Science Museum of Minnesota

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Art, diatoms, great blue heron, green heron, hand dyed silk, hand painted silk, Pine Needles, Science Museum of Minnesota, silk, St. Croix River Valley, St. Croix Watershed Research Station, St. Paul, walnut dyes

The Science Museum of Minnesota was directly across the street from the convention center and conference participants were able to visit for free. Again – a photo using the panoramic app. One of the things I especially like about taking pictures like this is the irregular shape of the image. It really bends the space.
There is a Pterodactyl(?) skeleton suspended from the ceiling and a world map in the floor of the entrance.

After leaving St. Paul, we drove to Marine-on-St. Croix to visit the St. Croix Watershed Research Station (SCWRS). I was an artist in residence there in 2008 and last year at this time delivered the piece I created as an interpretation of my stay at Pine Needles, the cabin designated as the “residence” for this program. I hadn’t had the chance to photograph the piece before delivering it to the station, so I took the opportunity on this visit. Click on the photo to see a larger version.
The pieces I create as interpretations of residencies tend to be more complex than my other work. Hopefully, the story of the two or three weeks I spend immersed in a new place become well integrated as a snapshot of that time. Once in a Blue Moon combines images I obtained from the research done in the river directly outside the door of Pine Needles – diatoms and discs used in Lead 210 testing of sediment core samples – with the plants and animals I observed during the three weeks I lived there – Great Blue and Little Green herons, the blue moon that occurred, and of course, the pine needles.  The SCWRS is part of the Science Museum of Minnesota.

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Heron Moon

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full moon, green heron, Heron, silk, UW - Madison, Walnut Street Greenhouse

I recently learned that my piece Heron Moon, was purchased by the University of Wisconsin – Madison for one of the greenhouses on campus. Again, a purchase through the Percent for Art program administered by the Wisconsin Arts Board. Unfortunately, the Arts Board will be unrecognizable after the new fiscal year begins. It’s budget has been slashed by 75% and the remaining positions will be absorbed into the Department of Tourism. This is an enormous loss for the State and will impact the quality of life to which we’ve become accustomed. To learn more about how WBA is changing go to: http://artsboard.wisconsin.gov/

This piece was created by folding and dyeing in fiber reactive dyes, then silk screening the images with a chemical that removes the dye. The moon is silk screened using illuminated vat dye – a process that removes the base dye and replaces the color with the new reductive dye. Reductive dyes oxidize as they’re exposed to the air and the color can become quite intense. The green heron was screened onto a separate piece of silk and handpainted – again using fiber reactive dyes. Then he was cut out and appliquéed onto the background fabric.

The inspiration came from my residency at Pine Needles in Marine on St. Croix, Minnesota. The cabin was situated on the high bank of the river and I was able to look down to the Wisconsin shore line where I often observed juvenile green herons. All of the other animals on this piece also visited the cabin during my stay.

The Case for Multiples

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green heron, screen printing, silk painting

Many of the pieces I do include a variety of techniques. I started my career with textiles using the process of silk painting. My first class focused on a technique called gutta serti, which uses a resist to paint an outline of a design onto a piece of silk stretched on a frame. Then dyes are applied to the silk, much like watercolors to paper. I was intrigued with the intense color and fairly quick results. But the gutta left a white line – similar to the black line of a coloring book. I often felt this detracted from the overall design and decided to find ways to eliminate that element.
One way I achieve that is to screen print a basic outline of an image onto white silk and hand color it with thickened dyes. Here I have a series of Green Herons, a wading bird found in this area. The birds were printed with thickened H series fiber-reactive dyes and then steam set so the outline will stay crisp during the application of the dyes to fill in the colors.

Here is one of the birds colored in, also with thickened H series fiber-reactive dyes.

And here is the entire piece of silk with all of the herons hand colored and steam set. Eventually, these birds will be cut out of the surrounding silk and appliquéd to another piece, so the bleeding of the colors into the background aren’t an issue. If I’d wanted to keep everything as one piece, I would have masked the background and made the colors a little thinner during application.

As you can see if you look at the large version of the last picture, each heron looks quite different from all the others. This will allow me to choose the one I like best for each piece. Below are closeups of a few of them so you can see just how different they are from one another.