Point Roberts Rules!

What we are festivating right now on the Sunshine Coast is Fibre Arts. This past week was the tenth annual Fibre Arts Festival, which includes classes, exhibits, merchandising, and evening parties to celebrate all things fibrous. And this would include the arts/crafts of woodworking, paper arts, quilting, art quilting, knitting, spinning, weaving, needlework, felting, crocheting, wearable arts, and rugmaking. Except for the woodworking, it is largely a lady activity, I’m afraid. I’m sorry I won’t live long enough to see such work not considered women’s work, hobby activities. It is possible that no one will ever live long enough, I suppose.

I’m not sure whether it’s the ‘women’s work’ category that drives the sponsors/organizers to need to have prizes for all those categories of work, but whatever it is, if you go to the exhibit, you are urged to fill out a ballot in which you get to designate the one thing in all this panoply of wonders that you think is the very best. How it is that you calculate that an exquisitely built wooden train is more best than an exquisitely felted unicorn and wizard I cannot begin to imagine, so I always throw away this ballot without forcing my little brain to tackle such perplexity.

The Festival does have independent judges, however, whose task is to decide, at least within the categories, which are the best and the almost best and the very nearly almost best and the slightly not as wonderful as the very nearly almost best. Even here, I’m really not all that sure as to how a well-made 8-foot-on-a-side Irish Chain quilt can be determined to be slightly better or slightly worse than a well-made 15”x24” place mat, or how a beautifully made Fair Isle Sweater is better than a beautifully made (and funny) pair of socks. But we can leave that to the judges who, I presume, sleep well at night.

In any case, there were about 70-80 interesting fiber pieces of all descriptions and well-madedness and well-designedness on display. And anyone who was lucky enough to be in town here and had the time to spend an hour or two looking at what these women (and a few men) had wrought, would have had a day well spent. But what makes this time-spending slightly more relevant than the time spent at the showings of all the other shows around at this moment, in one town or another, in one country or another, is that the first prize in the Art Quilt category was given to the quilt in the photo above which is none other than a representation of Point Roberts back in the days, many thousands of eons ago, when Point Roberts was but an island button, with no visible connection to what was to become Richmond and Vancouver, and when Tsawwassen was under the water, which of course prohibited it from having strip malls of any sort. (Also: no border station.)

The maker of the quilt is Rose Momsen of Point Roberts. And further to add to P.R.’s PR, my quilt received an Honorable Mention in the same category. Its photo is at the bottom and actually makes no internal reference to Point Roberts, being a story about a courtroom drama. The thing is, in Point Roberts, we have drama, but no courtrooms.

Congratulations, Rose! You did well by our home town.

Mine, All Mine

Another tourist festival here on the sometimes sunny Sunshine Coast. Rain welcomed the 5-day long, Gibson’s Landing Fibre Arts Festival, which has been an August feature in Gibsons for the past eight or so years. It includes classes, an exhibit, a merchant mall, a film evening, a reception evening, and a variety of demonstrations. It focuses on all the ordinary fibre arts (knitting, lacemaking, rug hooking, quilting, ornamental clothing, weaving, felting, crocheting, embroidery, paper-making, fabric jewelry, and wood-working, because wood, too, is a fibre, as the promotional materials inform us.

The exhibit is the part I’m mostly interested in, but it has a checkered record. The goal of the exhibit is to attract high-quality stuff from off the coast, but that has not been easy to achieve. There are no significant prizes, no significant publicity, and no significant ease for getting your work to and from the festival. It is a juried exhibit, but some years the jurying appears to be non-existent with plaintive letters going out to various fibre groups on the coast begging for submissions. Other years, the quality is very good. I’m just one of the tourists they’re attracting so I don’t know much about what’s behind it all, but this year, things took another turn downhill from my perspective.

The exhibit was excellent. I took my camera with me because I have lots of friends who would like to see what was on display, friends who don’t live on the Sunshine Coast, but who might try to get here if they saw the quality of the display. ‘No Photographs,’ I was told. ‘Copyright issues,’ was added vaguely, as if that explained everything, as if there were no such concept as ‘fair use.’ One of the attendants went on to explain that I, personally, could give the Festival permission to use a photograph of my quilt (I had one quilt in the exhibit), and that a professional photographer would take such picture. Hardly a response to my request, I thought. In any case, since I had just sold that quilt, I suppose the ‘copyright’ (whatever that might mean in this situation) would be going to the person who bought the quilt.

Intellectual property is what we were dealing with here. Thoughts, images, ideas: all mine, or all somebody’s, never to be touched, seen, thought, or even imagined without giving that unknown ‘ME’ credit or getting ME’s permission or providing ME with money. I heard that the festival had run into some difficulty earlier when they had used a photograph of a quilt from a previous year’s exhibit in their publicity materials. Apparently, the quilt was made from a copyrighted design (dear lord, you can copyright almost anything, including the simplest quilt design), and the brochure had not given credit to the copyright holder nor, I guess, had anyone asked the copyright holder's permission to use a photograph of a quilt made by somebody else in the festival’s brochure: I mean, why would they? TOO bizarre for me. I take a picture of a deer in someone’s yard. Does the image belong to the person who owns the front yard? Surely not. Maybe we should be getting the deer’s permission to take the photo in the first place, and then pay or give credit to the deer when I put the photo on my blog, in the second? Does the image belong to the deer? Have I captured its soul? Should Dorothea Lange’s estate have ensured payments to the woman whose photograph Lange made famous throughout the world?

I know there’s another side to all this, but I’m not persuaded much by that side, at least not when it's exercised in unreasonable ways. I’m happy to think that images (and information), as the phrasing goes, would like to be free. That’s what is destroying newspapers, I am assured, but it seems to me that newspapers, e.g., have done a very good job of destroying themselves by their mediocre display of journalism. I hope the Fibre Arts Festival doesn’t go the same route. Images are what is on view at an exhibit. Surely, the purpose of an image is to be seen?