends and neighbours, city
public-works employees and artists.
5 Read more about the origins of this enduring collaborative artwork at https://

carlynyandle.weebly.com/blog/the-thing-is-bigger-than-our-original-idea

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ROTE HAND-MAKING

Exploring the innate tendencies of material through various domestic-craft methods is key to
discovering the innate behaviour of the material at hand. It is a process of physical logic, of ‘if
not this then that’ trial and error and multiple iterations, working at a small scale and always
with the large-scale possibilities in mind. Through this highly exploratory “methodology of
material complicity” (Lange-Berndt, 2015) the materials at hand play the role of “willful actors
and agents” (2015) in the choosing of a suitable low-tech, rote-making method. By playing with
material I also play with the ideas emanating from the embedded history of the material such
as a speculative housing market, climate change, fast fashion, or overproduction/consumption
processes. Through these two notions of play, time and space opens up to allow for further
expansion (2015), as I innovate, collaborate, research, and share newfound knowledge through
images of early outcomes via social media.

At left: Details and screen
shot of the Instagram view of
No I Like Her She’s 29, 2019,
14” diameter, by Carlyn
Yandle, for the Tiny Pricks
Project created by Victoria,
B.C. artist Diana Weymar. The
vast, growing number of
donated embroideries
featuring quotes by the
current U.S. President
Donald Trump is now an
international touring
exhibition.
Photos: Carlyn Yandle

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Case study: Scaffolds
Process: Gathering, wiping, washing, drying, cutting, knotting, crocheting, binding, weaving6

Scaffolds (detail at right, and Fig. 1) is an
imposing macramé tapestry knotted up in the
luxury-housing boom in my immediate urban
vicinity. Its frothy whiteness, on closer inspection,
reveals hasty, provisional construction and
environmentally-unfriendly materials.

The highly sculptural properties of Tyvek were
explored over recent years first by cutting found
remnants into strips, winding them into skeins
and working them up into two giant crocheted doilies, following patterns from 1950s home-craft
magazines. This weatherproof material was an attractive choice for installing the giant lace
6 Companion column posted April 10, 2019 at https://carlynyandle.weebly.com/blog/a-useless-

thing-with-many-functions

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works in the public sphere to function as they do in domestic spaces: to protect surfaces and
cover up unsightly elements with a whitewash of pleasing pattern.7 Scaffolds is an extension of
that cover-up scheme, the result of an elaborate, repetitive physical activity that helped quell
anxieties about my own marginal housing situation and the relentless, shimmering investment
edifices towering over my old port town.

Scaffolds is in dialogue with the monumental and laborious fibre sculptures, installations and
tapestries of renowned American fibre artist Ann Hamilton, who famously agitates expectations
of everyday textiles “by bringing them back
into contact with raw materials and the
sensate” (Owen 2011). The scale and
concept of Hamilton’s heap of multi-hued
denim, Indigo Blue, inspires through the
juxtaposition of aesthetic beauty and the
fraught plantation labour history of the
American South. The work is also informed
by the woven, knotted fields of Sheila Hicks, 8
who by weaving in everyday materials and

Sheila Hicks, at her 2019 installation in Chile.
Photo by Ministerio de las Culturas, las Artes y
el Patrimo (Creative Commons CC BY-NC-SA
2.0)

objects has long challenged boundaries between fibre arts, painting and sculpture. My processdriven practice is propelled by Hicks’ prolific engagement with the material world, still producing
in her mid-80s9 imposing, fresh explorations in fibre.

7 More on the doily project posted Sept. 2013 at https://carlynyandle.weebly.com/blog/

discarded-doilies-demand-attention

8 Another student of Josef Albers (more on Albers in Space Craft case study)
9 Including age is relevant here as it feels possible to have time to expand my full-time practice

that began mid-life.

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Scaffolds also plays in this space between materiality, history, abstraction and architecture,
creating new spaces of inclusion (Adamson, 2019) through the gathering and exploration of
culturally-rich discards from the urban landscape.

