SEWN Mat for Houses Art Piece

I’ve been sewing up a storm for the SEWN class with Mary Ann Moss.

I’m a bit off topic, or working larger than was requested in the class for the mat you see in the photo above. The hexagons are about 5 inches; the entire mat uses more than 100 of them to form a 4′ x 4′ square.

I had already planned to make these houses for an art show in the fall called “Structure” at the ARC Gallery in San Francisco.

I envisioned an installation piece, originally thinking the houses would be hung. The houses are made from prints (monotypes) I made during a class many years ago. It was the first printmaking class I ever took, and the first several prints I made were atrocious: bad choice of colors, immature composition, pedestrian design. Still, they were on really nice Rives BFK printmaking paper, so I couldn’t bear to throw them out. I always figured I would cut them up, or work over them in some way. They just sat in a drawer until a project to make paper houses came up at a Women’s Caucus for Art chapter meeting.

I pulled out a stack of the papers and headed to the meeting. I tore off all the white border, then folded them according to the instructions. Each plate used to make prints was a different size, so the houses all ended up being different sizes.

After I cut them to make them three-dimensional, I put them back down flat, worked them over a bit using pastels, then added a coat of encaustic wax. I used the wax to glue the ends and edges together too.

The resulting houses are rigid and smell beautiful. I made a list of all the houses I every lived in and discovered that there were 11 houses I built and 11 houses I’ve lived in, so I assigned an address to each house.

After I put the wax on the houses I didn’t think it would be easy to hang them in a way that they stayed level so I decided to instead put them on the ground.

That’s when I thought it would be great to put them on a mat and decided that mat should be made of hexagons I cut out from old maps someone gave me recently when they bought a car that has built-in GPS.

I wrote on some of the maps, and had other paper I incorporated to make a mat that was four feet wide by four feet long.

When I look down on the houses on the mat, it seems reminiscent of the view you have when you fly over the mid-west. Fields, crops, farms, lakes and green on the landscape below.

I’m ready now to submit this installation piece to some shows – ARC Gallery Structure and also DISCARTED in Ojai.