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Gourd Art
Last week, I rediscovered a few gourds "drying" in our garage... In fact, I was searching for them after doing a doll making workshop where we transformed gourds into doll bodies, with the addition of polymer clay and apoxie sculpt. I have researched a little to identify the gourds I have - they seem closest to the water jug shape gourds.
The gourds we used in the workshop were Chinese bottle gourds.
my gourd doll - a flower child /hippy fiddler?
Workshop dolls - Christmas sprite by Jane Lambert , and my doll
Flower doll also completed in the workshop by Lee Hennequin
Balloon seller - gourd art doll by tutor, Janice Laurent
Working with gourds made me very curious about the history and cultivation of gourds. A gourdis a plant of the family Cucurbitaceae or the fruit of the two genera of "calabash tree" . The term refers to a number of species and subspecies, many with hard shells, and some without. Likely one of the earliest domesticated types of plants, subspecies of the bottle gourd have been discovered in archaeological sites dating from as early as 13,000 BC (found in Peruvian archaeological sites dating from 13,000 to 11,000 BC and Thailand sites from 11,000 to 6,000 BC.[5) ]
Gourds continued to be used throughout history, in almost every culture throughout the world.European contactin North America found extensive gourd use, including the use of bottle gourds as birdhouses to attractpurple martins, which provided bug control for agriculture. Almost every culture had musical instruments made of gourds, including drums, stringed instruments common to Africa and wind instruments, including thenose flutesof the Pacific.[10]T Gourds have had numerous uses throughout history, including as tools, musical instruments, objects of art, film and food. (From Wikipedia). There are many wonderful gourd artists worldwide One of my favourites is John Hernandez,whose gourds are beatifully painted, highly polished and embellished with sewn pine needles. I also admire the work of Serena Kovalsky whose gourds are organic sculptures ... here is a video of some of her amazing work.
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This week I've been working on fish and sticks .... The sticks are the message stick art dolls which were very popular, attracting some attention and a few orders at the Wise Women exhibition. Each of the message stick dolls are from the Wise Women series, each with her own personality and message of wisdom, handwritten on a handmade timber tag. I gather the sticks during my walks around my neighbourhood and the tags are made from special bits of timber, some collected by me or my husband or from off cuts gifted to us from another doll making friend whose husband makes bagpipes. These dolls start off very simply with a wrap around a stick, in the general shape of a body. 'Naked" message stick dolls - strips of wadding wrapped around found sticks. Then I usually wrap other layers of fabric, wool, and/or fibres, over which I do some simple embroidery. I sculpt or mould small face masks for these dolls. I really like using "sari ribbon" as w...
"29 Faces " is an online art challenge - blog and Facebook . The challenge is to create a face each day of September ( with one day for catch up) .... I decided to take up the challenge to practise drawing faces for my dolls and to practise techniques with coloured pencils. I received a set of 60 pencils from my daughter last Christmas so I wanted to be sure I used them before next Christmas! I love making tags so I combined tag making with "29 Faces", so I will also have some unique Christmas gift tags for gift giving this year. Here are the first 9 faces for the first 9 days of September
This is my tag for the current theme at Tag Tuesday - Book Print. I like using text as a background for tags and today, I reduced one of my recent line drawings and printed it on a small book page .... as you can see, the book's chapter is entitled "Of Holy Living and Dying ( from The Book of Books) . I thought this was appropriate as this 'Covid man' drawing depicts Nature happily thriving while man appears to be "unravelling " at the edges of body and mind... Original drawing - Wilma Simmons Silk screen print on fabric : Wilma Simmons Silk screen print on paper : Wilma Simmons And here are some other tags on book print backgrounds - these are free motion stitched "Nature" portraits done earlier in the year.
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What sweet little dolls! I am always delighted by the cleverness of the creatives such as yourself.
ReplyDeleteThank you for sharing, and for the links to other gourd art. Lovely xx