Craft Week in Asheville

Folk Art Center

Our first stop in the beautiful city of Asheville was the Folk art center.  Here we observed how the womens craft guild began.  Francis Goodrich began this movement of getting the women of Appalacia involved in crafting as their hobbies and chores in order to boost the economy through selling these crafts.  

Handmade in America

Center for Craft Creativity and Design

The Oriole Mill

Field Trip to Asheville, NC

Our class took a field trip to Asheville, NC for the American Craft Week. There we got to explore various types of folk art and crafts, which was incredibly intriguing.

Our first stop for the day was at The Folk Art Museum. We learned about the quilt system in the Appalachian region. The Southern Highland Craft Guild was founded in 1930 and is spread to nine states. It was first founded by Francesca Louisa Goodrich when she arrived to the mountains as a Presbyterian missionary teacher in 1890. After creating Allstand Cottage Industries to market arts and crafts from the mountains she later gave it to Highland Craft Guild.
A piece of work I looked into was a an "Indian Madonna" (1953) by a Cherokee potter Amanda Crowe. It was beautiful and looked interesting, telling so much about the history of the area. Amanda Crowe was born in 1928 and was an East Band Cherokee and known for her traditional indian woodcarvings. She also did some pottery, which of this sculpture was a very good example of.

Our next stop was a workshop at Handmade in America, where Yoko Morris told us about using crafts in interior design. She pointed out how easily hand crafted furnitures could be a part of modern decotared home and that way make in unique and much more important, and I have to say that I agree with her. Crafts do not have to be always furniture made by carpenters or cabinet makes, but it can be smaller details like dishware, for example. That's why I took a closer look at a set of clay pottery at the exhibit by Michon Sentner. The pieces were beautiful in their own simplicity and that is exactly how I like them. They were hand crafted out of stoneware clay.

Stonewatnerre pottery by Michon SenThe next stop was the Asheville Center for Craft Creativity and Design. We were suppose to have a bigger assignment once we got there but due to cold weather and short time we did something else. We were guided to take a look at the weaving works of a textile painter artist called Lia Cook who had a small exhibition going at the Center. Her work was not the most typical weaving, since she used photographs to create a picture. I found her work interesting and very special, especially because of the detailed surface of the weaving.

Our biggest place to visit was the Oriole Mill. Their fabrics are made by weaving them with massive mechanical looms of which using requires a lot of physical strenght and understanding the mechanics. The Oriole Mill became to be when Bethanne Knudson and Stephane Michelson bought a closed down frozen food packaging building to store their mill for producing high quality interior textiles and products. They use two types of looms for their fabrics, the Jacquard loom and a Dobby loom. The Jacquard loom is a type of loom that can create more complicated pattern that a Dobby loom. According to Wikipedia, it is the type of device that "can be mounted atop a loom to lift the individual heddles and warp threads".

At the end of the day we headed to River Arts District to see galleries but since it was already quite late we were only able to find a glass factory, which we all wanted to see the most. At the galss blowing factory there were many pieces that were so interesting and beautiful in their own serene way. There were glass balls hanging from the ceiling with plants in them, which I found very intriguing. Also the usage of colours in their class work was astonishing and gorgeous. Blowed glass is one of my favourite materials and I have done it myself too. We met a girl making beads out of glass by melting glass around an iron stick with a small gas torch.

Asheville Trip

The field trip to Asheville last week was very intrguing and educational.  I learned much about the culture of the Appalacia and about the arts and crafts that they made. The River Arts District has gained many new studios, galleries, and restaurants in recent years.  It hosts about 150 different artists with much variety between twenty buildings in Asheville.  Here are some of the important things that I gathered:

The Folk Art Center had numerous exhibits that I found intriguing.  The Craft Guild was pretty much started with Frances L. Goodrich during the 19th century.  She had not planned to be working with crafts and selling her pieces, but rather doing crafting as a hobby.  People began to have an interest in her works though and so she decided to sell them for a small amount.  This is how the Craft Guild was originated.

Tom Brown was a woodcarver from Indiana who had small wooden pieces of people or animals.  Below is a carved and then painted person that he made.

Handmade in America was nice because their goal was to support local businesses around Asheville and keep the culture prevelant in Asheville.  I feel that it is very important to buy from your local area to help your own town.

My favorite piece was from Alice Pratt who had a weaving pattern that was cotton and hand woven.  I really loved the colors that she incorporated as shown below.

