Kerr Grabowski - Maker of Beautiful Things I had been reading about Kerr Grabowski for quite some time. I’ve been looking at her the clothing on her website and hearing the comments of her students about the great work she does and how much fun her classes are. Kerr will be teaching at Silk in Santa Fe this July and. I caught up with her to ask her a few questions about her work. Fiber artist, or a surface designer, Kerr considers herself to be a maker. “I really am a maker. A mark maker or a clothing maker or a maker of stuff. The thing that fascinates me is a mark.” What kind of marks? “It can be a smear made by a dirty finger. It could be – I love smudgy charcoal. ; I love graphite. I love those things that make marks. Bird prints in the sand, that’s a mark. The way insects eat leaves is a mark. I like the ones that are made almost by a life process.” How does a mark maker learn her craft? Did she start with a formal art background? Does she have advanced degrees in art? Or did she start as a hobbyist? How did she learn to do this kind of work? She Kerr answereds easily, “I’ve always drawn. My degree is in art – drawing, printmaking. As a hobby, I did batik t-shirts for friends. I learned everything I knew, in the beginning, from Dona Meilach’s book, Contemporary Batik and Tie-Dye.” (pPublished in 1973).” “I’m completely self-taught as far as fiber goes or as far as dyeing. But also, we learn from everyone around us. At [one] that point, I was the only person in Mississippi that I knew working with fiber or dyeing or doing any of that stuff. I went from the batik t-shirts that were very spontaneously drawn – they were all wild jungle animals. Very detailed. More like a
drawing in wax. Somebody said, ‘Oh, you ought to go to a craft show.’ So I took my little tshirts to a craft show.” Then she got divorced and. She needed a way to support herself and her six year old daughter. “I was way too shy to think of having any kind of job around people. So I figured, okay, I’ll do the t-shirts. I went to a craft show with those. And someone said, ‘oh you should do skirts.’ So I made skirts. And Tthen they said, ‘you ought to put pockets in them.’ People just suggested things, all the way. This was all cotton, all in the South. Eventually I started working with the silk and that was more like drawing.” “ Warm and funny, Kerr hails originally from Alabama and Mississippi. Much of the fiber arts scene in America happened on the West Coast in the 19‘60s. Despite this, Kerr was having a good experience with selling her fiber crafts. I asked her about selling her work in the South, where it was probably not quite as popular. “I traveled,” she saidys. “I went to the American Crafts capital shows. I did the Smithsonian show. I did the Philadelphia Museum craft show. First, I did little craft shows in the South, . Bbut that was in the early ‘70s. There was nothing like what I was doing in the South. I had no idea what was going on in California. I lived in my own little microcosm. I had a ‘58 Volkswagen Van that would let me go about 5 five hours before it broke. So, in the beginning, I had a five5-hour radius,.” lLaughing, Kerr stateds., “Then, in ‘84, I bought a brand new van and that helped increase my radius a wee bit.” Yet, she found sources of inspiration in her surroundings. “I think that being very solitary and very isolated in a state that has a rich narrative, oral storytelling history helped me come up with perhaps my own style – there wasn’t anyone to copy that I knew of. So, I slowly developed something that was mine, – and it would have been more difficult had I been around
all the fantastic stuff that was going on. I would have made a living a little bit sooner – a better living, maybe. I’m very thankful that I started here and had no idea what was going on in the rest of the world.” Digging a little deeper, I queriedy her about her original impulse – what made her decide that she wanted to print cloth, coming from this art and printmaking background? What moved her from paper to cloth? Her impulse was born of practicality. “I was a single mother and I thought that working at home would be such a great idea. All my friends were artists and craft was a no-no. I was the only person I knew doing something functional. I kept pretending that I didn’t like it. And Tthe more I learned about it, and the more I learned how to make the type of mark that would come from my soul, – the more I loved it. But Mmy first plan was that as soon as my daughter was in college, I was going back to paper. It didn’t happen.” She broacheds this seeming age old dispute – the difference between art and craft – craft being functional or useful. Which would seem to make art . . . useless? It seems that art, any kind of art, can touch the soul. In a world that often needs acknowledgment of the soul, art would seem to be functional and therefore useful. Kerr weigheds in with her somewhat reluctant opinion. “I can rant on that for hours and make lots of enemies. You just put it out there as art and it’s art,. aAnd there’s good art and there’s bad art. It’s whatever we choose to call it. I’ll stay away from that one. I have enough trouble with my own self,” she laugheds. So, with craft possibly being functional and Kerr being practical, did she start out with function in mind? She wasBeing a single mom,. Wwas she printing things for her daughter and herself as a way to make clothing and saving money?