The initial gathering involved Latin-American immigrant labourers from some of the city’s many
residential-complex jobsites who delivered scrap items to the university campus on a regular
basis for several weeks. The timing of the drop-offs and the selection of materials determined
the scope, scale and resonance of the project. Over the course of three months the fibre artwork
evolved through a collaboration between a single, repetitive macramé method and the inherent
material properties of the detritus. This confidence that allows for the ability “to experiment
without a plan and allow something unforeseen to emerge” (Jones, 2013) and relies on a
fluency in various technical skills that extends back to an early age.

Scaffolds serves as artifact of the slow, intense labour involved on a grand scale that illustrates
what political theorist Jane Bennett calls “the ability of things to make things happen, to produce
effect” (Bryan-Wilson, 2017) and in this project, the effect was both personal and social. The
rote activity required opened up time for solitude and space for thinking without distraction. The
process of gathering was an opportunity to appreciate some of the realities of the personal costs
and benefits of working in construction in Greater Vancouver’s speculative-real estate economy,
further strengthening this interweaving of tactile and political awareness. It is a piece designed
both to entice as a decoration but discomfort that reading through the use of unusual, even
hazardous, debris.

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Fig. 1: Scaffolds, 2018. 80” x 80” x 8”. Discarded Tyvek brand spun-polyester
building wrap, PVC pipe, electrical conduits, rebar and other debris from large-scale,
Vancouver-area residential and commercial construction sites. Photo: Nate Yandle

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Case study: Resurge
Process: Gathering, washing, drying, cutting, knotting, winding, hand-stitching, braiding10

Resurge (Fig. 2) is a twisting together of the soft hue and touch of used denim and complicity
in an exploitive and toxic global-trade denim industry11 to meet our insatiable individual desires
for more.12 Intertwining art and life, this object’s origins is an apron/tool belt hybrid made out of
necessity that launched a cottage industry of one-of-a-kind Work Wraps.13 As the cloth was
cut away from dozens of freely-available jeans, the byproduct — waistbands, labels and thick
seams — pooled around my feet. A larger project began to emerge from this denim detritus to
10 Companion column posted Dec. 6, 2019 at https://carlynyandle.weebly.com/blog/tripping-

on-this-troublesome-rug

11 See Pedro Mendes’ documentary on CBC Radio’s Ideas, September 2019. https://

www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/how-jeans-became-one-of-the-most-polluting-garments-in-theworld-1.5280773
12 In her 2013 lecture, “Powers of the Hoard”, Jane Bennett acknowledges the ‘thing power’ of

capitalism that “was and remains a formidable desiring machine.” (Video: https://vimeo.com/
29535247)
13 Retail site for this part-time cottage industry: https://workwraps.weebly.com/about-work-

wraps.html

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express ideas of piecework labour, globalized fast fashion and an ocean-going transport
system that links far-off factories on this Pacific Rim. It began as a tight nucleus of force
spilling out in all directions, following “the force and flows of material that bring the form of the
work into being.” (Ingold, 2009). A loose macramé method was used to weave in the remnants
of seams that inherently coiled and clustered while waistbands ran like rivulets through an
expanding pool of netting, emerging as an oceanic topography.

Part meditation and part endurance test, this was a process of finding and dissolving pattern
and horizons, of allowing the material to ebb and roil through simple, repetitive and laborious
gestures. Feminist theorist Lucy Lippard relates these rote actions to "the ancient, sensually
repetitive, Penelopean rhythms of seeding, hoeing, gathering, weaving, spinning as well as
modern domestic routines” (1978) that connect the realms of the privileged space of art and
the everyday. Working horizontally evokes domestic activities — ironing, cooking, wiping
counters, vacuuming, washing floors — as well as the immediate vicinity of its making: the
watery striations of ocean, island and sky. Resurge does not stand for the lingering hierarchy of
vertical positioning, instead contesting the need to legitimize the work through the reliance of
the “spatial shift from horizontal to vertical” that is then “institutionally framed and legitimized
as art” (Bryan-Wilson, 2017).

