SDA article by Deborah Kapoor by ArtXchange Gallery

Surface Design Journal

features 06

Travel, Textiles, and Tradition by Susan Stover

The Tactile World by Miles Conrad

Sharing Creative Process: Brahma Tirta Sariâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Batik Mentorship by Sonja Dahl

Susan Lasch Krevitt: The Rhythm of the Hand by Nancy Natale

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Dialogue of the Unsent by Deborah Kapoor

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Memory, Spirit, and Gender: Existential Themes in Fiber and Wax by Joanne Mattera

Crafting Creativity by Susan Moss

Surface Design Journal

Winter 2015/2016 Volume 39 Number 4

departments 48

Restoration New! Lenore Tawneyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Cloud Series VI

In the Studio New! Lorraine Glessner

First Person Paula Roland

Exposure A gallery of recent work by SDA Members

Emerging Voices Joy Dilworth

On Display New! Iris van Herpen: Transforming Fashion Beyond the Surface Fires of Change Tibor Reich Retrospective Native Fashion Now

In Review Materialities: Contemporary Textile Arts Counter-Couture: Fashioning Identity in the American Counterculture Susan Taber Avila: Matters of Dis-Ease Rijswijk Textile Biennial 2015 Contemporary International Tapestry

Spotlight on Education Lillstreet Art Center, Chicago, IL

SDA Creative Promise Awards for Student Excellence Molly Koehn, MFA Lauren Mleczko, BFA

56 Winter2015/2016

Kathryn Shinko, Honorable Mention

Dialogue of the Unsent b y

New Mexico-based artist Molly Geissman and I have shared a hotel room at the annual International Encaustic Conference held in Provincetown, Massachusetts for the last six years. Founded by Joanne Mattera and co-presented by Cherie Mittenthal, Executive Director of Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill, the conference is for professional artists engaged with pigmented wax. You get to know someone, living in close quarters. In a casual pre-conference conversation last year about how we would like to participate in the hotel fair where conferees display recent work, it dawned on me it might be a good time to try something a little different: a collaboration. A few months earlier, I had come across a visually arresting book cover at Barnes & Noble entitled The Gorgeous Nothings: Emily Dickinson’s Envelope Poems, edited by Jan Bervin and Marta Werner. The book offers a glimpse into the world of Emily Dickinson’s writing process, highlighting 52 “envelope writings” that are drafts of poems. Using recycled envelopes, “Dickinson’s chosen paper already carried words, familiar names and addresses. It was stained with life, with postmarked dates and the dust of distant places. From that resonant content, she could generate new content, just as she had always generated poetry from the immediate facts of the physical world.”1 Dickinson’s repurposing resulted in poignant objects. With the visual inspiration of her work in mind, I began to consider how the implied action of an envelope form itself is to ‘envelop’ whatever is contained therein. Images of flaps, pockets, corners, outstretched crosses, and bird’s wings loomed in my imagination. Observing the power of Dickinson’s handwritten text, I thought about the history of letter writing as intimate communication. I brainstormed about piecing together fragments of ephemera in the studio, and the making of envelope substrate forms commenced, soon accumulating in my studio. While talking to Molly by phone last

D e b o r a h

K a p o o r

spring about our upcoming conference lodging plans, I asked if she might be interested in developing a call-and-response visual project for our own constructive musing. Sort of like a modernday Exquisite Corpse experiment— similar to when the French surrealists of the 1920s engaged in a method of collecting words and images, each collaborator adding to the composition in a sequence, to collectively assemble a work of art. To my delight, she said yes. Both of us had used fiber in our previous bodies of work, and it seemed a natural option for our envelope series. Textiles have been integral to our existence for millennia and offer a link to our sometimes forgotten collective past. To begin our dialogue, I added initial layers of imagery to the envelopes using ephemera and transfer processes, then packed up a box of them and away they traveled through the mail to Molly’s Albuquerque studio. Time passed. Molly added collage elements and stitching, embedding strata between thin layers of encaustic, a material chosen for its ability to convey a feeling of mini-memorials that access history. The beeswax is heated with a small amount of resin to create hardness and becomes paint when pigment is added to the melted wax. The unique visceral texture of the encaustic surface has the ability to diffuse light, allowing the viewer to see through what morphed into two-sided, opened-and-laid-out-flat envelope paintings. A couple of weeks later, she sent the further developed envelope “starts” in a return package. Opening them felt a bit like Christmas. Inside were Molly’s additions to the surface, and I was more than pleased with what she had done. My mind raced past the upcoming hotel exhibit as I considered the possibility of presenting a more substantial show during the conference. We continued our correspondence, but only through the mail, not having any conversation as to what would happen next. Blindly, like the Surrealists, our process was intuitive as we unveiled each subsequent delivery of envelopes

Surface Design Journal

ABOVE & BELOW: DEBORAH KAPOOR AND MOLLY GEISSMAN Systems (Front & Back) Fabric, paper, thread, postmarked Polish stamps, ink, encaustic, hand stitching, 11" x 13", 2015. Detail LEFT.

