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

Piila Saksela

Working in the Garden 2000 synthetic silk, newspaper, sewing thread, smocking

Piila Saksela lives in Finland. She is 72 years old now, and has been a maker of textile art all her life. She began her career as a weaver, devoting many years to that craft. She thought that she would weave her entire life but around the age of 50 she became unsatisfied with the restrictions of warp and weft and searched for a new way. She felt fearful of the 'catastrophes that might lie ahead" but after years of searching, through trial and error, she developed a unique new style. Orlando steel, rust, knitting 2001

"Bringing one's own studio to life is an arduous task" she says. "It feels as if all originality will flee at any moment."


Her technique involves preparing synthetic silk-like fabrics with oils and lacquers in order to make them translucent. She then layers this prepared fabric on top of tissue paper or newspaper, which then transfer their colours and markings to the fabric. The result is pleated and hand-smocked.










Ninive II 2002 synthetic silk, newspaper, sewing thread, stitching, smocking Ninive II (detail) 2002
I love the colour and the little bits of text and image that I glimpse in Piila's work, but more than that, I am comforted and intrigued by the repetition and texture of Piila's hand stitch and manipulation. Smocking is an age-old technique that crosses many cultures and perhaps this is what gives it such power. ( Piila says that the technique is from Hungarian national dress, but my Canadian mother (half English, half Irish) smocked dresses for me.) Land Ahead 2000 synthetic silk, newspaper, sewing thread, smocking

Piila Saksela has done something rare. She has succeeded in making a domestic technique leap into the fine art world. I found all these images as well as a very small amount of Pilla's statement in Art Textiles of the World Scandinavia published by Telos Art Publishing. Land Ahead (detail)
Matthew Koumis says about Piila Saksela "Her hangings recall a Japanese aesthetic, and convey both her desire to harness light and to express 'fortuity' allowing of happy accidents in the creative process." Circling 2001 wrapped steel, rust, wood
I find it so unfortunate that artists of Piila's generation slip away from our web-based research. If her work was not brought to my attention by the Telos series, I would not have known about it. I could not access any images of this artist's work in the "new museum of cyber space". (which is where students today go first when they look for role models) Part of the reason I am writing this blog is to try to give women textile artists who came of age and did most of their work before the internet revolution some deserved attention.