This braiding together of contradictory positions evokes the works of the 1970s conceptual
crafty movement, from the needlework wearable sculptures of videotape by then-Vancouverbased multi-disciplinary artist Evelyn Roth to Harmony Hammond’s14 Floorpieces: circular
braided-rug-like objects with painted surfaces made from fibre detritus from the garment
factories near her New York studio. Resurge continues to break down remaining distinctions,
hierarchies and binaries among sculpture, painting, women’s work and craft-based textile arts

14 The work of this feminist/queer-art force that dates back to the 1970s has been accredited

with “bringing art down while also bringing textile craft up” (Bryan-Wilson, 2017).

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(74), binding in current issues of gender politics and globalized factory labour and laying it at
the feet of viewers. The large scale demands some precarious leaning in but that inability to
fully capture the text in the textile labels aims to increase the sense of the magnitude of global
production/consumption systems.

American artist Polly Apfelbaum continues to claim that contested ground of art, craft and the
everyday with her “off the pedestal” Fallen Paintings, shifting the discourse horizontally by
“valorizing the floor” and “reversing the cube view” so that the floor is the space for the art, and
the wall is the everyday (lecture, 2017). She acknowledges that these works contain a “tough
beauty” as a means to engage, as opposed to work that is “not something that people did not
want to look at” (2017). This form of viewer-seduction into a deeper, conflicting reading is also
used as a strategy by Anishinaabekwe multidisciplinary artist Rebecca Belmore, who grapples
with “the beauty and the ugliness of how we are as human beings” (Belmore, 2018), evident as
she arranges denim yardage into grey-blue currents and flows for an installation evoking a
harsh history. 15

The ability of material and method to evoke beauty and horror through its tactility and cultural
underpinnings is a driving force behind Resurge. The particular method of making is designed
to draw out the multiple, contradictory associations of these manufactured cast-offs: swirling,
soft indigo blue hues; fast-fashion/over-consumption marketing; textural knotting and braiding;
industrial toxic outflows; innovation in sculptural potential for denim; and extreme corporate
profiteering on the backs of exploitative foreign labour practices. These embedded conflicting
notions vibrate with a rich and toxic human culture, contributing to the “thing-power” of denim
waste in its ability “to go from trash/inanimate/resting to treasure/animate/alert” (Bennett,
2004). The force of these ‘things’ in my hands connects with the many anonymous hands who
15 The installed denim material that comprises At Pelican Falls evokes residential school

coveralls, seen worn by seven boys in a 1955 photo from a remote area connected to the
artist. Read more.

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grow and make the cloth, who dye, distress, sew, package, display, wear, launder, fold and
throw them away. Together and through the power of my own bodily material, the work aims to
reverberate with “an internal resistance” to “the sheer volume of commodities and the hyperconsumptive necessity of junking them to make room for new ones” (2009). This transference
of my own vibrations of resistance includes a resistance to the notion that matter doesn’t
matter, and that change can be manifested through making.

Fig. 2 Resurge, 2019. Found denim jeans, thread. 12’ diameter x 8”H. Photo by Carlyn Yandle

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Case study: Space Craft
Process: Gathering, cutting, folding, hand-stitching16
Space Craft is an object of hybridized thinking between space, both in terms of physical area
and the universe, and the multifunctional art of craft. Combining the slow-craft rote activity of
traditional smocking with flashspun high-density polyethylene fibres is a tenuous, often
frustrating venture. What feels like folly at first results in work beyond predictability or
perfection and toward new forms and new ideas. The folds are all physics17 and the stitching is
a different kind of string theory.

The traditional craft of smocking transforms the rigid into elastic, the flat into the voluminous. In
the making, space and voids open up as does time for the mind to wander from the
macrocosm to the microcosm. Playing with materials becomes playing with ideas: black holes,
space-time, the contracting universe, the infinite. Through trial and error and several iterations

16 Companion column posted Sept. 22, 2019 at https://carlynyandle.weebly.com/blog/finding-

new-space-in-old-craft-of-smocking

17 The work references Miura-ori, a folding process created by Japanese astrophysicist Koryo

Miura that has applications ranging from internal-medicine stents to outer-space satellites.
Read more: https://www.wired.com/story/the-atomic-theory-of-origami/

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540 square feet of area take shape with no beginning nor end. It is proposed as a conundrum:
Is it math made into a model or a model looking for the math?