Winter2015/2016

DEBORAH KAPOOR AND MOLLY GEISSMAN Even Though (Front) Fabric, paper, thread, 1942 postmarked letter, hand stitching, eagle Xerox encaustic transfer, 13" x 10.5", 2015.

and responded to what the other had done. The shapes and words of Emily Dickinson’s original envelopes naturally inspired us to find expressions of text as a physical subject. Seams joined both content and form. Select phrases began to appear, manifesting the alchemy of language, the uncertainty of meaning, and the resonance we felt when the right combination of images and words were used. Systems is composed of a Polish stamp postmarked from 2004, the term “password hiver2010”, and a lotus flower cut of patterned paper. Rings hand-stitched overtop appear to reverberate outward, referencing various systems we use to communicate meaning. For the piece Is an Artist, bank receipts amidst vertical cuts in the floral patterned paper are accompanied by Elbert Hubbard’s definition of an artist from a shorthand dictionary: “Almost anybody can do business fairly well. Many men 34

can do business very well. A few can do business superbly well. But the man who not only does his work superbly well but adds to it the personal touch through great zeal, patience, and persistence, transforming it into something unique, individual, distinct, and unforgettable is an artist.” This layering of elements reveals our mutual interest in the politics of the body, psychology, and the environment. At times, original texts of letters from our personal collections were sewn into the works, touching on themes of women as keepers of history within family lineage. Throughout this experience, I reflected upon my own family history. Post WWII, my grandfather worked for the post office; later my father was a teletype operator in the Air Force, and my mother was a stenographer. I had pen pals growing up and reveled in the magical deliveries to my mailbox. The evolution of communi-

Surface Design Journal

DEBORAH KAPOOR AND MOLLY GEISSMAN Is An Artist (Front) Fabric, paper, newsprint, ink, thread, encaustic, hand stitching, 11.75" x 11.75", 2015.

cation in my lifetime, emphasized via email, Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook, and Instagram, has dramatically shifted from physical to virtual ways of “giving and receiving”—having conversations with those worldwide without ever leaving my home. Yet there is something still compelling about the notion of receiving a tangible letter, knowing that the intentionality and resulting object has been touched by another’s hands. Not only were we having a visual conversation, we were literally reviving the art of letter writing, through snail mail. For the 9th International Encaustic Conference exhibit in June of 2015, we partnered with the Provincetown Library, a fitting venue to honor Dickinson and contextualize our thematic envelope series. In a world where so many displaced people struggle to find refuge, tracing the migration of families is a relevant and contemporary theme. This body of work is an act of contemplation about the nature of history repeating itself, and begs the question: How is progress made? The piece Even Though took on a very patriotic tone, using communique from the War Department and family letters as imagery, highlighting the importance of letter writing during times of past wars. By revisiting old newspaper clippings of my paternal grandmother’s passion to become a Red Cross nurses’ aide during WWII, and Molly’s artifacts that locate her heritage as a descendant from the Winter2015/2016

Mayflower, I am reminded that 200 years after that Mayflower voyage, Dickinson wrote poems that reflected her time in history. Molly and I continue to discover new interpretations of Dickinson’s work through blended vocabularies of meaning, 129 years after her death. Like the poet’s fragmented starts, this collaborative fiber and encaustic mixed-media series addresses the unfinished, the undone, and yet unsaid. Dickinson’s letters, after all, were never sent. 1Holland

Cotter, “A Poet Who Pushed (and Recycled) the Envelope, The New York Times, December 5, 2013, Books section.

Molly Geissman: www.mollygeissman.com The Gorgeous Nothings: Emily Dickinson’s Envelope Poems (New Directions/Christine Burgin, 2013) is available from online booksellers. —Deborah Kapoor is a visual artist who works and lives in Seattle, Washington. www.deborahkapoor.com

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