Saturday, December 14, 2013

Textile work -- Rare Opportunity

I was going through my photos this morning, clearing out not-so-good-ones, & I came across my piano photos from my May trip to Nancy Crow's farm in Baltimore, Ohio.

What a rare opportunity it was.
Farms are great places for collections, detritus, and quirky finds.

The two piano frames were in the quirky zone.
I loved them.
Lines, shapes, textures, & all the nostalgia that abandonment
evokes in me having to do with lost stories, lives gone by.
The amazing engineering of it! The tension....Upper strings starting to go...


 Corrosion & rust...That whole feeling that nature will overtake it...... & chaos is already starting... I was traveling with my really old friend Mary Beecher Price, so there was a serendipitous touch....

So I hung out with these two pianos quite a bit & applied cloth & then dye-wash to them to make prints of a sort.
The first tries were with unslashed cloth, but it was hard getting good string contact that way.



 So I then tried cutting into the cloth so cloth & strings made more contact...


 ... & enriching the colors...


This was before I washed the dye-stuff out but it is now dry. I took the cloth out yesterday & look forward to playing with them.

                                                             
That's it for now.