A COMMUNITY OF WOMEN: My Mexican Studio Assistants

Upon hearing that I moved to Mexico to avert a financial disaster, a colleague said “Oh, we all thought you moved there so you could get studio help and work larger.” Well, it turns out she was right, but I didn’t know it at the time.

Although I have studios in Durham, NC and Chapala, Mexico, most of my production work takes place in Mexico. Due to the vast difference in pay scale, I can afford to employ a team of Mexican women to fabricate my feathers.

One team is a grandmother, mother and granddaughter who handle the fusing and print preparation. The other team is a mom and teenage daughter who assist Sandra, my full-time assistant with screen printing and cutting out feathers.

With the exception of cooking and cleaning, there are few employment opportunities here for women so it feels great to be able to help these families while producing the components I need for the large-scale work. It’s a win-win for everyone.

Over time, everyone has taken ownership of their part of the production making it more efficient and refined. I love the energy of our women’s atelier (taller in Spanish).  I’d love to hear about your experiences with studio assistants.

The favorite spice of fiber artists

Even when I worked with fiber and encaustic, I bounced back and forth between letting the wax glow unimpeded versus adding waxed linen and wire to create surface texture (see example of Plumage 6 and 7 above). Now that I am creating feathers by screen-printing on fused plastic bags I have started to feel the tidal pull towards adding texture again.

Since I am working on a larger scale, I wanted to test drive some texture options on smaller pieces. In a new circular black piece, I tied in black plastic zip ties and painted the tips. Although the texture alludes to nesting material, the plastic speaks to ecological threats to birds and the drastic reduction of nesting habitat that they are facing.

I’ve also tried tying in waxed linen and wire thread. I love working with these materials because they have a mind of their own and curl in wild and unpredictable ways. Texture enlivens the surface of the feathers and evokes the threads that birds use to feather their nests in nature.

There’s a time and a place for using texture and I anticipate adding it when I want more visual excitement and forgoing it when I prefer a more tranquil surface. Let me know if you have a favorite texture.

My year of R&D

Every summer I jury a couple hundred applications for the 360 Xochi Quetzal Artist Residency Program. One note I frequently write on applications: work and statement both strong but not integrated. One day I snapped to attention because I realized that my pieces were guilty of this too.

I stopped making the work I’d been building for the last fifteen years and began to search for a better integration of the content and form of my feathers.

Early on I printed details of my previous work on linen. The resulting feathers looked flat and dead. I moved on to printing images and text about endangered birds on sheets of fused plastic bags using an Epson 3000 digital printer. The machine was way too persnickety and it was clear it could never keep up with feather production.

Finally I returned to my roots and began silk-screening just like the old days when I was a textile designer. Much experimentation was required to work out the kinks of priming, ink flow and over-printing.

It took a full year to work through the research and technical details. The resulting feathers were embedded with visual and written information about habitat destruction, endangered and extinct birds, migration and endangered languages.

There were times I felt completely lost and hopeless and that I was wasting my time. However, faith in the creative process carried me through. After a lifetime making art, I have learned that pushing through the narrow places always pays off. I am delighted with my new feathers and feel that I accomplished what I set out to cure: marrying content and form. Let me know if you agree.