Space Craft was approached out of curiosity over the possible combination of the high-tech,
industrial material of Tyvek through a slow-craft version of hand-smocking. The ancient craft of
gathering cloth at geometrical points to create ease and stretch in garments was unexplored
territory, having grown up in the plastic-elastic age. I experimented with flat sheets of scrap
then scaled up as I was able to create more and different volumes. The laborious, rote activity
of tying individual knots of thread opened up time to reflect on other possible applications such
as collapsible shelters, and related methods like origami.

This material exploration could have been
work produced at Black Mountain College,
North Carolina, where a progressive but
short-lived learning-through-making
approach to liberal arts education was the
crucible of American mid-century
contemporary art (Adamson, 2007). This
history is relevant here as it connects the
importance of material exploration through
simple materials and methods with the
pursuit of knowledge. This is the driving

American architect, educator, author,
designer, inventor, and futurist Buckminster
Fuller leads a class at Black Mountain
College, date unknown. Photo: Creative
Commons, CC PDM 1.0

force of Space Craft, an aesthetic object in
itself but also a mode for launching new ideas through simple hand-making skills not seen as
“a discrete set of techniques, but as a way of being within society” 18 (Adamson, 2007). (Fig. 3)

18 As envisioned by Josef Albers, the famously influential instructor at the college in the 1930s

and ’40s, formerly at The Bauhaus.

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The legacy of Ruth Asawa, one of the more renowned graduates of Black Mountain College, is
her learning-through-making voluminous wire sculptures, social-engagement projects, public
artworks and art education opportunities for children. This holistic, “a/r/tographical" approach
to learning and teaching through making (Springgay and
Irwin, 2008) is seen in her art experiments that hung in
her domestic spaces. 19 Her process can be seen as an
activity counter to “modern, industrial capitalism” by
resisting “the pernicious separation of art from life and
daily experience” 20 (Grant, 2017).

Asawa’s objects may be fully appreciated for their
multiple meanings — artifact of daily life, process,
concept, political position, aesthetic object — when
viewed through the lens of the super-object that accepts
a dual positioning of the craft object in the privileged art
context and the everyday (Mazanti, 2011). Space Craft
can be seen as holding the same dual positioning,
serving as a mode for exploration as well as a point of
agitation against any lingering distinctions and

Top: People look at Asawa’s sculpture
at the De Young Memorial Museum,
San Francisco, after her memorial.
Photo: Steve Rhodes, licensed under
CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 ; Above: Asawa’s
1986 origami-inspired Aurora fountain,
San Francisco. Photo: Shawn Clover
(Creative Commons CC BY-NC 2.0)

hierarchies among sculpture, craft and fibre arts, and in
dialogue with architecture, engineering and physics. It can serve as a record of the time spent
in the labour of the piece and a reconsideration of the traditional skills of origami, smocking,
and paper-folding. It can be read as artifact of performance that begins with the endurance19 In a life inseparable from art, Asawa necessarily created much of her work in the company of

her own children; advocated for public arts education opportunities for children; and was the
driving force behind the San Francisco School of the Arts. Watch Asawa in her own words in a
film for the Smithsonian Archives of American Art.
20 Quoting John Dewey, author of the 1934 seminal text, Art as Experience.

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testing action of folding paper and knotting threads, and ends with its own ‘thing power’: “the
curious ability of inanimate things to animate, to act, to produce effects dramatic and
subtle” (Bennett, 2004). That power is evident here in its own inclination to spiral tight in the
centre and settle into its own gravity.

Fig. 3 Space Craft, 2019: An
exploration into unknown
dimensions and notions of
infinity through the material of
540 square feet of found
construction building wrap,
64”OD x 36”H.
Photos: Carlyn Yandle

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Case study: Foundlings
Process: Gathering, wiping, washing, cutting, binding, weaving21

A trip up to a remote Gulf Island22 mountain of recycling-rejects sparked the Foundlings project
that literally and figuratively grapples with the global problem of plastic. The idea for this
collaborative work began on regular walks along the island foreshore. I compulsively23 gathered
up the relentless plastic shards of containers, fragments of rigid foam blocks and polystyrene
packaging, binding up the bits for easy transport using found nylon rope and netting.

