Bosna Quilts

The quilts in this post are all from the Bosna Quilt Werkstatt , an ongoing organization of quiltmakers that began as a response and a way of caring for humanity during the upheavals of the Bosnian War.  

Since 1946, Bosnia and Herzegovina had been organized into a republic as part of communist Yugoslavia.  The ethnic unrest among the people who lived there exploded into such a harsh severity in 1992 that NATO become involved.  It was a civil war in which the Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) were being eliminated by the Serbs.  Between 1992 - 95, over 200,000 people were killed and 2 million were displaced.  For a better understanding I've put a link for you here .

Women, children, and grandparents fled the atrocities and men disappeared.

The story of these quilts began in the Galina refugee hostel, in Vorarlberg, Austria on Palm Sunday, April 1993, already a year into the war.  

Lucia Feinig-Giesinger, a young artist, listened to the women, and was moved to help them continue with the quilting artform they were already familiar with.  Making is a form of healing.  

Lucia's art training was in painting, and she was not acquainted with the techniques involved to make a quilt.  However, the materiality and usefulness of the blankets, combined with the craftsmanship required to make them appealed to her.  She also liked how quilts are warm yet light and she was inspired to create minimalist designs. 

The women did all the construction seams as well as the beautifully dense hand quilting. 

The seams were machine sewn on donated sewing machines in an adapted military garage.

The hand quilting was done on the beds in the hostel by mothers and grandmothers, the children playing nearby. 

There was constant interaction of the stitchers with Lucia and with the project manager who would procure the materials and did the public relation work.  Not only were the quilts therapeutic for the makers, they were sold and thus provided needed income.    The quilts became famous, and have since shown around the world in quilt festivals as inspirations for community healing work as well as modern design.  

The project stopped for a while in 1998, but started up again in 2004 and currently 12 women design and stitch quilts for the Bosna Quilt Workstatt.    

The lead artist, Lucia Fenig-Giesinger is interviewed by Pionira at this link.

The quilts continue.  The Bosna quilts were invited to the International Quilt Festival, Houston, USA in 2020.  

The website has a catalog of newer pieces that are available for purchase.  The website also lists the many places that the quilts have shown since 1998.

The above quilt was made in 1999.  The stitcher's name is Safira Hoso.   76 x 57 inches  Safira was able to return to Bosnia and Herzegovina when the war ended and continues to make quilts for the Bosna Werkstatt.  

Safira’s quilt is from the book:  Vernnahate Zeit: Die Bosna Quilt Werkstatt, published by OttosMuller Verlag , Salzburg in 2007.    (In German, but there is a supplemental section that has an English translation).  The book's text was written by Wilibald Feinig, the artist's husband.   The English supplement was translated by John Christensen in 2007.  

The quilt below is also stitched by Safira, and you can find it on the Bosna Quilt website catalog.  It was made in 2018 and measures 70 x 55 inches.  

Several websites and blogs feature these quilts.  

Besides Bosna Quilts, already noted, here is a a pinterest board and a profile article.

Quilts are a feminine, dialogue-born form of art.  Up to the present day quilts have been overlooked in art histories.  

Art that emerges from the hardships experienced by a new European nation driven to war is an art meant to be grasped and touched.  These quilts have a place not just in ruins, but also museums.   Bosna Quilts are now granted a space within the broader house of art.  Bosna Quilts are nomadic art.

(Willibald Feinig translated by John Christensen) 

Shihoko Fukumoto

I hold simplicity as a firm principle in my work.  

To express an idea in a minimum of terms means a serious commitment to removing all extraneous elements:  paring away and discarding all that is not essential in pursuit of clarity.  

Saying much in just a few words has been a strong expressive tendency in Japanese culture.

My aim is to achieve an expressiveness that is profound within the constraints of the clarity and simplicity of the single indigo colour.

I believe that it is depth that is of the greatest importance in a true work.

Depth means a penetration into the deep and fundamental nature of things.

Depth is not just a matter of rational concept or idea, nor is it something one can always achieve through sheer commitment and devotion.

The Japanese word OKU indicates an inner realm; maybe emphasis placed on inner depths - oku - is unique to japan; however, I believe it is a universal value.

The difficulty of expressing oku and any success in expression must surely be an intrinsic part of the artist's talent and temperament.  

I find it extremely difficult to realize, and have no clear idea of how to go about it.

