I can often sense my creative focus moving before it actually does. The last time it happened was this past July 14th.
I’m a “multidisciplinary” artist, but I’m actually more serially monogamous I have periods — eras really— where I’m very focused on one kind of art practice. I’m deep into printmaking, collage, crochet, figurative painting, book arts — and then it falls away for a bit. It feels to me like a spotlight trains on an art form and it becomes luminous, irresistibly compelling — which casts other practices in comparative shadow.
I can’t always identify the shift with such precision as this last one, I know the exact date because it’s when I went to an exhibit at The Drawing Center called “The Clamor of Ornament.” It was, as it turns out, the waning days of my last Printmaking Era, C.E.
At the Drawing Center, I spent a long time in front of an embroidery sampler from Mexico in the 1800s:
Image of an embroidery sampler on display at The Drawing Center in 2022, unknown artist.
Worked by an unknown artist, this piece is silk thread on cotton, made to look like patchwork, with each rectangular portion a different kind of pattern made with a variety of different stitches. (If you know your stitches, there was cross, stem, long-armed cross, threaded running, Roumanian, fern and buttonhole.)
i knew at that moment that embroidery was coming back— I could feel it in my fingers.
I first embroidered this piece based, appropriately, on an image I saw on my last trip to Mexico in 2019. But after I finished that, I didn’t want to work on anything specific.
I wanted to keep embroidering, but in the way that I work in my paper art journals. These I bind with various kinds of papers — blank and printed, new and vintage, uneven sizes — and I skip around as I work on them. I can lay down a bunch of marks on different pages, collage a bunch of things down, or I can work right into a piece and finish it.
And so it hit me: why not do this with fabric? Bind a book with lots of different fabrics, stitch scraps on in certain places, and just flip around.
And so, dear reader, I did.
Image of a “spread” in my embroidered art journal.
Another page in my embroidered art journal.
It’s actually weird to me that I haven’t thought of this before. I am always wanting to treat paper like fabric — I want to stitch into it, weave it, attach fabric and buttons and trim to it. (In fact, last year I taught a workshop at FabScrap about using fabric in art journals.)
And I knew you could use bookmaking techniques to bind fabric rather than paper. Although when I flipped through my reference materials on bookmaking, I only saw examples of soft books made for babies, in which each page had been embroidered separately and then bound together after. And that’s not what I wanted. I wanted to bind “blank pages” and embroider into them.
The challenge for me was the back side of the embroidery. Although the reverse side of an embroidered piece can look cool in its own way — and some people take a lot of pride in how neat they keep the wrong side of their embroidered pieces — I’m only concerned about the reverse side when I’m embroidering on a garment. I didn’t want half the book to be the reverse side of embroideries.
Then I remembered that waaay back in 2017, MOMA had Louise Bourgeois exhibit including her embroidered books. She “bound” them with buttons, so she could easily remove each “page.” I liked this idea.
Louise Bourgeois’ embroidered book pages on display at MOMA.
Since I couldn’t see the backside of Bourgeois pages at MOMA, I didn’t know how she resolved this wrong side issue — if it actually bothered her at all.
Eventually I decided I would simply bind my books and just work on every other page. I could safety pin the “wrong” sides together while I was working, and sew them together like a sandwich when I was done.
The only trick here is to keep track of which side was the right and wrong side — you don’t want a wrong side facing a right side, because then there’s no way to hide it.
I did fuck this up a few times on the first journal, although. I just sewed in an extra page when I did, which is a little fiddly but not the end of the world. If you try this at home, I’ve since realized that for stability, I generally need to double up my fabric. I used a different fabric for the “wrong sides” which has helped me to keep track and not sew on it.
I’ve now made three of these art journals — I’ve basically filled all of those up, so I’m soon to bind a fourth. I’ll post more pages from these journals soon!