Over time the colourful clumps from each beach walk amassed, asserting themselves as
something other than detritus, which led to research on binding in art and inevitably the works

21 Companion column posted July 2, 2019 at https://carlynyandle.weebly.com/blog/foundlings-

kids-works-of-terrible-beauty-in-forest-display

22 Lasqueti Island: the only off-grid B.C. Gulf Island community (by choice) with regular public

ferry service

23 Making often starts with compulsion, a need to quell anxiety. In this case, it’s the incessant

debris on the undeveloped island foreshore, considered to be the remains of the Japan
Tsunami of 2011.

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of California sculptor Judith Scott (1943 - 2005). I could see that her prolific24 practice of
binding and weaving objects that agitate notions of sculpture and ability would be of interest to
children.25 Soon I was organizing a critical-making project with students from the island’s one
school, using a simple method of binding. The project held the opportunity of engaging
children to physically wrestle with issues of consumption and environmental devastation26 in
their immediate surroundings by giving form to the invisible. The island community’s waste
manager offered up possible discarded petroleum-derived materials at the dump for
consideration, and the school teacher allowed her class space for weekly making sessions.
Through this organic, growing collaboration the material explorations evolved into Foundlings
(Fig. 4), an open-ended, woodland exhibit of student work displayed on stump ‘plinths’
complete with titles in their own hand. The collection debuted at the island’s annual arts festival
in July 2019.

The actions of connecting with others through gathering, sharing knowledge of work of other
artists, exploring the inherent qualities of discarded material, developing skills in the making
and ultimately exhibiting the multi-layered objects together form a “living inquiry” that is “the
ongoing living practices of being an artist, researcher and educator” (Springgay and Irwin,
2005). The art experience was beyond knowledge through “mere visual and textual
representations” (2005) but an embodied process with the detritus and its inherent nature,
working independently or collectively over weeks, not minutes, to open up time to consider
and re-consider colour, form, techniques, and new modes of social interaction.

24 Scott’s compulsion to entomb found objects in fibre resulted in a large volume of works in

her short life as an artist that could fill large public galleries (and did).

25 In another example of this inextricable art/life cultural practice, making with children is borne

of family responsibilities.

26 By the end of the making sessions, students viewed pool noodles not as a bargain but an as

a cost to their local environment.

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The forest installation of these whimsical,
fraught, uncertain pieces created out of the
curious hands and imaginations of children are
an example of the joyful, creative acts in “the
politics of everyday life” originating in the “local,
here and now” (Braidotti lecture, 2014) that
resonates with this time and this place, out of
abject material. The Foundlings pieces can be
fully appreciated as super-objects (Mazanti,
2011) for their embedded meanings: as sites of
material explorations; as seductive, attractive
colourful objects; as artifacts of social
engagement and community-building on this
remote island; and as potent symbols of the
futility of “throwing away” non-biodegradable
material. They emanate with their own history
of their production, their journey from factory to
forest, and their mix of whimsy and treachery.
In the hands of the young makers these
overlooked waste materials are transformed

Fig. 4 Foundlings, 2019 (clockwise from
top): “Insane Sometimes”,“Garbage
Catcher”, “Little Worker”, installed on
woodland plinths, Lasqueti Island, July,
2019. Photos: Carlyn Yandle

into active agents for social change through
gathering and tactile engagement. Indeed, by developing an eye for the ignored and
overlooked, students took the opportunity of a year-end field trip to a marine reserve to gather
up more plastic debris for their additive sculptures, daylighting this devastating effect of global
petroleum production in their own backyard.

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Case study: Hearth
Process: Gathering, giving, washing, drying, ironing, cutting, ripping, stitching27

Note: This ongoing project involved facilitating a weekly two-hour social stitching session from
November 2019 to March 2020 at the inner-city Enterprising Women Making Art (EWMA)
Studio, operated by Atira, a Vancouver-based agency that works to empower and support
women28 affected by violence, from housing to outreach, daycare to education. The screening
process included a written application, criminal record check, in-person interview with Atira
administrators, signed contract as well as a meeting to clear the project with the university’s
research ethics coordinator.29 The core purpose of the Hearth project was to create a safe
space for all participants to freely express themselves and support one another through the
connective power of everyday material and methods, and toward a culture of shared desires. In
27 Companion column posted Nov. 5, 2019 at https://carlynyandle.weebly.com/blog/i-trust-

this-log-cabin-will-create-some-heat

28 That includes “anyone who identifies and lives full time as a woman and who experiences

gendered violence and misogyny.”

