Purple Pony Art Blog

I'll be catching up on last semester well into summer. I wrote this post and made it private to edit later. Later is today! I finished off FIBR420 with a panel critique.

The panel critique was nerve-wracking. I planned it all out, even the outfit. I missed my third year panel critique due to COVID-19, so I wasn’t sure what to expect. I didn't need to worry. Fibre, being Fibre, meant it was a chill and casual conversation with my instructors. The panel critiques for some majors, such as the design stream, can be super intense. One of my friends, a drawing major who graduated years ago, had a nasty panel critique in one class that left her super angry. I get it--especially when you’re a young person, instructors feel they can talk to you a certain way. With maturity on my side, instructors can’t really do that.

I blissfully drew Thursday’s first time slot; every session after me ran late. I even stayed later. There were three areas for critique with the idea while one was being set up, another could be taken down whilst the last area held an active session. My critique started about five minutes late and ran five minutes over. I even stayed later than expected to help the next classmate set up. She had a very long piece and needed an extra pair of hands plus scissors.

Everything I did this semester was paper-based and I’ll continue the material theme. Barb, who I have had for many classes now, gave me great advice. More art, less craft. In some ways FIBR420 felt like an in-between phase--the second movie in a trilogy where stuff happens, but the story neither starts or ends.

I presented five works, one of which was hanging in the main mall, so it's not included in the picture below. Stay tuned for more info about them.

ACAD310 is an interesting class in that it is a studio class, but a broad topic unites a broad selection of disciplines. Students work in their chosen medium based around a suggestion. The topic for the first assignment revolved (heh) around time, cycles, and the future. I jumped at this and made a clock that lacks the traditional markers of time passing. I took a lot of in progress pictures and you'll be amazed that this was the final product :-D

Stay tuned for those as well as what my peers think!

Annnnd here's a second video we have to watch for class. I hope you are enjoying these tidbits.

It started snowing yesterday and the North wind has been whipping our part of YYC for hours. I don't know why the wind tends to blow through at night, but it does and I'm exhausted before the day begins.

I'm going to be working on Tuesday's homework all day. I worked on Tuesday's homework all yesterday.

I drove myself into the ground finishing Thursday's homework and as a result, I came down with a slight cold :-P

Tuesday's homework had a major setback. You know all those stories where a project fails because of a math mistake? Yep, a little math mistake meant I had to redo my homework over again. There was no way of saving it if I wanted it to be a tube dress.

I'll back up and mention that I wanted to make a dress with a subtle statement about dangerous weather. YYC's main river, the Bow, was prone to flooding for years and years. In 2013, it famously flooded, leaving lasting damage from Canmore to High River. The flood was a moment when everyone realized how easy it is to take Mother Nature for granted.

I wanted to make a striped tube dress showing the amount of rainfall in 2013.

To do that, I needed to take the data and convert it into stitches. I even made an Excel spreadsheet so that it would be accurate.

I mistakenly calculated 6 rows per inch instead of 5 rows per inch for the type of yarn I'm using. As a result, the dress was 10+" way too long and the meaning of the stripes was lost.

It was not all bad. I unravelled it and switched up the colours, replacing green with mint which gave the dress more pop.

I was all set to finish the knitting yesterday on my knitting machine when disaster struck! I ended up with a big hole in the middle that I could not fix :-(

I had to unravel everything down to the last mint stripe and start over again. It took me half the morning to take off 130 stitches, unravel and put 130 stitches back on the knitting machine.

Fibre arts--they build character!

Here's a pic of my knitting before the hole disaster. You can see a small hole on the right side, but that one was easily fixed.

I have to unravel my homework and start again, crud!

I made a spreadsheet so that I could correctly calculate the number of rows, but I mistakenly used six rows to an inch instead of five. As a result, my finished piece was 40 rows way too long--or at least, way too long to be a tube dress for a 5' person :-D Stay tuned!

Sunday is the day I do the big tub scrub for the bird cages and I usually have a little time to LJ. Ten minutes for the soaking, twenty for the drying. Oooof, it's a chore like any other one!

Project 2 for my Tuesday class had me wiped physically and emotionally. I took three stabs at it and the third one worked out. We studied the works of Canadian artist Meryl McMaster. She is a visual artist of nêhiyaw (Plains Cree), British and Dutch heritage. I saw one of her exhibitions at the Glenbow a year or two ago and the photographs were amazing.

I wanted to do something photography based as well, but, after much mind mapping, could only come up with making still lifes out of my personal objects and clothing in a bureau cupboard. I may post the photos later. As it is now getting darker outside, I had to wait for certain times of the day for the light to come in. I took loads of pictures and moved things around slightly in case I wanted to animate them in a video. Hehehe the video did not happen :-D Holding objects, remembering what they meant and positioning them was upsetting at times. I held my grandparents portrait and realized that I knew so little about them because they were such private people.

As someone who has feet in many identities and more than one culture, it was a very difficult assignment. How much of a culture can I claim? How do I make something public as a private person? What do I want to share with an audience?





What finally did happen was a Pinterest like website that used photographs and texts. I posed questions, arranged photos and came up with something that I was personally satisfied with. In exploring identity through material culture and a diary-like format, I did succeed in posing these thoughts:

• Who do we keep in our lives?


• What do we keep in our lives?


• Why do I still have some of this stuff?


• What was it like moving to a new city as a teenager?


• What do I say/not say or do/not do to avoid confrontation?


• How much of a culture can I claim?


• How did my identity change when I lost 40 pounds?


• How does identity change as we age?


• Why was it so much easier when I was younger?

I ended up using almost 200 digital photos and it was a sculptural process to arrange, re-arrange and order them around the text. Sometimes it was random; sometimes it was intentional. 43 years is a long time to be here on the planet--and the 40s are a special time in adulthood to start planning your next 40 years :-)

Tuesday's class was mostly studio time and lecture. I jotted down the list of artists to look up later and you can too!

Giacomo Balla
Varvara Fyodorovna Stepanov
Oskar Schlemmer
Jim Dine
Louise Bourgeois
Joseph Bueys
Shawna Dempsy and Laurie Milan
Anne Ramsden
Buseji Bailey
Eda Birthing

I want to watch this later too as it is half an hour.

I took some drawings from my budgie colouring book and made them into a pattern. My goal was 80s inspired and it ended up more pastel than Lisa Frank, LOL! I would really like to see this one on a shirt. I think I could add another budgie and improve where the edges meet. Pattern making is such a journey. Here is what it looks like tiled.

Finally, something to show! My Thursday homework involves creating patterns, so here is the first one, a repeating pattern. I wanted to mimic embroidery with it. I made it in Rhino and then imported the different shapes into CorelDraw to add colour. I used this colour palette from Design Seeds for inspiration.

I returned to art college again this past week. I'm taking two classes and as always, you can learn along with me! One of my first assignments is to watch and react to this video.