I must say that the Oriole Mill was my favorite place that we visited all day.  I just found it very interesting how the fabric is made with the machines and how much intense labor actually goes into thier work.  Also, I found that the people there had much passion for thier work which is always nice.  

The mill is quite large and spacious which provides for a perfect and ideal working area.  There are actually few workers there but that is what they prefer.  One lady noted that she had been working there since the mill opened, but before that, she had been working with mills similar for about fourteen years.  Many threads are streched on huge spools to a machine shown below:

Getting the threads lined up in the perfect positions can be, at times, quite challenging.  They need to be spaced perfectly with no overlaps.  This can be difficult because there are so many threads and they span a large distance which means the workers have to check the entirety of it for precise work.

Above shows the depth that the threads are spun upon.

Entering the mill in more depth, I noticed these threads arranged in a unigue way hanging from the ceiling.  I thought it was so beautiful looking so I just had to take a picture as shown below.

The crosses made are helpful when making a patterned fabric piece like the one shown below.

There are many designs that they can make with the fabric and fortunately, we were able to see the machine stitch a few lines of the fabric.  The machine speeds extremely fastback and forth, printing a design and ultimately making a whole piece of fabric.

Above shows threads of many colors on one of the looms.

Lastly about the Oriele Mill, I must mention some information about the Jacquard Loom; the machine that makes the beautiful works.  It was invented by Joseph Jacquard who was a silk weaver.  He improved the textile loom significantly into what is now used at the Oriele Mill and many other mills.  Jacquard was born into a family of weavers in 1752 and wanted to speed up the long, tedious process of making intricate designs.

The Center for Creativity and Design was small inside, but that didn't stop it from having great quality works.  The artist presented was Lia Cook, a textile painter.  Cook is still living today and continuing to make things.  She designs a picture by using different colors (mostly balck and white).  The whiter areas usually make up the faces and the darker areas usually make up the background.  Looking closely at her work, it appears that a random design is made but when you step back and look at the picture as a whole, you can really distinguish the picture clearly.

Above is a common idea that Cook has created - a close-up shot of the face with little color.  She focuses much on the emotion that something gives to people.

Below is a weaving of a child again, but this time, the foreground adds another element.  In color, there is another person.  It is intriguing how Cook seperated the two people with adding a color element.

Trip to Asheville

Our class recently took a field trip to Asheville, North Carolina. We went to celebrate crafts week. Out of our many stops in Asheville, the place that is most memorable for me is the Center for Craft Creativity. When I first entered the building, I was amazed. The art looked so realistic, just like photographs. But, it turns out they were actually made from thread. These pieces were designed by Lia Cook. Overall, I loved her work and all the pieces at the Center for Craft Creativity were very interesting I thought, especially by the detail and splash of red thread in some of the pieces.

The image above shows a thread piece done by Lia Cook.

Asheville

The first stop I made it to was The Center for Craft, Creativity & Design where they had Lia Cook's exhibition on display.  I loved her work & its intricacies.  She uses a Jacquard loom to weave her images.  Her work is composed of compelling close-up images of children.  It was interesting participating in her research about the difference between looking at a digital photo versus a woven image.  

 

Next was the Oriole Mill, which was perfect.  They told us more about the Jacquard looms because they have 5 of them.  These looms can weave any picture unlike the Dobby looms which have a more limited result.  This mill has 2 Dobby looms.

The Oriole Mill is unique for a few reasons:

1. It gives tours.  Many mills are focused on productivity, so they have their looms extremely close together.  Because of this, those mills are not safe enough for people to tour.

1. It has natural lighting.  Most mills rely on fluorescent lighting.  Natural lighting is much better for looking at color and other significant details.

1. Also, they use a technique that makes their woven pieces look like they've been quilted.  They put a shrinking fabric like wool between 2 fabrics that don't shrink much.  This produces the quilted look when you wash it.  This mill is not the only one that uses this method, but they are one of the few.

 

I found Melanie Robertson's pottery particularly interesting.  She was the Raku firing artist.  This is a method of pottery that can be quite dangerous, but the results are interesting.  You never know what you're going to get.  It creates a crackled effect. 

 

Marty Libman is a woodturner that creates incredible bowls.  It's amazing how much work goes into making a simple solid bowl.  He gets chunks of wood & roughs them out into a bowl shape on his lathe, and, for most woods,  must let them dry for an entire year.  As the wood dries, the bowls warp, so he has to do more lathe work.  Finally he gets amazing bowls containing the original wood patterns.