Textiles in the Landscape

Location #1: Abare Hammock Frames

     My first idea is to create vines, flowers, and mushrooms out of dyed and sewn fabric and to wrap them around the wooden hammock frame outside the Abare dorms. I also want to create some vines that string from one post to another.

Location #2: Flagler College Tennis Court Fence

     My second idea is to pick a section of the chain link fence surrounding the Flagler College tennis courts and to embroider/weave moths onto the fence. 

Artists:

Wendy Moyer

She makes flowers and other plants out of fabric

https://www.textileartist.org/wendy-moyer-interview-textile-sculptures/

https://textileartistmx.com/

Danielle Clough

https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2016/01/racket-flowers-danielle-clough/

Refined Idea and Sketch

   I liked the idea of embroidery as graffiti so I looked into the history of both mediums. Modern graffiti was started in the 1960s, and the majority of people doing it were lower class youth who did it while traveling around their cities in their free time. They started off by just writing their nicknames on any surface they could reach, and on as many surfaces as they could, in an attempt to gain fame or notoriety through tagging. Embroidery was a sign of wealth and pre-existing high social status, the opposite of the lifestyle that inspired graffiti. I like the dichotomy between the two mediums, one that existed to build status and one that exhibited the existence of one, and I like the similar dichotomy of embroidery usually being a smaller and more elegant craft being done on something very modern and not as elegant-a chain link fence.

For this project I wanted to focus on two contrasting histories: the history of modern graffiti and the history of embroidery. Modern graffiti as we know it today became popular during the 1970s and 1980s, when young men that were members of the lower economic class began tagging their nicknames on various surfaces around their cities. This was to build up some notoriety and to make their names known. Embroidery was typically done by women in higher class families, whose names were already known to others. To show this dichotomy I embroidered flowers, as floral patterns and nature are common themes in embroidered designs, and I attached those flowers to a chain link fence as my own kind of graffiti. This also shows how different the two mediums are; embroidery is typically seen as an elegant and delicate medium, and graffiti is seen as dirty and is considered a crime.