Love Letter Sweater
Woven shredded letters, sleeve trim is handspun paper thread
Isn’t this image beautiful? I spotted this installation by Crystal Cawley in the window of Space Gallery in Portland, Maine when I arrived for a visit last week. I quickly realized my Brooklyn housemate had sent me a text-image of the window a few days before; so great and lucky to have friends on the lookout for inspirations to send my way. Thanks to all of you darlings! Read on and get to know Crystal and how she created her collection: Protective Coloration.
This work combines my interest in the form and function of clothing with the possibilities of paper. I savor the challenge of translating the technical details and methods of working with fabric to working with paper. I also love reusing things—all of these garments are made of materials that used to be something else. Family Tree Apron is made of pages from a 1960s parenting book called Mothercraft. I used art postcards collected from museums and galleries or sent to me by friends for Cold Comfort Coat, and Love Letter Sweater is woven from letters sent to me by my partner when we didn’t live in the same state.
Love Letter Sweater
Detail
Darlings: Tell us about you…where are you from, are you a full-time artist etc?
Crystal: I make sculpture, artist’s books, prints, and other works on and of paper. I have an MFA and BFA in painting and printmaking, and have been using paper as my primary medium for twenty-odd years. I’ve lived in Portland, Maine, since 1996, and am a full-time artist, which means that I do a lot of different things to keep making stuff and supporting myself. I make and show my work and sell it when I’m lucky. I teach and give talks about my work. I mend books for the public library, and I bind books and build boxes on commission. I play the piano, am the accompanist for a few choirs, and teach beginner piano lessons. My partner and I own our three-family apartment building, so we play landlord and landlady and have learned all sorts of things about old house maintenance, Portland’s building codes, and how to get good tenants (most important).
Cold Comfort Coat
Art postcards, chopped into squares and zigzag stitched together, grommets, waxed linen thread lacing, velcro, trim is scrunched brown paper
Darlings: We love this quote, it seems almost like the tagline, can you tell us a bit more how it pulls together your project?
Protective coloration affords an animal protection from observation either by its predators or by its prey, and can be classified as concealing, revealing, or deceiving.
Crystal: I use titles, whether of individual pieces or for exhibitions, that are thought-provoking and open to interpretation. When I was thinking of a name for this show, I considered that the kinds of garments I was making are all ones that are used as protection. Most clothes, micro bikinis aside, afford protection in one way or another, but certain garments, like aprons, coats, or sweaters, have a more direct relationship to protecting us. I especially liked the idea that protective coloration can hide something, show something, trick you, or do all of these things.
Family Tree Apron
Old book pages, chopped into squares and mounted on tracing paper, embroidery thread, rickrack, yarn, velcro
Darlings: Do you think what we wear to have a meaning, a history, or a memory?
Crystal: Given our enormous capacity for creating and assigning meaning to an extraordinary range of things, some of us will find meaning in what we wear. The paper clothing in this exhibition incorporates both history and memory, because it is made of items from my personal life. I must point out that these garments I made are sculpture and not wearable clothing. They are a little larger than life-size—I scaled them for a body for which an average adult female would appear child-sized—about 11 years old. I think of them as clothes for Big Mommy, who doesn’t exist except in my head.
Family Tree Apron – Detail
Darlings: We love how all of the materials you used for this installation are re-used items. Why did you choose to use paper instead of fabric?
Crystal: Paper has been my medium for many years—even when I was mostly painting, I painted on paper not canvas. I have always re-used things, starting with my own work—I’d tear up old drawings and paintings to make new pieces. In the last five years or so I have started including bits and pieces of fabric with the paper in my work, but until recently, have not used fabric by itself. This year I started a series of large (36 x 60 inches) letterpress prints, half of which are on fabric and which I am working into with hand and machine embroidery (there’s a picture of a paper print in one of the studio shots). Though I’ve worked with fabric since I started making clothes when I was a teenager, it’s a completely different experience using it for art. It just feels weird, though not in a bad way—I am paying attention to what happens as I progress. I’m most interested in putting paper and fabric together somehow, which presents more possibilities and challenges than using one or the other.
Handbag
Shredded letters, woven for bag and looped for chain strap
Darlings: Do you have any favorite clothing designers (or artists) using recycled materials?
Crystal: I’m a fan of Ralph Rucci, Madame Grès, and vintage Balenciaga, who don’t or didn’t re-use materials to my knowledge, but whose structures, contours, textures, and detailing inspire me. I’m also fond of clothing made of recycled clothes and fabric, in the DIY tradition. As for artists using recycled materials, I’m a long-time admirer of Robert Rauschenberg, Lenore Tawney, and Joseph Cornell. Maine artist Katherine Cobey, who I don’t know personally but whose work I love, knits astonishingly beautiful, ethereal garments out of plastic bags. My friend Bryant Holsenbeck, an artist in North Carolina, does wondrous things with bottle caps and cat food cans.
Boots
Packing tape, black vinyl tape, three-ring binder reinforcements
Darlings: We are totally coveting these rain boots! Can you share with us your process for creating them?
Crystal: You start by wrapping clear 2” packing tape sticky side out around whatever you want to form (for my boots I used a giant pair of old Wellingtons—you can also do people, parts of people). You keep wrapping and overlapping the tape until you get the whole object covered in a layer of sticky-side-out tape. Once this is done, you continue wrapping with tape, sticky side in, so that you are covering that first layer of stickiness with smoothness. At any point you can put inclusions in the layers—sequins, glitter, whatever the tape will hold (I used three-ring binder paper reinforcements for the dot pattern on my boots). After you’ve got several layers of tape on and it seems like your cast object will be sturdy enough on its own, you carefully cut a seam somewhere (I cut down the back of each boot, from top edge to the back base of the heel), and take the cast off the object. This step is kind of like when an insect sheds an old shell—it makes a satisfying faint cracking sound as you peel it off. To finish, you tape the seam closed, add any other embellishments (the black vinyl tape details on my boots), and there you have it!
