Susan Shantz - Creating Her Art
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(Sewing small pieces)  Well I like doing this kind of thing.  I think some women would hate doing this kind of thing.  And historically in Victorian times anyway, all women were supposed to like doing this kind of thing.  So for me some people might think it’s sort of oppressive that I continue to do this kind of work, but this part of it I like doing, but I would say that I’m also interested in doing this for a more public conversation than doing it to decorate my house or something like that.  I’m interested in that larger part of the dialogue that doing this work for a different purpose brings forward.  So it’s going around and around, sort of spiraling right to the centre, and then I tuck it in underneath it.  But it does give it a little bit more curve and physical weight than if it didn’t have the cotton stitched on the back.  So when they were floating, they would be floating kind of like this, and they would be on a monofilament and they were kind of floating in space and they would move a little bit with the air currents.  So in the installation, the fact that there were 1,200 or 1,500 of these floating in space creating a kind of environment that shifted your perception in some way.  Some people thought it looked like a hologram, or looked like leaves floating on a pool of water.  At the end I didn’t have enough of these to get the show together at the Mendel because I realized I needed a lot more.  So when I was back in Ontario in the summer, I was sewing a lot of these, and my family members started volunteering to help me, including my 10-year-old nephew and my brother-in-law and my mom and sister-in-law, all of whom sew.  But a lot of them got into doing a lot of these.  So I come from a family of people who really like to work, they like doing things with their hands.

Duration: 2:13 min
Size: 9558kb

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