“I’ve always sewn. I started sewing probably in the 5th fifth grade making things for my Barbie doll . Aand my mother gave me access to the sewing machine. She didn’t show me how to use it, . Bbut she showed me the machine and the book. I’ve always made my clothing. Once I started doing it for a living, I quit making my own as much. It’s kind of like the plumber and the broken pipe syndrome. I did make things for my daughter, . Bbut it was a business. I hired seamstresses. I had people help me do the batik. It was strictly a business. It wasn’t as lucrative as I thought it would be,. Bbut, we made it.” I asked her if she paints cloth for framing or hanging on walls or ifis she is mostly making clothing? She is doing both, returning to her roots and doing some drawing, on cloth and paper, but loves the clothing. “I’ve fallen in love with the sharing aspect that comes with the clothing. I like it. I like the limitations of it. When I paint a fabric, when I’m painting three or four yards at a time, I start like a painter. I don’t say, well this part of the fabric is going to be this, that is going to be that. I’m doing the fabric for me. It has no end goal in sight other than I know that ultimately, no matter how much I love it, I’m going to cut it up and make it into something that suits a human body. I love that. It changed the way my ego dealt with all of it. I didn’t have to have an ego to justify what I was doing because what I’m doing is actually sharing with another person, whoever buys the piece. And I’m going to cut it up, whatever I paint, so it can’t be that precious,. Nno matter how long I work on it. I like what that did to my thought processes.” This thought process seems to create a balance in her creative process. The painter is satisfied,. Tthe designer is satisfied. and tThe maker of things is sated. “I get to make a very large painting and make the aesthetic choices as though the piece is actually 4 feet by 8 or 9 feet. And Tthat fills a need – whatever that part of my creative need is.
Then I actually love the cutting up process. I have templates that are really holes and I move those all around the fabric, choosing the parts that would work best for a garment. Then I start cutting.” “I have a lot of excess fabric when I’m through with this. I make scarves out of it which I dearly love doing, . Bbut I like having this large piece that I made strictly for me. And Tthen I start thinking of how it will look on a body. When I start moving that template around and choosing the parts, – I’m thinking, ‘“Is this going to make her butt look big? Can I have this big old flower here?’ That’s suits the designer side of me.” “ About those templates - did she learn pattern making? “The kimono is what I started with because I felt that a kimono was a gorgeous canvas. I loved the way the linings and the exterior have conversations with each other and sometimes were so completely different.” Quite a few of her designs are just takes on rectangular patterns. They are versatile and you can wrap and tie fabric so that an outfit can suit different bodies. She also tries to keep the patterns simple. “I like simple clothing shapes. I think they’re kinder.” Presently, she does all the work herself, the painting, the dyeing, the cutting and the sewing. “I love to sew. It’s meditative. Maybe the sewing suits the maker side. I’m not sure,. Bbut the clothing has given a balance that I find very healthy.” Exploring more about the sharing aspect of her making. Although she’s presently doing all the work, the sharing comes with the wearer. “When I start making the clothing, I really try to keep it so that when it is put on – when the right person wears it – the piece is finished. Whatever coloring that person has, adds to the piece,; the piece adds to them. Aand that completes the whole. To me, that’s part of the sharing.”
Comment [A1]: A little bit awkward
Shifting now into the process of creating the cloth, and being almost totally ignorant about screen printing, I asked Kerr to explain a bit about the process that she calls “deconstructed screen printing.” She replieds that it is not the typical screen printing process. One of the things she likes about the fiber world is the free flow of information about such things as techniques. She speculateds, “Perhaps because it’s so female, but there’s a lot of sharing. There’s open sharing of techniques and there is a long lineage of “this technique comes from this technique, this grew out of this. That’s how the deconstructed printing happened.” She Kerr read Polychromatic Screen Printing by Joy Stockdale. The and learned that the technique involves painting dyes directly on a screen, allowing it to dry and then releasing it with some chemical. (Kerr was using sodium alginate). After doing the technique for 10 years, she happened upon her own technique. “I just left some screens to dry that I hadn’t washed. I started playing with it with thickened dyes with textures under the screen. What I do now is put subtle textures – it could be a leaf, pasta (get her clarification) leaves are fantastic because their veins are tall –under the screen and . Ppull thickened dyes over that screen with a squeegee. The dye goes in and out of the thicknesses of that texture, leaving that imprint on the screen with the dye. I allow that to dry and then I use the sodium alginate, which is the thickener for the dye, to release the dye from the screen. It will create a series of monochromes.” She also applies wax to the screen. Speaking about the class that she’ll be teaching in Santa Fe, she said, “Our class is very short, but I’m going to bring the wax anyway. I use beeswax and do rubbings on the screen over textures to create stencils. I may melt wax and draw on the screen as kind of a resist or a stencil effect. I don’t use wax on the fabric anymore, but will use wax. It gives a different line quality. We can have either a very sharp line quality using the tjanting or we can do wax rubbings that have a very soft line quality. And I’ve even used a
Comment [A2]: This is a little bit confusing, to me.