29 The activities with participants are not aimed at generating data in answer to research

questions, qualifying the project for creative practice exemption from Research Ethics Board
review.

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accordance to the conditions of working with Atira, the identities of the participants are kept
confidential.

When I moved back to the East End30 of Vancouver a few months before this writing, I was
committed to finding connection not just the residents on my block but the neighbours in the
social housing projects, the shelters and the SROs31 right around the corner. I found that
vehicle for connection in a community quilt project that draws on the traditional quilting bee —
stitchers sitting in the round, in collective
activity — and the Gee’s Bend quilters
specifically. The women in this multigenerational group are renowned for their
improvisational, asymmetrical and abstract
designs, and their use of old textiles that
evokes their racially subjugated history in an
isolated corner of Alabama.

Inspired by the hand-stitching and use of

Women of Gee’s Bend in a quilting bee,
Birmingham, Alabama, 2005. Photo: Andre
Natta (Creative Commons CC by 2.0)

found materials, I devised a simple quiltblock-building skill that anyone dropping by could pick up in a few minutes.32 I envisioned that
this activity could one day result in a single work for exhibition33 (Fig. 5) but the focus would be
on embracing “slow craft” for its ability to encourage reflection and imagination (Sennett,
2008). It would also serve as a political position against “pressures to speed up, to produce
30 Childhood vernacular more inclusive than ‘Downtown Eastside’ or ‘Strathcona.’
31 Single Room Occupancy units in downtown hotels, some renovated and some in horrific

conditions

32 While the theory is simple, the activity of running thread through layers of fabric can lead to a

new appreciation of the labour involved in hand-stitched objects.

33 Inspired by the 36-metre-long collaborative Quilt of Belonging, created 1998-2005. Read/

watch more on this large-scale undertaking.

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more, and to consumer more” (Bryan-Wilson, 2017) by engaging in hand-stitching with found
fabrics.

For several consecutive months and
in different East End sites, these
ongoing sessions of pulling thread
through cloth created an opportunity
for sharing scraps, skills and stories.
This time-based project is one of
enriching relations, a long game of
stitching together shared
experiences in a space outside the
dominant economic system.

The rhythmic, rote activity so

Each block in this mobile project serves as artifact
of social-engagement sessions around various
local tables. Photos: Carlyn Yandle

conducive to easy conversation
meandered around memories of other projects and other influencing makers, mothers, aunties,
friends, current challenging situations and local conditions. It is a project of welcoming all to
one table and revitalizing a shared culture of nurturing domestic activity through a
contemporary art context.34

The project was initially conceived as a cathartic opportunity to memorialize friends,
neighbours and loved ones who have fallen victim to the current epidemic of a toxic drug

34 The connection between making and revitalizing culture can be seen as far as my ancestors’

country of Finland, where in an effort to revitalize the Lapland culture is underway by
“recreating old handcraft traditions with contemporary art methods” toward the larger project
of strengthening cultural identity and decolonization.

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supply 35 in the tradition of memorial quilts including the AIDS Memorial Quilt36 and, more
locally, the Downtown Eastside Women’s Memorial March Quilt.37 The log cabin block was
chosen for its multiple layers of meaning. It stands as aspiration for (or futile gesture of) making
a home in a city where homelessness is at an all-time high38 and where affordable housing is
increasingly scarce.39 To assemble a
log-cabin block is to experience
architecture, beginning at the centre
hearth — traditionally a hot or highcontrast colour — and spiralling out in
lapping construction. It’s a design that
builds strength in the accumulation of
even the thinnest scraps of cloth,
adding a further layer of meaning:
metaphor.

