Sandra Brownlee: Notebooks (part two)

Sandra Brownlee in her Dartmouth, Nova Scotia studio

From a young age Sandra kept a notebook and it was while a student at NSCAD that she began to incorporate its use into her daily life. At first the books served as tools to record information and weaving charts, but over time they evolved into a greater role. Sandra uses her notebook as a thinking space-- a safe place to enter more deeply into her work and her practice. She normally works in one notebook at a time, but when she is working on a special project she keeps an extra one specially dedicated to that. Sandra's notebooks are now a catch-all for everything: quotes, images, experiments, and ideas. They are a place for playing, experimenting, creating, and freely expressing herself. The notebooks are a place to see and respond.


It is in her notebooks that Sandra digs deep. It is where she enters "the thorough experience of experience" as Inez Martinez wrote in an essay called Interiority. On these pages Sandra responds to her physical environment. Once she picked a delicate flower, pressed it, made a cloth pocket for it, and then darned this pocket into her notebook. She will post a card from a friend on one page and then on the opposite page, recreate the card in her own way. When she receives gifts, she does a line drawing of the object, thus becoming one with the gift, or becoming the object as Walt Whitman wrote in his poem There Was a Child Went Forth.

"There was a child went forth every day;

And the first object he look'd upon, that object he became;

And that object became part of him for the day, or a certain part of

the day, or for many years, or stretching cycles of years."

During a decade-long transition from her well-established weaving practice (that I will write about in another post), Sandra ramped up her notebook practice, often filling a page a day. She returned to childhood activities and found herself exploring materials and techniques of childhood art like finger-painting in her notebook. During this transition, the notebook became a portable studio and she was free to create art anywhere.

 Artwork by Sandra Brownlee, Photography by Keith McLeod

When artists exhibit their work, we generally see the work and an artist statement. We are rarely aware of the thinking that allows the artwork come to fruition. Sandra's inclusion of her notebooks in an exhibition, even when firmly closed, remind the viewer that artworks and the ideas behind them don't just come out of the blue. They evolve from a jumble of dreams, images, thoughts, and stories that we tuck away in our notebooks. They jostle together, a hodgepodge of miscellanea, until connections are made and insights arrive. The mind sees patterns and creates linkages between unlikely things.

In her essay, On Keeping a Notebook, Joan Didion wrote: "It is a good idea, then, to keep in touch, and I suppose that keeping in touch is what notebooks are all about. And we are all on our own when it comes to keeping those lines open to ourselves: your notebook will never help me, nor mine you." So, in the end, although I would love to curl up on a comfy couch with a pile of Sandra's notebooks and a mug of hot green tea, the reality is that my own notebooks (or sketchbooks, as I call them) will tell me what I need to know.


Thank you Sandra for so generously including your notebooks in your solo exhibits. They inspire us to fill our own sketchbooks, make our own connections, and make our own artwork.

* you can read part one of this essay here

Buckminster Fuller: Intuition

Image found: johngushue.typepad.com (Sept. 10, 2007)

"Intuition is the key to thinking. Intuition is our contact between the conscious and the subconscious. It's your subconscious that suddenly comes through and lets you know that 'this is something important to be thought about.' It's intuition that is continually opening doors of thought."

-- Buckminster Fuller

Sandra Brownlee: Notebooks (part one)

Sandra Brownlee notebooks,  Image © Keith McLeod

Sandra Brownlee catalogue,  Image © Keith McLeod

You say couch, I say sofa. Sandra Brownlee says notebook, I say sketchbook. I first encountered the notebooks and woven images of Sandra Brownlee during her solo Weaving Out Loud exhibit at the Textile Museum of Canada in 1995. She generously shared two notebooks for viewing and my immediate impression was that her black-and-white woven imagery was a direct contrast to her colourful notebooks. Sandra's intimate artworks are finely woven using a ground weave with a supplementary weft pick-up with only ubiquitous black and white mercerized cotton threads. An alchemist, she has the gift of making a silk purse out of a sow's ear. 

