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.

Looking at Art

The New York Times published an article the other day about how people look at art. Which might more appropriately say, how they don’t look at art. Over the years, and particularly at quilt shows, I’ve noticed that people (as The Times reports) kind of move quickly by, unsure about what, exactly, they are seeing or how to respond to it. If they are looking at traditional bed quilts, they get a quick ‘like/don’t like’ message from and to themselves, and then move right on, knowing that, somehow or another, that quilt has a destiny on a mattress. End of story.

If they’re looking at what is less craft (useful) and more art (not so clearly useful, or not useful at all), they usually don’t even get the quick message. It’s more as if their eyes, as their feet quickly move by, are looking to see if they ‘recognize’ the piece; looking to see if it is similar to something else they know, as if their job was to categorize it, the way you might categorize people at a party mostly attended by people you’ve never laid eyes on (A friend? An acquaintance? A stranger? The host/hostess?). And most of those art pieces are strangers, and people have no more reason to look at them closely, to engage with them, than they have to start up a conversation with the people whom they happen to see when they are riding on a bus.

So I went to spend my day at the Point Roberts Art Walk Quilt Show on Monday with some trepidation. We had put up a lot of quilts, a number of them mine, and I was going to be sitting in the same room with them, watching people walk past them at that steady pace reserved for the foreign object. It didn’t help that I read The Times article the night before the Art Walk.

But, as occasionally happens, reality proves journalism wrong. A lot of people came to see the quilts and a lot of them stopped, stood, and talked to one another about what they were seeing. One quilt (mine) with a lot of humorous text and cartoon-like pictures almost always had somebody in front of it, somebody laughing, which would only be possible if they stopped long enough to read and relate the images to the words. Others, looking at other pieces, were clearly captured by color, form, image: something that made them pause a minute, or even five minutes to see, actually see what was in front of them without worrying about whether they liked it or didn’t like it, recognized it or not, could categorize it or not. And with surprising frequency, they sought out the maker, inquiring about why the piece was as it was.

It is hard to look at something if you don’t know why you are doing it. It perhaps says a lot about the kind of people who live here in this remarkable peninsular exclave, that so many of them were not just moving through fast but were instead looking, seeing, responding, and asking for more. Speaking on behalf of all the quilt group members, it certainly made our day. The Times article was about people visiting the Louvre; maybe we should invite The Times' writer up here next year.

Fabulous Festivities

The Hansel and Gretel Family: The Aggressive Stepmother, the Feckless Dad, Gretel, Hansel, and The Witch. Quilted dolls, of a sort, by Judy Ross.


Are we having enough fun yet? I speak somewhat mockingly about the number of festivals up here on the Sunshine Coast, largely derived from a need to get the tourists to come up and spend money. The problem, though, is real: the fish are, so to speak, drying up and the forests can’t be clear-cut with the abandon formerly displayed, so what to do? The tourists, for their part, long to be here in the warmest part of Canada, in the midst of all the trees that are left, and right next to the ocean that remains abundantly wet. The ‘warmest part,’ of course, has been more than a little too warm of recent days, but the tourists continue to pour off the ferry, as unable as anyone else to predict the weather. Today, the parking lot of the grocery store was packed firmly by noon, as everyone moved in quickly to buy a thousand pounds of groceries for their weekend/weeklong visit.

But, Point Roberts, much smaller, has its own excitements of a similar sort. This weekend, of course, is B.C. Day Weekend, even in Point Roberts which is not in B.C., and the Point Interface listserver has been sending us many announcements. Indeed, there are so many things happening that the listserver manager has started a second listserver just for the announcement of Point Roberts events. There is an opening of a photography exhibit at the Blue Heron tonight; a pancake breakfast tomorrow morning; songs and dances and reeling and writhing and fainting in coils at the Arts and Music Festival on Saturday and Sunday (which has a pre-start start tonight, and finishes up with a Mariachi Band imported from somewhere farther south); and the Art Walk on Monday.

On Tuesday, we’ll get back to business, but until then we are having fun in the sun, in the unrelenting sun.

The quilters will have a small quilt show as part of the Art Walk on Monday at the Community Center from 10-4, and will provide visitors with the opportunity to do a little art work of their own, as well. The quilts on exhibit will range from large traditional quilts to medium-sized art quilts, to tiny artists trading cards. We will make a quilt while you watch! We will explain how we do what we do if you care to find out. We will be entertaining, educational, and gracious, etcetera, etcetera, and we hope to see you there.

(The dolls in the photo will also be part of the exhibit.)

All About Me

This past week has pretty much been totally devoted to getting this 'featured artist' quilt show exhibit up and running. The Sunshine Coast Quilt Guild has been around for many years and currently has maybe 150 members. I’ve belonged to it for about 14 years and most of the people I know on the Coast I met through the quilt groups so doing an exhibit with and for that show is like playing for the home crowd. On the other hand, these are people who have watched my work over the years so they’re not easy to impress. Of course, most of the people who come to the show are not quilters, but people who like to see quilts and don’t need to be wooed. My job this week is to get my quilts up and then to spend a few hours each day keeping them company and talking to people who come through.

The space for my exhibit turned out to be different from what the planners had expected and totally adequate. This part of the show (there are two venues, one in downtown Sechelt and one a few miles north), is in a big Catholic church hall, and includes about 80 quilts plus my twelve. The other venue is smaller, and includes another 40 or so quilts plus a group of wearable art jackets.

Hanging my quilts turned out to be very problematic and if Ed had not been there to help me, I think I would have just turned around with my quilts and gone home. But he was there and he did hang them, although it took him 4 hours to do it. The space is open, about 20 feet long on the back side, and ten feet each at the two ends. There are five quilts along the long wall (the ‘autobiographical quilts’) and two political ones at one end and five more at the other. In the middle, there’s a small table where I preside or something while I’m there.

I’m not entirely comfortable talking to strangers, but there are enough old friends and acquaintances who come by as well, that my anxieties are kept at a reasonable level. Mostly, people are taken by the humor of the pieces which they don’t expect in quilts. Most people make the effort to say something to me, if only to say that they like the pieces or that they admire the effort required for such work, and many want to know what compelled me to make them. Indeed, more want to know that than want to know how I achieve particular effects, which was a little surprising because quilters are often most interested in technical matters.

The quilts like all being together, I think, because it rarely happens: I don't, alas, live in a house with museum-type wall space. I’m happy because I like to see them all together. It’s like having all one’s children home at the same time: a lot of work, but very good for the soul. All in all, a happy three days so far, and I expect tomorrow to be more of the same. We are all pleased, I think!

Individual photos of the quilts in this exhibit can be seen here.