Carol Larson - textile artist

Several years ago an aged and grumpy long lost Swedish cousin of my husband came from Stockholm to visit.  This man was well into his 80’s, a retired engineer who lived in the same 500 sq ft apartment in Stockholm for 5 decades. He had never owned a car, much less been in one. And he had never traveled outside of his native Sweden when he decided on a lark to come visit his 2nd and 3rd cousins.  We were blessed (?) to host him and his wife for two weeks.

What I most remember about him were his ongoing remarks about everything that represented our lifestyle being impractical!  Freeways were impractical! Cars were impractical! Computers were impractical!  He did not want to visit San Francisco because he had read about it in a book…too impractical! While what he said did make some sense his continual remarks of impractibility became a laughing point for my husband and I as we plowed through the two weeks of our impractical lifestyle.

So imagine my shock today when I was well into my rowing machine routine listening to classical music when it came to me that my art-making has become impractical!  For the past two months I have been designing new work that is impractical. It is impractical to store, it is impractical to ship. And yet I plod along creating more of it.

The Upheaval series resonates with my life these days where chaos reins.  My own elder parent issues have rendered sanity unpredictable and yet I am excited to create work that reflects this.

Someone told me to store this work wrapped around a pool noodle.  Granted my studio does contain pool noodles, which I use solely for shipping work so it doesn’t wrinkle. But the long term effects of storing work on a petroleum laced pool noodle is not my idea of textile conservation.

For now I have rolled these pieces perpendicular to how they hang and then gingerly placed them in their cloth condom and laid on a long and flat shelf. That is as practical as I can get at this juncture.

If you have been reading this blog for any time at all, you know I have a work ethic like no other….except everyone else in my birth family.  I was hoping for this to be a lazy weekend but alas I have had pedal to the metal making more note-cards.  Designed with fused fabric scraps these sell well at the gallery and I anticipate being a big hit at Open Studios in October.  Since the cupboard was bare I really needed to get on it and make more so that is what I have done this weekend.  It is astonishing to me that even with an 18″ tall bag of scraps and some 60 cards later, the bag is still almost full. I think the scraps reproduce on the table.  I chose to do these because the other over-achiever’s option was to fine-tune two lectures I am giving this fall.

I also played around with an Embellisher. A friend cleaning out her studio lent me her machine because I have been saying for a couple years now I was thinking of getting one. They are very inexpensive so that was not my issue: it’s that I am opposed  to buying anything I am not sure I am going to use at this time in my life.  So un-American!!!  So this baby has been resting in the corner waiting for me for at least a month.   It was much fun & now I am certain I need one. I have big plans to take some old wool sweaters, and a drawer full of my hand-woven remnants from a previous life and felt something fabulous. Yea, right after I use those 100 jars of textile paint she also gave me. And don’t forget those lectures….I get it…this is why we are supposed to rest on the weekends.

So imagine my surprise when just the other day I cut out this image from an ad and stuck it on my design wall and supposedly forgot about it.  I liked it not so much for the hues but for the shapes. I am currently working on a series I titled ‘upheaval’ and this image resonated with that theme.

I recently realized that my profound dislike of all social media and especially Facebook was getting a bit tedious.  I kept hearing how much it would change my life and that if I refused to join the parade I might be left by the roadside as an antiquated dinosaur.  So today I bit the bullet and logged in…I know I can hear the collective groan from you last few remaining holdouts.  Part of what convinced me was the You Tube videos of temper tantrums. First of all who records their kid going beserk anyway?

My intention is some saavy corporate person on FaceBook is going to make me a star. I  might as well aim high.