Sandra Brownlee notebooks Detail,  Image © Keith McLeod

Back to the notebooks. They were, and still are, colourful, loose and textured. The covers are lavished with care and attention, like icing on a wedding cake. Jan Baker, a colleague who is a graphic design professor at RISD, inspired Sandra to cover her notebooks with special fabrics from her collection. She takes a mundane notebook and elevates it to a work of art. Some notebooks are embellished with buttons, others have secret pockets stitched into them to hold a pair of embroidery scissors. They invite you to hold them and examine them closely.


Fast forward 14 years. Sandra has another solo show, Departures and Returns, this time at the Mary Black Gallery in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Her signature woven artworks adorn the walls along with framed textile collages that are pages excised from cloth notebooks, and a few hand-stitched pieces. At the end of the gallery hangs a shelf with a row of her notebooks, except this time they remain firmly shut with a "Please Do Not Touch!" sign. The notebooks beckon, like Lorelei singing to wary sailors, but I reluctantly obey the sign. The closed notebooks create tension as they tempt viewers to step behind the curtain to get a glimpse of Sandra's imaginings. On the other hand, the closed notebooks maintain the mystery of the creative process. They make me wonder and inspire me to do a deep dive into my own sketchbooks.
* you can read part two here

Aganetha Dyck: Art Hero

I have never met Gathie Falk, Wanda Koop, or Aganetha Dyck, but they serve as role models. You see, we all have something in common: we are all female artists of Russian Mennonite heritage. Mennonites aren't really supposed to be visual artists. In the Mennonite community where I grew up, it was acceptable to be a musician, it was OK to write (as a hobby), but to be a visual artist was iffy.

©Aganetha Dyck;  Image from Michael Gibson Gallery

"Glass Jar with Beige Wax and Flower Broach with Pearl", 1984 Glass Jar with buttons 9.3 x 3.3 x 3.3 in. SOLD

Of this trio of artists, the work of Aganetha Dyck speaks to me the most. Aganetha's work is rooted in the domestic: in canning, knitting, felting, and bee-keeping. But with a twist. When her studio occupied an old button factory, she used the materials at hand using a technique likely taught to her by her mother: she canned the buttons. Aganetha shrunk wool clothing for her Shrunken Clothing Series, and moved on to collaborating with bees. Her work with bees put her work in an entirely new light. In 2007, she won the Canadian Governor General's Award in Visual and Media Arts.


Thank you Gathie, Wanda, and Aganetha for persevering.

The real deal

Matryoshka doll, 1965 Image © Karen Thiessen 2011

Above are images of the "real deal"-- the Matryoshka doll or Russian nesting doll that belongs to my mom that I wrote about in a previous post. She is mother to five girls and was made in 1965 in the Semionovo style. The eggplant-coloured dress is unusual; mostly I see them in red. The five daughters wear red dresses. This doll is faded from sitting on a plate rail opposite a south-facing window. Apparently the Semionovo dolls are painted with aniline dyes. Almost anything can fade in direct sunlight, so this is an example of what can happen to artwork, furniture, and other collectibles.


This Matryoshka has long been part of my imagination, so I'm delighted that designers brought her into the present with measuring cups, pillows, tea towels, plates, and more. Atelier LZC printed some great Russian doll inspired tea towels in 2007 that are sadly no longer available. It seems that 2007 was the year of the Matryoshka in the design world. 

Small things

Bread Tab Image: © Karen Thiessen 2011

"One should pay closer attention to small things." -- Squeak Carnwith, American Painter (b. 1947)

Jon Lee is one talented guy

Jon Lee Installation NYC 2007

This installation of 10" square mixed media panels by Jon Lee caught my eye on a 2007 trip to New York City. It is from his Great Wall of Boxes series and aside from his techniques and imagery, what grabbed me was the modular nature of his work. I've been obsessed with modular art for a few years now and in a future post, I'll highlight a few artists who work this way. Jon Lee is one talented guy. He was one of 15 MFA students to receive the prestigious Joan Mitchell Foundation grant in 2010.