I do not know to what extent I achieve it.  Shihoko Fukumoto

 All the text in this post is by the artist.                                                                                                        All the images are from the internet.   

Ann Clarke: a life in motion

Untitled (Vertical Stripes) acrylic on canvas, 1974 by  Ann Clarke

Ann Clarke was born in England and attended the Slade School of Art in London UK.  She graduated in 1966 and was awarded the prestigious Slade Painting Prize.  In December 1966, her work was included in the exhibition Five Young Artists at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, England.

In 1968, Ann Clarke moved to Edmonton, Alberta Canada with her then husband and two young boys. 

In 1973 she had a solo exhibition 'Ann Clarke' at the Edmonton Art Gallery.  Her studio for a period of time was in the municipal airport hanger.

glimpsed in the waves, acrylic on canvas, 1978, Ann Clarke

During the 70's and 80's, Clarke began to teach painting in various colleges and universities across Canada.  In 1975-76, she taught at NSCAD  (Nova Scotia College of Art and Design), and in 1979 - 80, she taught at Red Deer College in Alberta.   

She had several solo shows in Alberta during this period.  In 1980 she had a solo exhibition in Gallery One in Toronto.  

Inclement, Acrylic and Oil Stick on Canvas. 1980 by Ann Clarke

 Ann Clarke's painting, Inclement, was curated into a tribute exhibition for the Canadian painter, Jack Bush, by Ken Carpenter.  It took place in 1981 at the Robert McLaughlin Gallery in Oshawa, Ontario.  

Clarke moved to Toronto in 1984.

Fantasy, Acrylic on Canvas, 1985, by Ann Clarke

detail of Fantasy, 1985, by Ann Clarke

Then in 1987, Clarke moved to Tamworth, north of Kingston.  

Leaping Deer Acrylic on Canvas, 1988 by Ann Clarke

Inspired by a dream, Leaping Deer is a self portrait. 

Leaping Deer, detail

In 1988 - 89, Dorothy Farr curated a solo exhibition at the Agnes Etherington Art Gallery in Kingston that included Leaping Deer.     Ann Clarke:  Recent Work

In 1992, Ann Clarke was invited to teach in the department of Visual Arts at Lakehead University, Thunder Bay, Ontario.  She was elected to the Royal Canadian Academy of Art in 2008, and retired from teaching in 2009.  

Time, acrylic on canvas, 2000, by Ann Clarke

TIME, (above) was included in her 2000 solo exhibition, Sexta Feira, at Gallery One in Toronto. 

Ann Clarke has a website that includes recent work and also archives of her long career in painting.  Twelve artist statements reflect her commitment to continual change and growth.  Visit her website with this link.   Her work is represented by the Hatch Gallery  in Prince Edward County, Ontario, Canada.  

All images in this post are from the 6-decade retrospective Ann Clarke: A Life In Motion  currently on display in Kingston at the Agnes Etherington.  The exhibit was curated by Alicia Boutilier and Mark Birksted.  The text is taken from the wall signage.  Congratulations Ann Clarke!!!  

Vija Celmins

 My work is not meticulous, it is rigorous.  

It's like living another life.  As if you have a time here, with the work, and then you have a world in which you are living your other time.

Why do it?  The older I get, the more mysterious that seems.  

It's some kind of impulse inside you, and when you are working well there is a feeling of connectedness to the world, and occasional feelings of bliss.

It occurred to me that when I am really working well, the work has no meaning  You can work with less mind.  You see with your mind, not your eyes, because eyes are just the lenses.  But you only see what you already know, so maybe this is why I focus on something outside of me, that I don't really know  You might say it's copying , but it's re-imagining this thing in another medium.  

I thought I could fool my clever mind because it limited me.  I thought I could get to a sense of form that was more in my body - or my hand - and that comes from just making.  

I want to get in touch with something more mindless, more intuitive.  I'm not clear about the meaning.  Maybe its the spectator who puts the meaning in.  

I don't work from experiences that are fresh.  I tend to repeat things.  I've carried thoughts around in my head for months.  I have a feeling about a form that I want and I want the feeling to develop as far as it can go, and I want my work to be able to stand a lot of inspection.

The things I draw are formless, hard to grasp.  Like the ocean. Like the sky.  It's as if the ocean is like a ghost somewhere and what is in front of you is the real thing.

I have no technique. I gave it up as well as other obvious signs of self-expression.  

I never thought to call my work a pleasure.  I just felt the compulsion to do it.

