Guess who got some press?! Yep, The Laurel of Asheville just posted a great article on our upcoming exhibition! They quoted me too! Thanks to the staff of The Laurel who represented us so well!  You can read by clicking on this image:

AAAC Exhibit Seeks to Heal Societal Rifts

It has been go, go, go in my studio for the last few weeks. I decided to push the boat out and make a challenging conceptual piece as my last contribution to the show. The exhibition, entitled “Deconstruct to a New Paradigm” is aiming to help heal societal rifts by helping viewers envision a path to positive future. So, I decided to make a quilt called “Crossing the Breach.” It’s about dealing with conflict and how complicated it is to bring opposing sides together.

Here is the original quilt design. It’s a quilt that has been pulled apart and is attempting to bring itself back together.

Original sketch for “Crossing the Breach” by Jenny Kiehn

To create this, I had to make little figures out of air dry clay. I’ve been looking at the work of Juan Munoz and Ellen Jewett and have been thinking about this for a while.

Conversation Piece by Juan Munoz. He creates such interesting conceptual interactions with his figures.

 

Sculpture by Ellen Jewett. Her sculptures are all free modeled by hand with air dry clay and wire armatures!

Here are the figures I’ve come up with. They had to be very small to fit in the shadow box frame. It was tricky making them. Each one took from four or six hours.

This is a figure for “Crossing the Breach”

And here is the design with the figures in. In the end I decided to include fewer figures so they wouldn’t dominate the design too much. If you look closely, the lower two figures are in a “tug of war” holding each end of a thread. However, in this artwork the “tug of war” is also bringing the two sides of the quilt back together.

Design for “Crossing the Breach”

Here is a time lapse video of me pouring some of the resin. As you can see, I used the resin to glue the figures to their little shelves.

Here are the figures in the resin. At the time of writing, they are curing in the molds while I sew the other quilt squares together. I can’t wait to show you the final result!

These figures from “Crossing the Breach” are sitting in the resin while it cures.

The exhibition will be on view next Friday the 19th and the opening reception will be Friday Aug 2nd from 5-8pm. We are timing our opening with the downtown Arts Walk, so there will be other galleries doing events at the same time. The show closes on the 16th of August.

And of course there are the workshops! On Sat Aug 3rd we’ll have a full day of thematic workshops. My workshop is called “Design Your Own Story Quilt” and will be from 1-2pm. Cost is $20.  Click here for more info or to register.

I hope see you at one or both of these events!

Take Care,

Jenny

PS. It would be a HUGE help if you forwarded this to anyone you think would be interested.  Thanks in advance for spreading the word!