little clover irons and different irons to just melt out parts of the wax from the screen. Or you can wax the whole screen and use a wood burning tool on a rheostat to lower the heat and melt some of the wax out to get positive marks. They look like cave-painting marks – really kind of rough lines that are beautiful. I could spend a week or a month working with just wax on a screen alone and see what types of marks it makes.” She Kerr uses fiber reactive dyes and was the technical advisor for Susan Louise Moyer when she did Silk Painting for Fashion and Fine Art. On For that project, she did the screen printing portion and she used traditional silk painting dyes. “I used either Dupont or Sennelier. As long as it’s a dye and not a paint, they all work equally well.” For her Kerr’s classes in Santa Fe, she will use her dyes but will also address the silk painters’ dyes. “They are never going to be as bright that one can get with the silk dyes. Some of the silk painting dyes get colors with a clarity that my dyes won’t get,. wWhich is fine, because I like things that are murky. But they can work with the silk dyes and can get those bright colors. In the class we’ll use the dyes I use, but we’re definitely going to talk about the others and ways to use them because I want people to leave the workshop and use their materials, not have to go out and get something new.” Getting back to her designing process, why does she call it deconstructed screen printing? She laugheds. “It took a lot of lying to come up with that,.” Sshe laugheds some more. “I had to have a proposal the next day . Aand it had to have a name. We maybe got a little too intellectual.” Normally, people use a silkscreen to get pretty much the same image over and over again, very easily, with stencils. When I started this, I didn’t use stencils.”
Comment [A3]: Wrote? Created? (I’m not sure if this is a book or DVD)
Not using the stencils has made the end result more of a surprise. “You cannot repeat this look” she intones. “no matter how hard you try,” . she intoned. “So I felt like we were deconstructing the repetitive idea of what a silkscreen did.” She uses other materials to create texture and pattern on screens. She might also paint on top of or in between the printed designs or discharge some of the color. “I can use newspaper stencils, put them on the fabric first, put the screen on top of that and only certain parts will print. Then, I can go back into those areas that the stencil protected and do other things – draw, print, paint with dye, whatever.” These techniques she uses are easily adaptable for silk painters who could use resist on the screen instead of dye. “They could draw on the screen with wax, paint dye in between those wax lines just like they’re painting on their fabric with gutta and get a series of monoprints that way. Because Yyou get more than one print and the dye slowly leaves the screen, you just print till it’s gone.” “I do a lot of painting after I’ve created a series of initial prints. I will either thicken the dye or not and paint back into the print for hours to change their colors. And I do more of that than printing, . Bbecause I like that touch. I like working with a brush.” I asked her Kerr what fabrics she’s likingshe likes right now. She state that she likes silk crepe, organza and some chiffon. She also likes vintage linen – a fabric one can imagine probably prints very well. For a time, Kerr lived in New Jersey. She saidys that in while selling to her New York based clientele she developed a feel for creating black and white fabric. I chuckled at the reference to New Yorkers and their love of black clothing, . Pperhaps it’s the weather. “I love a black and white accent. I love black and white period. It’s graphic. It’s wonderful.”
