FI16 inspection highlights… and register NOW for the Forum!

FI2016 inspection

SCC ArendtOpening weekend for Fiberart International 2016 is steaming toward us like a freight train — packed with art, anticipation, and festivities!  Lots of last minute preparations behind the scenes before the gala opening on May 6, just weeks away! A favorite part of every FI is inspection week-end when one of our jurors returns to examine each piece live for the first time.

Lucky Guild volunteers make up the white gloved crew who carry out this essential operation. We open each crate with special care, document the condition and note how each piece was packed. After inspection the work is re-packed for storage until installation.  Not only is this an opportunity to check out the detail and incredible craftsmanship of your favorite artworks but also to engage with the juror about all things fiberart. Even if you’ve seen the images a dozen times, as some volunteers have — the scale, texture, and power of each piece is a joy to experience firsthand.

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Help make FI16 the best Fiberart International ever!

women seated
Rebecca Hebert, Camilla Pierce and Lauren Sims
Rebecca Hebert, Camilla Pearce, and Lauren Sims, the three top execs who run opening weekend.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve heard about Fiberart International (FI), the amazing show our guild produces every three years. The exhibition is so big, it takes up two simultaneous venues: the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts and Society for Contemporary Craft. But what you may not know is that we are famous (yes we are!) for hosting a great opening week-end where FI artists from all over the world gather to meet and talk about our beloved medium – fiber art.  And the best part is our members are deep in the thick of it all. We all have the awesome opportunity to shmooze, help out, and participate as much as we want. On Sunday January 10th volunteer guild members old and new gathered together to learn all about FI2016.

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Elisabeth Higgins O’Connor at SCC

Meet the artist and share her vision

At a recent guild-sponsored lecture at Contemporary Craft, featured Bridge 13 artist Elisabeth Higgins O’Connor talked about the evolution of her style and body of work. Guild secretary Wanda Spangler-Warren took her usual meticulous notes and lent them to us for this post. Thanks, Wanda!

The huge, grotesquely charming, animal-ish forms lumbering around SCC’s gallery owe their existence to a series of happy accidents involving drywall screws, the Iraq war, and a truckload of discarded cushions. Which is just another way of saying O’Connor never met a random input she couldn’t use.

Detail: Wanna do right...but not right now
Detail: Wanna do right…but not right now

As a resident artist in Kohler’s Arts/industry Program, O’Connor learned the slip casting method of making vitreous china, a technique she would later intentionally corrupt by using found objects, creating animal hybrids with ceramic heads and fabric bodies. Perhaps more importantly, Kohler made available to her a huge inventory of hardware – screws, wires, and grommets – which she used to assemble her figures in obvious and deliberate ways.

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