Wednesday, March 27, 2013

Imaginary Friends and Spontaneous Creatures

"Imaginary Friend: The Star Wars Singer"
"Imaginary Friend: Long
Necked Blue Beauty"
"Imaginary Friend:
Green Faced Woman"
in the collection of
Jane and Wallace Ewing
"Imaginary Friends: Speak No Evil, Etc."
I have been very fortunate to have my work at Synchronicity Gallery in Glen Arbor, Michigan, since 2007.  Michigan is a true summer resort area during the warm months of the year and Glen Arbor, although a little burg on the edge of Lake Michigan, is one of the most famous and loveliest, so the gallery is only open from May through October.  

Each year I've sent a different group of dolls, sometime my tall, freestanding one-of-a-kind, sometimes more production type pieces (Glamour Girls and Button Jesters), but in the spring of 2010 I sent a group I called "Imaginary Friends: Spontaneous Creatures."  Inspired by an article in Cloth Paper Scissors magazine, I constructed dolls from fabric that I had previous cut another doll from, using the odd cut-out edges as a new shape for the.  This created "body" shapes that were odd, a little strange and quirky; therefore, spontaneous creatures!  And they became my imaginary friends.  

The faces that are on many of these pieces (Speak No Evil, Etc., Green Faced Woman) is from fabric I bought in Tokyo at Nuno Fabrics, a very famous experimental fabric company.  This fabric is a sheer pale olive with freeform machine stitched faces, 16 or 20 in all, with a variety of expressions.  I later made some pieces in which I did the freeform machine stitching of faces and expressions---the fabric was a great inspiration.

There were a few that never sold and I'm glad because now I get to keep those friends at home, such as "The Star Wars Singer" (remember the "Star Wars" movie where Hans Solo is encase in a block of something by Jabba the Hut, and he's being entertained by the band and a singer/creature?---that's her) and "Speak No Evil, Etc." among others.

Imaginary Friend:
Dancing into Spring
Imaginary Friend: Red Eye

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