They are visual chords.  They are dense, materially oriented images.  They don't really tell stories.

My feeling is that when you are not using your brain, you are not necessarily being stupid.  It's just that you're in touch with some other things in yourself.  Then they become brainy. . Because look how we talk about the art afterwards.  We can talk about these pieces in an intelligent way even though the work itself is ..... what is the work like?  I don't know..  I don't know what the work is like.

In  a way, I am building a self.  It's not really self-portraiture.  Rather, it's being able to get something out of yourself that has a life on its own.  That's step one.  And you recognize that it is step one and you're going to take another step.  You're going to try something else.

I found I had a tender touch.  I got more interested in projecting the spatial qualities.  I started doing darker things, like New Mexico night skies.  I started making the star field paintings.

The image itself has 2 or 3 qualities that you grasp at one time: a flatness, an illusionary depth, and a MADE quality.  How it's made is the thing that I think engages you in looking at my work.

But the process of making isn't an invocation of darkness.  And the making is not just busy work.  I like to leave subtle traces of the making and of the thinking, bypassing the brain but still leave signs of intelligence.  

I'm highly self-critical.  I'm critical of others too.

I want to work larger so that you can roam around  I'm finding it difficult to concentrate and make work that is so concentrated.  I'd like to make work that's a little more emotional.  I'm interested in a more ambiguous, more abstract space.  I may make some dimensional objects now.

I'm an outsider.  there is an outsider quality to everything I do.  Vija Celmins 2003 

Vija Celmins was born in Latvia in 1938 and immigrated to the USA when she was ten years old.  

There are many videos of her and her work on youtube.  

video about the surface of the ocean and the desert.

video of how she makes prints of the night sky

video of her speaking and shows her working

Vija Celmins was interviewed by Robert Enright for Border Crossings magazine in 2003 and her words were paraphrased by Judy Martin in 2024.  You can read the original in border crossing magazine #87

Louise Bourgeois : The Woven Child

the found child 2004

Classical statues made of permanent materials awaken our feelings of mortality as we realize they will outlive us. 

A sculpture made from soft, perishable textiles, evokes the body's vulnerability much more directly, arousing our latent awareness that we are all essentially sacks of skin hung around a structure of bones and stuffed with blood and organs.             

Ralph Rugoff (director of the Hayward Gallery in London, England) 

untitled 1999

For Bourgeois, sewing goes beyond restoration.  Instead, it is a metaphor for psychological repair and for exploring the complexity of human relationships.  

In her artworks, repairs become conspicuous scars.  Sewing is a subtle form of communication and atonement.  The gesture and labour involved evokes complex feelings in another person.  Sewing, the act of reparation, was a defence against fragmentation and disintegration.  

 Julienne Lorz, chief curator 2018-2021. Gropius Bau, Berlin. 

couple IV 1997

Louise Bourgeois makes her passage through the intimate terrain of private and chaotic experience without being destabilized by its violent emotion.  Her triumph lies in the retaining of artistic objectivity in the face of the most fiercely subjective materials.

Rachel Cusk, novelist

untitled 2001

Bourgeois renews her allegiance to the truth of her female history and its origins in her child self.  Size, scale, and the monumental can be arrived at, stitched together, organically built up, as in her series of tall fabric pillar shapes, both assertive and resolutely handmade.  

Rachel Cusk, author of several works of fiction and non fiction

the cold of anxiety 2001

"I cannot renounce the past.  I cannot and do not want to forget it."  Louise Bourgeois

the cold of anxiety detail, 2001

untitled 2005

I would like to embroider and put everything in place and in a proper and predictable manner.  To simplify, reduce, organize, round up and retire after being sure of the method.  

Drawn in and concentric I would like to be.  Louise Bourgeois

untitled, 2006

Sewing implies repairing.  

When you mend things, it allows you to have your hands occupied.  To look intensely and never meet the eyes of other people.  You can even be moral about it.  

You can appear to do things for others.

You can say, "I am repairing your clothes."  Louise Bourgeois

untitled, 2002

My subject is the rawness of the emotions, the devastating effect of the emotions you go through.  Louise Bourgeois

untitled, 2004

Bourgeois' sculptures, at once baroque and schematic, subvert any possible association with platonic completeness.  Female forms simultaneously subvert and implicate a voyeuristic gaze.  At the same time, through its use of materials that we are accustomed to feeling against our skin, a dimension of haptic sensation and tactile association is opened up, beyond purely visual engagement.  