I asked her how she landed in New Jersey from Mississippi. “I’d always wanted to live in New York. I had no idea what it would cost to do that. I was at a craft show put on by the Smithsonian Museum. The woman across from me was an artist-in-residence at Peters Valley Craft Center in New Jersey. She said they needed a fiber person. It felt right. I, at that point, was still doing more drawing. I really didn’t consider myself a fiber person, . Bbut I figured, okay, we can do this.” She wasn’t really well-versed in fiber arts. However, part of her job was to hire the instructors for the department. She began researching to make herself more knowledgeable so that she could create the curriculum. “That’s when I really became a fiber person because I had to learn about the field.” She Kerr museds on that her life that, like her artistic technique, hasve moved intuitively from one phase to another. – this thing leads to that. She desiredwanted to move to the East Coast and the opportunity presented itself. “It’s kind of a life without planning, but I’m ready for whatever happens. So I was ready to go to Peters Valley and pretend I knew all about fiber. I hired teachers in all aspects of textile work – weavers, felters, people who sculpted with fabric, people who stitched, quilters, dyers – all types of people. And I started learning from everybody.” She was on the East Coast for 21 years, but now she’s back in Mississippi. Her work and her personal experience of being an artist is evolving and developing in different ways. “I’m doing a lot of teaching. Right now, I do not go out and wholesale my work. There is one gallery in Florida, Gallery Five, that which carries my work. I have a one-person show in Australia starting in March in a Gallery there.” “
Although she teaches more now, she says the studio work keeps her excited. “So does the teaching, but if I wasn’t still working in the studio, I’d have nothing to teach! Whatever it is I’ve learned in the studio that I’m working on currently, that’s the direction my workshop’s going. So if I learn a new way to make a mark before I’m going to teach in Santa Fe, that method of making a mark is going to be in that class.” She’s also doing larger wall pieces. “I’m dealing with the figure more. Once a week, a group of five artists, we hire a model, we meet for two hours and we draw. I’m also drawing the figure on the iPad and I know that I’ll make photo screens out of some of this. I’ll probably distort it more and then I’ll also draw directly on the screen a little bit. I’m regaining my knowledge of the proportions of the body. It’s very stream of consciousness type work. If I have that figure in my head, when I just work intuitively, it helps the right thing come out. I think it enhances the work. If I didn’t draw every day, I don’t think my work would be as strong. So I draw every day,. Aand all of that makes its way into my work somehow.” She Kerr does see more drawing in her future and . Sshe is incorporating more of nature into her work. “For some ungodly reason, I’m drawing plants and seeds and that aspect of a lifecycle. I actually see my work being very, very large images of seeds, sprouts, roots and that type of thing, but large, . Aand then maybe portions of it and distorted.” And Ffor these, she’s working on both cloth and paper. She’s Kerr is allowing herself to develop her ideas and believes that, by the time they’re finished, the images may not look like the model upon which they are based. It should be interesting to see. Sometimes a work starts one way and morphs into something else, . Bbut sometimes the viewer is able to intuitively see the underlying image.
Of course, there are so many people – especially women artists – painting and drawing flowers especially among silk painters. “I swore I’d never do it,” she Kerr saidys. “I thought that I would never do that. A flower – I was so human narrative oriented I just was never ever going to do a flower and suddenly they started appearing in everything. Real kid-like flowers, at first. Now they’re getting a little more sophisticated, but they’re everywhere. Whatever it is, I’ll accept it because that’s what started coming out of my hand.” She’s Kerr has been back on the Gulf for three years, during which. sShe survived Hurricane Katrina, although it destroyed her yard. “There were no trees, no nothing.” So, she’s been planting and watching her garden grow. That’s when the flowers found their way into her drawings she says. “For nine years in New Jersey, I lived in the nNational park and then I moved to town and watched people more. Now it’s plants and people cause they relate. They do the same things – they look pretty, they pollinate, they have babies and they die. It’s all the same.” Wrapping up our time together, I do asked ifs she hads any advice for fellow artists. She respondeds immediately, “Trust your intuition. Do something every day. I don’t care if it’s making marks. I don’t care if it’s writing. Some little ritual every day and trust your intuition. Why else do we do with all this? Just work. Work every day, even if it’s only 15 minutes.” Then she altereds her answer slightly. “Trust your intuition and play. It’s the main thing I teach in my class.” With work this fine, it’s easy to see how work becomes play. If your mind is struggling to visualize the process, then no worriesdon’t worry. “It’s so much easier to show than it is to tell,” Kerr laughingly concededs. Perhaps this is why, instead of writing a book, she has chosen to create DVDs. Deconstructed Screen Printing For Fabric and Paper is available on her
Comment [A4]: Which national park?
website along with a couple of other offerings. So, even if you cannot attend a class, you can still learn the process.