The Downtown Eastside Women’s Memorial March
Quilt, 2007. Photo: d∂wn (Creative Commons CC BYNC-SA 2.0)

In keeping with an a/r/tographical approach to learning through doing (Springgay and Irwin,
2008), any intention of introducing a larger narrative in this project was eclipsed by the various
makers’ interest is tactility over tactics: giving and receiving fabric scraps, organizing palettes,
assembling and re-assembling pattern possibilities from the stacks of finished blocks. Clearly
what is attractive in a city in the throes of an affordable housing and toxic-drug crisis is a
reliable routine of light banter, tea and skills-sharing. This is the practice-based research that
35 Aside from contending with the current global coronavirus pandemic, Vancouver is at the

epicentre of this public health emergency, with more than 1,000 deaths due to toxic drug
supply since the beginning of 2016, breaking records every year since 2014.

36 The legacy of bold designer branding in the quilt (Bryan-Wilson, 2017) is another conceptual

layer.

37 Read more on the Women's Memorial March Quilt (https://thisvancouver.vpl.ca/islandora/

object/islandora:remembering_our_dtes_women_collection)
38 See the latest homeless count, as of this writing, here.

39 See a snapshot of current statistics, as of this writing, here.

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emphasizes theory as “reflective, responsive and relational” and “continuously in a state of
reconstruction” with no pre-determined outcomes (Springgay and Irwin, 2008). The value of not
needing to know (Jones, 2013) is essential in collaborative work, as is magical thinking about
the range of possibilities for scope and display.

Each block-object, then, can be viewed as an
artifact of a specific moment of social
engagement or as a stand-in for each of the
individual makers in a collective whole. As the
blocks align into a grid the work grows more
evocative of the abstract expressionist
movement in general (Ann Wilson, Agnes
Martin) and more pointedly Robert
Rauschenberg’s Bed, 1955, in which a
Detail from Robert Rauschenberg’s Bed,
1955. Paint on handmade log-cabin quilt,
maker unknown. Photo: profzucker (Creative
Commons CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 )

handmade log cabin quilt (maker unknown)
was “used, transformed, and
destroyed.” (Bernick, 1994) 40 41

An important research outcome of this ongoing project is the reminder of the importance of
adopting a “nomadic consciousness” in the terms of feminist theorist Rosi Braidotti (1994).
Collaborating outside of the comfortable confines of one’s own practice calls for flexibility and
empathy and for embracing the notion that subjectivity is never fixed (2014) and that change is
40 Artist Dorothea Rockburne, owner of the log cabin quilt at the time she and Rauschenberg

both attended Black Mountain College (see Space Craft case study) recalled in Art Quilt
magazine: “It was kind of special to me because I had it at the time my daughter Christine was
born, and she used to spend a lot of time on it. I didn’t actually give Bob the quilt, it just sort of
appeared in the work one day.” (Art Quilt, 54, no. 104, as quoted by Bernick, 1994)
41 Quilt historians would be able to situate its time and place and economic conditions of the

making through examination of the unobliterated areas, and any quilter could appreciate the
time required to create this hand-stitched bed-sized piece — all testimony to the rich cultural
ground of found materials.

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possible. The Hearth project is a fuzzy,
warm form of political action that originates
in personal practices42 of gathering, of
tactile engagement and of rote activity that
open up consumption-free time to reflect,
to socialize or to share ideas and ideals.
This is a hands-on, embodied process of
interweaving the self with interactions of
others (Springgay and Irwin, 2008), a
resistance to limited definitions of art and
limited views of the power of making.

Details of the Hearth collaborative installation: A
simple and improvisational method of attaching
tops of fabric strips to the wall in a lapping, logcabin-block style using sewing pins.
Photos: Carlyn Yandle

42 Braidotti identifies feminist political engagement as in opposition to the binary storm-the-

castle approach, starting from the body and connecting to others through shared desires.

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Fig. 5. Hearth, 2019-2020: Found fabrics, sewing pins, construction string, wooden spools, 16’W x
11’H. The planned two-day social engagement event to install the work was cancelled the previous
day. The installation was completed March 16-17, 2020 by a small fraction of the project
collaborators, five days after Covid-19 was declared a pandemic and two days before the university
closed. Photo: Carlyn Yandle

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Reflection
In the eight years between earning my Bachelor of Fine Arts degree and entering the Masters
program in 2018, the world — and my world — have undergone a seismic shift, and so has the
way that I make.