Ralph Rugoff (director of the Venice Biennale 2019)

the mute, 2002

This final body of work counts as one of the greatest late-career chapters in the history of art.  A body of work in which lifelong concerns of Bourgeois:  destabilising of boundaries, ambiguous sexuality, and a sliding register of meaning / identity, are revisited in profoundly enlivening ways.   Ralph Rugoff   

 

All images and text in this post are from the catalogue that documented Louise Bourgeois: The Woven Child,  an exhibition that was presented at the Hayward Gallery, London England and Gropius Bau, Berlin, Germany in 2022.  All the works in the exhibition were made from LB's personal saved clothing and domestic textiles when the artist was in her 80's and 90's.  (Bourgeois died age 99 in 2010.)

Magdalena Abakanowicz, the Abakans

Black Ball 1975, Sisal, 140 x 110 x 100 cm
and Abakan Red 1969, Sisal 405 x 382 x 400 cm

Polish artist, Magdalena Abakanowicz (1930-2017), created and displayed monumental woven textile sculptures in site specific environments so that people could move around in as if in a forest of large cloaked figures.   

The sculptures were named Abakans, after the artist's own name.   

Created in the late 1960's and early 70's, they remain hugely influential. They show how soft objects can have great expressive power.  When we move through them, there is a feeling of breath and touch, of fertility and decay, of connection between humanity and all living things, animal or plant.   

in foreground Abakan Festival 1972 Sisal 370 x 100 x 100
and Abakan Brown IV 1969-84 Sisal 290 x 300 x 30 cm 

I see fiber as the basic element constructing the organic world on our planet, as the greatest mystery of our environment.  It is from fiber that all the living organisms are built, the tissue of plants, leaves and ourselves.  

Our nerves, our genetic code, the canals of our veins, our muscles.

We are fibrous structures.  Our heart is surrounded by the coronary plexus, the plexus of most vital threads.

Black Garment VI 1976 Sisal 330 x 220 x 100, Abakan vert 1967-68 sisal 260 x 60 x 30,
Winter 1975 - 80, sisal 320 x 360, and Abakan Festival 1971 370 x 100 x 100

Handling fiber we handle mystery.

What is fabric?  We weave it, sew it.  We shape it into forms.

Abakan Brown 1969 Sisal 300 x 300 x 150 cm

When the biology  of our body breaks down, the skin has to be cut so as to give access to the inside.

Later it has to be sewn, like fabric.

Abakan etroit 1967-68 sisal and wool 320 x 100 x 100 cm

Fabric is our covering and our attire.

Made with our hands, it is a record of our souls.

sisal and wool abakan

My works are organic like creations of nature.

And like creations of nature, they will eventually turn into earth.

Assemblage noir 1966  sisal, wool, hemp and horsehair 300 x 220

They are born from the effort of my fingers, wrists and muscles.

Only in this way can I pass on to them my energy and my secrets.

Only in this way can I learn their secrets.

Brown Coat 1968 sisal 300 x 180 x 60 cm

The threads I weave make up homogeneous fabric, the expression of which depends on the tension or the relaxation of my nerves.

Abakan - Situation Variable II 1971  sisal and rope 400 x 250 x 100

Forms result from everyday emotions, like a diary.

They are a product and the record of my time, with its experiences, disappointments, longings and fears.

sisal and rope 1971 detail

My forms change as time goes by like my face.

Abakan Yellow 1970  sisal and rope  380 x 380 x 70

My Abakans are a protest against the weaving conventions.

A need to guide people into a world different from that of a noisy street and a brutal technique.

They are a cry of despair in the face of the ailments of civilization.

Abakan Orange 1968 sisal 360 x 360 cm  and Abakan Yellow 1970  sisal and rope 380 x 380 x 70 cm 

They are, like sweat, a symptom of my existence.

background, abakan orange on floor, abakan january february 1972 behind it, and some of the 800  embryology bundles.  Foreground is Abakan Red 1969  Sisal 405 x 382 x 400 cm

The text in italics is from Magdalena Abakanowicz's presentation at Fiberworks: Symposium on Contemporary Textile Art in Oakland California, May 1978.  The images are from the exhibition Every Tangle of Thread and Rope, curated by Ann Coxon, the Tate Modern, London, England for winter/spring  2022-23.   An excellent video produced by the Tate: click here!