Installation of Recollect 2 was a breeze thanks to Kat Perez the exhibition coordinator. I was happy to have the work installed near my primary inspirations for this project – Laurie Herrick’s Purple Polychrome and Tree of Life. I am feeling really good about this work and am glad to have another day with it before heading home. Its always hard to tell what to make of something you’ve just finished.

If you havent already done so, I would encourage you to check out the website for the exhibition Laurie Herrick: Weaving Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow. From the website you can download weaving drafts, look at Herrick’s notes and sketches and participate in the exhibition by uploading an image of your own creation inspired by Herrick’s work on the museum’s Flickr page. Eventually a recording of my artist talk will also be available on the museum’s program page.

THANK YOU to everyone at MoCC for their generosity and assistance in making my time as artist in residence a memorable and inspiring one – Namita Gupta Wiggers, Kat Perez and Lauren Raburn especially!

Finally thank you Kristofer Kelly, my partner through it all for your patience, encouragement and love. (I’ll be home in forty-eight hours!)

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Today was the day (after six final hours of weaving) to hem stitch then cut Recollect 2 from the loom. After some repairs and wet finishing it will be ready to hang tomorrow. Here are a couple images of the piece earlier today just after it was removed from the loom…

More tomorrow…

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I began weaving today with a tie up composed of three interleaved sequences of random integers. The plan is to change the tie-up each time I run out of treadling variations (approximately once a day). The blocks in the resulting pattern are a little subtler than in the simulations I created before traveling to Portland, but were fairly close to what I had anticipated.

What I hadn’t guessed is that the fine silk thread I am using for a tabby weft between pattern shots would assert itself so much, casting a glowing, pinkish haze across the surface of the cloth. In the above image you can also see the warp ikat predominant in a few blocks. Weaving was slow this afternoon and evening as I was still getting used to the treadling sequence – basically six variations on three pattern treadles, with one used for each colour.

Am really looking forward to a full day of weaving tomorrow and discovering how the pattern blocks will tumble across the cloth…

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Four-hundred forty done, three-hundred twenty left to thread. Weaving begins tomorrow.

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I arrived at the museum in the morning ready to spend the day getting set up for two whole weeks of weaving. This was my first chance to meet the exhibit’s curator Namita Gupta Wiggers in person and discuss the arrangement of the working space with her and the exhibit coordinator Kat Perez. Both made me feel very welcome and I am starting to realize the gift that the next two weeks really represents – time to weave.

The loom is placed near the entrance of the museum which will give visitors the opportunity to observe my project as it progresses. I am actually kind of intrigued with the idea of working in a public space and what kinds of encounters I will have. Although I am warming to the idea of weaving in public, it is more than a little intimidating to be weaving in such close proximity to Peter Collingwood’s “Macrogauze 119″ and a “Tree Bark” by Theo Moorman. (Both pieces once belonged to Laurie Herrick who brought both Collingwood and Moorman to Portland to teach workshops in the early 1970′s.) The gravity of such a situation may be lost on the non-weaver, but those who understand…well, maybe I am over-reacting, but man they are pretty amazing!

Much of the morning was taken up with counting heddles and preparing to beam the warp onto the back of the loom. In the afternoon I began beaming…and beaming…and then beaming some more. By the end of the day what was a jumbled pile of braided threads became a neatly wound warp ready for threading tomorrow. With some luck I may even be weaving late tomorrow afternoon.

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