I had been enjoying a daily industrious studio routine, creating series of paintings conceptually
related to textile and fibre-arts but composed of several layers of synthetic polymer, commonly
known as acrylic paint. As the massive scale of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch43 and the
global plastics production system was becoming more understood 44 I could no longer ignore
my own complicity. I began to view my painting studio — my sanctuary — as a toxic hoard and
my heavily-layered paintings as just more non-biodegradable objects for purchase in a world
drowning in non-biodegradable objects. I started casting around for alternative materials and
methods but it took the collision of a personal setback and an environmental catastrophe to set
me on the course of what would become the way I make today.

I was struck with sciatica just as the Japan tsunami hit in the spring of 2011. With limited
mobility, I spent that time lying on my stomach watching the unfathomable footage flood in,

43 Watch: The Great Pacific Garbage Patch explained. https://www.youtube.com/watch?

time_continue=29&v=0EyaTqezSzs&feature=emb_logo

44 Plastic consumption around the world is now more than 320 million tonnes per year, with

more plastic produced in the last decade than ever before (Lebreton, L., Slat, B., Ferrari, F. et
al., 2018). Read more.

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some of it in real time. I had lived in Kyoto for 18 months in my early 20s, so the surging,
colourful whirlpools of domestic objects, vehicles, houses were all too familiar. My frayed
nerves drove me into the rote activity of braiding using whatever stretchy, petroleum-derived
fabric scraps I could gather up from around my home. By the time I could return to a vertical
position I had completed Seismic Rug: part abstract expressionist object, part domestic object;
part model of deep ocean-floor earthquake that triggers tsunamis.

There was no pre-determined outcome in this very different work; it emerged in my hightension state over this slow-motion disaster. As I played with the tension of the stretchy, lurid
fabric strands, Seismic Rug seemed to generate its own power but I couldn’t say how or why,
and if it mattered. I could only use what I loved about the project — gathering unwanted
materials, mining my own domestic hand-making skills, incorporating my immediate
experience of the world — to explore further.

I’ve been told throughout my life not to over-react. Or that I’m over-reacting. To these
statements of micro-aggression I say: I am not over-reacting; I am expressing an appropriate
amount of reaction to some realities in my personal life, my neighbourhood, my city, and this
planet. I connect with others who also react to systemic injustice and environmental disaster
due to rampant, unchecked global capitalism. I respond to grassroots action, where making is
core and often seen as “making trouble.”

There is power in the material and the making: I see it in a fabric patchwork cluster of tents in
the park around the corner, or in kids’ hand-made jellyfish floating through a massive march
through the major thoroughfares, or red dresses strung along a pipeline blockade, or in the
construction remnants at yet another investment real-estate scheme jobsite. There is power in
hand-making in reaction to personal anxiety, or public outrage, grief and loss, and power in the
materials themselves that can be at once attractive and repulsive, sad and joyful.

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I am deeply affected by these multiple layers of meaning in singular objects that twist together
beauty with struggle, despair with hope, conflict with unity. And it inspires me to react.

I turn to my own making to reflect on these ideas, playing with materials in the space between
these contrasting notions through the hands. What starts as a need to gather, to make, to
connect emerges as a conceptual, aesthetic sculptural object and an artifact of social activity,
of notions of time and of labour. Each of my objects may be seen as a piece of visual humour
or political position but it’s that possibility of creating something that holds the power to
captivate out of nothing that anyone wanted that propels me to keep exploring what found
materials can say. The material and the methods I turn to for solace, for self-care, for social
connection often feel like they are reacting themselves. The work emerges, expanding beyond
an art practice and into a broad-reaching cultural practice that knits in personal stories and
public, political issues. It picks up where I left off in my previous career in newspaper
journalism, engaging with readers over city issues. The connective tissue is now tactile and
beyond language. It continues to feel around for new possibilities for addressing and
redressing our wounds both individual and shared.

I am still making objects but the object of the making is finding agency in challenging material
and situations through rote hand-making. It is a constant project of joyful action, reaction and
connection in times of instability, injustice, distraction and fear.

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