At a dinner party with friends a few nights ago, someone suggested that we go around the table and share something we did in the past year that the group might not know about or might be surprised to learn.  One friend had joined a new musical group and another started teaching Spanish to elementary school kids. For a moment, I blanked on what to talk about because I really feel like I didn’t do anything new this year. I’ve been teaching, keeping up with my Etsy shop, doing shows. The same things I do every day.

But then I remembered that the thing that has been quietly changing this year is the kind of art that I make. For more than I decade I have been designing fabric, and I still love doing that a lot. But I really took a break from that this past year because fabric projects were not really calling to me. I didn’t feel motivated to tackle a big sewing project. I didn’t have the need to create those pieces.

Many years ago now, I stepped away from the fabric art center that was my entire life. There were lots of factors that came in to play there, but when I called it quits, I not only stepped away from my job, but I removed myself from that community as well. I needed a break; not just a rest, but a separation.

In August, after 3+ years of taking classes, I finished my Book Arts Certificate from the MN Center for Book Arts. It’s a program that they administer to “certify” artists in a study of book arts techniques. I think of it like a mini Masters Degree. I took classes which I loved (boxmaking, marbling) and ones that I did not love (letterpress).

I found that I wasn’t as interested in making art as I was in the experience of being a beginner again. I needed to ask questions and make things that were ugly and didn’t work and just to try new things.

I gradually learned enough skills in book arts that I could start to incorporate some of the fabric techniques that I love. I marbled paper and carved stamps to hand print in repeating patterns like the sea turtles (left).

My weekly embroidery class students got me thinking about what kinds of embroidery stitches I could do on paper instead of fabric. I explored and sampled all kinds of stitches to see how the thickness of the threads in each stitch and the threads traveling across the back of the paper would influence the stitched pattern on the front.

I learned to make my own bookcloth. I’d used bookcloth in several classes to cover both books and boxes, but being a person with a love of fabrics, I was immediately discouraged by the lack of fabric options. I could only find a handful of solid colors. So I printed my own Spoonflower designs on cotton lawn and peel and stick wallpaper and used that to cover books and boxes. Then I tried embroidery on bookcloth made from some batik fabrics to make small journals that were really a fusion of fabric and paper techniques.

And finally I put some of this new work out in the world. It’s one thing to share photos of all of these experiments on social media, but it’s another leap to take the photos and enter something new in a juried exhibition at a gallery. That’s what I did. And that felt brave.

When I tried to describe to my friends how it felt, I said to imagine that you have played the clarinet all of your life and then decided that you wanted to learn the trombone and you just played your very first trombone solo at a concert. (There were a lot of musicians in the room.) To someone looking from the outside, it might just look like art is art. But to me it felt very new and unsure.

The three pieces at the top of this post are all ones I exhibited this year. I did so a little bit quietly. I talked about them a little in my newsletter and I posted a little on social media, but I didn’t really talk about the intention of taking my work in a completely different direction: a fusion of fabric and paper techniques. Saying that goal out loud seemed a little too much of an “announcement”. So I just sat back and waited to see how people reacted and how it felt to watch people interact with these pieces.

One of them won an award. Another was dismissed as being “too fine art”.

It’s January and my business task for today is to work on setting goals for the upcoming year. I am procrastinating a little bit by writing this post, but reflecting is an important part of setting goals and I basically gave myself a year off from design challenges, fabric designs and garment making to try something else. I think the experiment is a success. I have another embroidered paper piece that has been accepted into an exhibition in January. I’m teaching a class making coptic bound sketchbooks in February. A college student reached out to me over the holiday break wanting to connect with other paper embroidery artists. And I am thinking about more classes combining hand embroidery with paper components. That sounds like the start of something interesting.

Sometime a piece of art kind of takes on a life of its own. This year for the MN State Fair Fine Arts competition, I entered a piece called Growversight. It’s one of a series of boxes I’ve been making all about the theme of detours and unexpected obstacles, plans that go awry, timelines that slip, and projects that run into snags outside of one’s control. Red is often a color used to communicate a stop and the theme of the pieces in this series is to talk about things that stop momentum from going forward. So each is made in an analogous color to red, to sort of play with the idea that these ideas were not quite a hard stop or an end, but more the idea of things that were in the way of progress.

I call this series “Portmanteaus”. The word portmanteau refers to a suitcase-like container or two words that have been joined together to form a combined meaning. Each of these boxes carries a story, just like a suitcase, and leans in to the idea that every story has an internal or personal version and an external version that you tell to other people. Each piece in the series has something going on inside and outside the box. I love puns and wordplay in my work. For Growversight, I created a paper flower that is pushing off the lid and crawling out of the box. It’s a nod to an oversight, or problems you ignore that just keep growing and growing.

It was rejected from the Fine Arts show. I’ve entered many times and been turned down far more often than I have had pieces accepted. That wasn’t unexpected. But then a friend told me about another show which was celebrating the pieces that were rejected from the exhibit. The theme is modeled after the Salon des Refusés, French for “exhibition of rejects”. The first was held infamously in 1863 as a response by artists being rejected by the Paris Salon, an annual show sponsored by the Academie of Fine Arts and the French government. Their protests were heard by Napoleon, whose office issued a statement that said “Numerous complaints have come to the Emperor on the subject of the works of art which were refused by the jury of the Exposition. His Majesty, wishing to let the public judge the legitimacy of these complaints, has decided that the works of art which were refused should be displayed in another part of the Palace of Industry.”

The theme was entertaining, so I entered the show and was accepted into the show, which was titled “Rejected”. We went to the opening and enjoyed the art in the exhibition.

The story takes a detour when I went to try to pick up my piece. And I mean literal detours. The gallery is situated in a place which is currently surrounded by extensive road construction and two large event venues, where there were police cars blocking streets and officers directing traffic. I spent 30 minutes driving in circles trying to find a place to park for two minutes to run in to the gallery. I finally drove to a dodgy parking garage a mile away and walked back to retrieve my piece, my quick errand now taking up nearly two hours of my day.

When I got to the pick up desk, a kind volunteer found the paperwork and my piece, but insisted that I chat with the gallery owner about their upcoming holiday market. “Your work would be perfect!” she said. Unfortunately, the gallery owner had a different idea. She looked at me, looked at my box, and said “No. That’s too fine art. Nobody buys that.”

Rejected once again. I appreciate the irony.

She went on to explain the ways that it was a bad fit, the wrong price, and my aesthetic completely unsuitable, while I stood tired and sweaty, with a puzzled expression on my face. (It was honestly pretty rude, considering it wasn’t my idea to talk about their holiday market in the first place.) I finally made an abrupt excuse and left, hiking the mile back to my car.

On the drive home, I realized that Growversight would now always have this story associated with it in my head like an imprint. Just like the theme of piece, the story grew while I wasn’t looking. So I decided that the piece should grow as well.

In light of its transportation issues, I decided that the original box needed a little cart to ride in. But you’ll maybe notice that the cart has four flat tires and a distinctive pattern embroidered around the edge. I love this piece even more now.I am curious to see if it will grow some more the next time it goes on an adventure.