SCRAPS, JACKETS, DIRT

Hello everyone,

Jordan here. Happy September, it’s been a minute.

Over the last year, my art practice has gotten quieter, both in process and urgency. It’s been refreshing and an interesting development for someone who has historically spent an enormous amount of time thinking about making while I make and think, then think and make some more at high internal volume. I’m still thinking but there’s been less wrestling, less external input with the work. I’ve turned inward and the pressure to figure out what a piece is or where it belongs ebbs away more easily. The silence where creation and destruction meet is showing up for long spells.

Lately, I’ve been sewing. A lot. A lot a lot. Praise be to the textile gods. And Easy Sew Daily on Instagram.

SCRAPS

I started making quilted jackets earlier this year. Initially using old quilts and a jacket pattern I found from a fellow Mennonite blanket maker based in Japan, the process became less about making a garment from a quilt and more about what I could do with the material itself. Cutting, shredding, adding thread, removing batting, always removing batting, painting, bleaching, foraging the textile aisles at the East Bay Depot for Creative Reuse, finding the right pink, then sewing those scraps back onto another piece. The felt sense of destruction has become central to my process and that’s new. It can’t only be creation, that’s not how energy works, materially, spiritually, every which way.

It’s also created another problem: I now have a shitload of scraps.

I started sewing the leftovers together on fusible interfacing. Pour them out, iron them down, basting stitches are gifts from God, also how come no one told me about needle down, add small pieces I’d cut off something three steps earlier. I haven’t been particularly precious because they were already the remains of something else, and that gave me wide latitude to release control over design and allow the composition to find itself.

I’ve made a handful of these smaller studies now and I’m curious about accumulation: more material, seams, more space.

I’m starting a much larger one, somewhere around 90 x 108 inches, basically the size of a queen size quilt. What happens when this thing is bigger than me? There’s something funny to me about cutting apart quilts, reconfiguring the remains, then eventually arriving back at a quilt.

JACKETS

The jackets have become their own ongoing experiment. I’ve made six or seven now, all from secondhand quilts, blankets and textiles. I’m looking to make more, do some pop-ups in the Bay Area ahead of the holidays. Be on the lookout for those.

Some get pulled apart and reconstructed pretty heavily while others need very little. I’ve been paying attention to that distinction, spending time building an entirely new textile for a sleeve or realizing the quilt already did the work 125+ years ago and I need to leave it alone.

(David Byrne approved of this last one, ran into his band at Chez Panisse in Berkeley, that’s a story.)

I’ve started listing some of the finished jackets on DePop. A few have already sold, which is cool and also means I get to keep making them without slowly turning my studio into a closet.

JACK KNIFE

Speaking of the studio, I moved into Jack Knife Studios in Oakland.

For the first years of my practice, the studio was a site of struggle. I’d bring a lot of inner conflict into the room with me and that would show up within the process: what am I making, is this working, I can’t find the specific paintbrush I need, how do I mix paint again, this looks way too much like (insert other artist here), what is this supposed to become, did I embarrass myself in my junior year of high school because I didn’t understand social cues, am I using the right material, why can’t I make this thing do what I want it to do. The ongoing fight was exhausting.

Now, I’m spending a lot more time experimenting and witnessing what happens. Put the previous two piles of jacket scraps together, how are the color relationships occurring, damnit, paint, wait, drive home, find some ephemeral inspiration on a light pole on my walk to Fruitvale & MacArthur, the blue and cream the commerical painters didn’t mean to put together is singing. I’m less interested in forcing the material, hell my whole life, toward an outcome, and more interested in observing where the path is opening and responding.

It’s deeply satisfying to not ask for answers quite so quickly.

DIRT

And, in a completely different but somehow unsurprising development, I enrolled in the Landscape Horticulture program at Merritt College.

I’ve started taking on gardening and landscaping projects around Oakland and the East Bay (shoot me a line if you know of someone in need of tree pruning), getting my hands into landscape renovation, fruit trees, edible gardens, irrigation and generally learning the actual names and systems that help create this mystical natural world we inhabit. Erosion control in the Oakland hills on a shady woodland slope, blue wildrye and California shady wildflower with a touch of Western sword fern was not on my bingo card and it’s damn fun.

Growing up in the Central Valley working around farms and agriculture as a teenager, there’s a deep sense of home in being back around plants and dirt. Turns out I love the combination of physical work and creative problem solving involved in looking at an overgrown garden and listening to what it’s asking.

Between quilting and horticulture, I am currently making an increasingly aggressive bid to become the most Mennonite person in the Bay Area.

SPEAKING OF MENNONITES: GIVE ME YOUR QUILTS

I’m looking for old quilts. Not fabric. Quilts.

If you have a quilt sitting in a closet, garage, attic, wherever, and you’re ready to part with it, send me a photo. It does not need to be pristine. In fact, damaged, stained, unfinished, missing pieces or generally strange is preferred.

I’m looking specifically for quilts people are willing to donate to my art practice, not quilts to purchase. And full disclosure before somebody sends me something from family’s collection: these may be cut apart, painted, bleached, written on, sewn into, turned into jackets or otherwise cease to exist in their current form.

So maybe keep Louetta Reimer’s beloved family heirloom, but I’d love to take a look at what else you got.

ALSO, A SEWING MACHINE

Last request: I’m looking for an older sewing machine.

I’ve been working on a Singer 7285Q that has gotten me through all of this just fine (plastic gears are kinda mid) but as the textile work has gotten larger, I’m interested in an older, sturdy machine with some actual room to move material through it.

If you or someone you know has one sitting around collecting dust, send me a photo at jordan.weeb@gmail.com and the make/model if you can find it.

More sewing. More dirt. More shit on the studio floor.

Thanks for being along for the ride.

Jordan