Tracy McCabe Stewart - Contemporary Fiber

 

Cave screen:As you may have noticed, I haven’t gotten a heck of a lot done in the art department over the last few months.  I did revisit a whooping crane piece I’d started before leaving for my trip to Japan, but wasn’t really engaged enough to stick with it when design problems arose.  It is currently in pieces waiting for me to get interested again.

I noticed, over the past few days, that when I thought about starting or working on one of my bird pieces, I’d start drifting away.  Suddenly, any thing else was more interesting:  laundry, walking the dogs, solitaire, you name it.  Interestingly, when I thought about doing some work on my cave series, I began designing and working the logistics of the piece out in my head.  I guess I need a break from the birds for a while.

I began working out fabrics and creating new thermofax screens to use in the piece last night.  I haven’t decided whether this will be a pure fiber piece or a piece that combines fiber and etched copper like my Lascaux pieces:  Horses and Bulls I and II. 

Anyway, here are some of the new screens I made based on the cave paintings in Altimira, Spain and Lascaux and Chauvet, France.

I am going to try to get some screening done over the weekend.  We are getting house stuff done next week (carpeting).  I need to empty out all of our furniture for the job and move it all back again when they are through.  It will be completely chaotic here for most of the week. 

Have a great weekend!

My pals Shelley, and Leah and I went with some other friends down to the fabulous Sculptural Objects and Functional Art (SOFA) show held at Navy Pier in Chicago.  The show was about 1/4 smaller this year.  They went really heavy on the glass this year as well.  I did manage to see almost all of my favorite artists’ work there.  Here are some pictures.  More to come.

There were a series of these  sculptures- by Keld Moseholm I really liked them:

Mixed Media Sculpture

 

I’ve seen this next artist a few times  Steffan Dam.  These marvelous sea life creations are within panes of glass:

Sea life creations in glass This artist, Barbro Aberg had the most amazing ceramics!amazing ceramics

I am a huge William Morris fan.  Here is an amazing tribal piece that was included in the show:

Glass by William Morris

This piece made from rusted metal by Mary Giles completely entranced me:

Rust piece by Mary Giles

Here’s a detail:

Another artist I absolutely adore is Gilles Payette:

glass sculpture by Gilles Payette

One of the most amazing artists at SOFA is Lesley Richmond.  She uses a fiber process that combines eating away some of the fabric and then uses metal pigments on them.  The results are exquisite, my picture, not so much:

 

Here’s a detail of one of her pieces:

Detail Lesley richmond piece

and some gorgeous thread painting by Carol Shinn:

Work by Carol Shinn

Ther was some beautiful wood carving by Milo Mirabelli:

Wood carving by Milo Mirabelli

and some really lovely glass work by Eoin Breadan:

Glass work by Eoin Breadan

I loved this horse sculpture and even talked with the artist for a few minutes.  She does these sculptures with her partner.  The artists are   Kirk H. Slaughter and Elisabett Gudmann

Horse Sculpture

here’s another one of their beautiful sculptures:

Another great sculpture

Here is one of Elisabett Gudman’s  gorgeous metal pieces.  She makes the most amazing colored metal patinas!

etched metal piece

 more photos later!

Hi all,

Over the past 6 months or so I have been in the process of letting go of clutter and trying to set up my workspaces to streamline my efficiency (I need all the help I can get!).  To that end, I have been reworking my wet studio space which worked okay for me, but was not working at all for my surface design work group, the Free Motions.  I still have tons of stuff that needs to go, but things are pretty well laid out.

Problems in the studio involved disorganization of supplies, my metalworking supplies taking too much room,  no central/bare space to put the supplies we were using; we had to put them on our work tables which gets in the way of work space, 3 tables instead of four and clutter in the sink taking up one half of the double utility sink, also no good solution for storing thermofax screens.

I have been decluttering my brains out, packing up my metalworking stuff-except for things I use to etch copper, and generally getting rid of TONS of junk.   Here’s the new layout: 

All my metalworking equipment is out of the way in those bins!

Here's two of the worktables, ironing board and empty (yeah!) tables

utility sink set up

Fridge to store dyes and shelf of fabrics that need more work!

 

You can see just the tip of the fourth table here.

long shot of the space including 3 of 4 tables

We still need to deal with lighting.  The light down here is really terrible (it is a basement), but all in all, I am pretty pleased.

 

My pond was looking pretty good, too.  Here’s a picture!

My pond!

Welcome!

First of all, however you got here, thanks for reading. 

I thought I might start this adventure with an introduction. 

I am a Chicago area artist.   Well, almost Wisconsin.  I live up near the border, and I work primarily in fiber. 

I began my rambling artistic journey in music.  I studied vocal techniques for ages and ages.  It took years, but I finally got the nerve to sing in front of actual people and had a couple year stint singing blues in a bar band.  Yes, ironically, we were an all whitebread suburban  band singing blues in Chicago.   It’s a wonder we got booked. 

God Bless the early 90′s!  I still have pretty big hair. 

Ceramic nut thing

I occasionally pine for my past media and break out the nasty chemicals or the blow torch to combine other techniques with my fiber pieces.

 

Lascaux series III-Horses

Those are etched copper panels below depicting horses from French cave paintings. Viola!

And here is a completely unrelated plug of my latest work that I wasn’t sure how to tie in:

Herons

Well, that was a rather ungainly transition in to the present.  I know I kind of fizzled out there, but I suddenly ran out of personal art  history.  I am sure my future posts about my current art escapades will be much more fascinating.

This blog journey will focus mostly on artistic inspiration and techniques.  This means you will probably get a scary glimpse into my brain through the pictures I take.   I also have an as yet unnamed fiber art working group starting that I plan to exploit for material and photos to post.  It’s sure to be a thrilling adventure.   I hope you’ll come along.