textiles – Whirligig

Lisa Hochstein

September 4, 2022July 10, 2012 by nanette

Lisa Hochstein is a Santa Cruz, California-based artist who works in collage, painting and fiber arts.

She recently curated the exhibition Earth • Science • Art for the R. Blitzer Gallery in Santa Cruz. The exhibition paired 16 scientists from the USGS Pacific Coastal & Marine Science Center with 16 Bay Area and Santa Cruz artists.

Hochstein has a BFA in painting from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Whirligig: What is art?

Lisa: My answer to that depends on whether I am in the role of artist or of audience. As someone who creates objects, art making is a response I have to the world’s bumping up against my awareness. Making art feels very instinctual though I can’t completely explain why I feel drawn to this particular activity. It has always seemed a little strange to me—that awareness leads to a desire to make something. When I am in my studio, my frame of mind is one of openness and curiosity and a certain amount of discontent or unease. Each piece grows from a combination of feelings, ideas, memories, associations and formal considerations, plus elements of chance and luck that I always hope to be awake to. I regain some kind of equilibrium through my work, but it’s not just about that. I also want to be surprised by what I’m doing.

Lisa Hochstein, Origins When I’m in the role of audience, I take in someone else’s work and want it to transfer some of that initial response/art-making impulse from its maker to me. As a viewer I also look for something I recognize as much as I look to be surprised. Elegance, honesty, technical skill, originality, narrative truth and aesthetic truth are some of the touchstones for deciding whether I regard something as art or creative output, which strike me as different from each other. There is a lot of creative work that may be artistic but not what I would call art. For me, something that is awkward and raw can be art while something beautiful and harmonious can easily fall into a creative-but-not-art category. Art needs to sing.

Jody Alexander

September 4, 2022May 28, 2011 by nanette

Jody Alexander The Artist in Her Studio

Santa Cruz based artist Jody Alexander is known for creating complex characters whose narratives are revealed through an array of artifacts which almost always include handmade books and are often exhibited as interactive art installations.

Her work celebrates collecting, storytelling, and odd characters.

Alexander has just completed two solo exhibitions: Jody Alexander: Sedimentals at Mohr Gallery in Mountain View, California; and The Odd Volumes of Ruby B.: An Installation at Saffron and Genevieve in Santa Cruz, California.

In the first half of 2011 Alexander’s work was included in: The Art of the Book at Donna Seager Gallery in San Rafael, California; The Book: A Contemporary View at Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts; Reconstructions at Conrad Wilde Gallery in Tucson, Arizona; Encaustic with a Textile Sensibility at Kimball Art Center in Park City, Utah; and Masters: Book Art published by Lark Books.

Alexander has a BA in Art History from UCLA and a MS in Library Science from Simmons College in Boston.

Whirligig: How did you come to be interested in the book as an art object?

Jody: While working on my Master’s degree in Library Science in Boston, Massachusetts. One of my professors took our class to Harvard’s Houghton Library. He began by showing us medieval manuscripts: Book of Hours, Gutenburg Bible, Nuremburg Chronicles amongst others. Obviously, this was very exciting to examine these treasures up close, but then he started taking out artists’ books. I don’t think I had ever seen an artists’ book before, and if I had, I wasn’t really aware of them as a genre of art. I think that I couldn’t breathe for a little while. I had one of those moments when everything suddenly made sense and it was clear that this is what I wanted to do. I proceeded to do every remaining project in Library School on artists’ books: their history, collecting them, storage and preservation of artists’ books, etc. As soon as I graduated I started to make them.

Whirligig: Tell us about the first book you made.

Jody: When I was about eight or nine I know I made some small books. I used to draw a hillbilly family and type out their story on my green portable Sears typewriter. These eventually became little books. I’m not sure how I bound them. They were just little pamphlet books. They no longer exist.

Jody Alexander Eleven Exposed Spines

Stacy Speyer

September 4, 2022February 5, 2011 by nanette

Stacy Speyer recently completed a residency at the Exploratorium in San Francisco. For the Exploratorium’s traveling exhibition Geometry Playground, Speyer created an interactive exhibit of metal geometric forms known as polyhedra. Subsequently she began work on a book on this subject called Understanding Polyhedra. Speyer was trained as a textile artist (MFA California College of the Arts) and is known for her large scale open weave installations. She is the Studio Manager of the Textiles Department at California College of the Arts in Oakland.

Whirligig: What is the connection between your work in textiles and polyhedra?

Stacy: There is an underlying grid in the make up of all fabric woven on a loom, but the different weave structures possible on a loom can create a huge variety of patterns and kinds of fabrics. My favorite weave structure is called plain weave and it is the one I usually use for my loom woven artwork. It is the simplest structure and when done in the light open way I weave, the woven grid is revealed. Though it is visually layered by the colourful composition dyed into the threads. It depends on the viewer’s interest whether they are caught more by the details of colour or the organic woven.
Stacy Speyer The start of all this polyhedra making, was a curiosity with a basketry technique, a hexagonal weave structure. It has three elements instead of the two in a basic grid that I am used to on the loom.

I liked the odd number of basic elements, one horizontal and two diagonals, that come together to make this regular structure. When all three elements meet, they make a small equilateral triangle and a set of two in three directions form the sides of a hexagon.

One year I worked out how to make the structure flat and the next year I tried making it into a basket. Then I wondered if I could close it off, making all the ends meet in some kind of spherical shape.

Spheres have always been a big part of my work but usually just seen as circles of dyed colour in the cloth or when the form the fabric is hung in an arc and column.