Turning wood, fabric into unusual art

At the interface of craft and art, Pat Ganase talks to two exceptional artists working in unusual materials.

DENISE Cobham has been an artist since high school, with a keen eye for line, and an ear for music and poetry. All that paused while she raised her family. By the late 1990s, she returned to an art practice with needle and thread, and her family rag bag.

“Here” – she points to a grey-blue swatch integrated into her new work – “this is from a dress that belonged to my mother. It’s probably the last piece that remained.”

We are standing at the single quilt that she completed for this year’s show, Meraki 7, at Cipriani Boulevard, Port of Spain. She titled it Rediscovering History, a personal story as well as a way of allowing things to connect.

Running strips of pattern hang vertically over a panel of sun-gold silk. Each strip is sewn – by hand – from a series of smaller pieces in different shapes and sizes. Here a little winged form; there a column of hieroglyphics; over there a bit of purple silk, a shape like a blade.

You can read it like another artist’s paint, or line, or texture. It is visual and evocative, stitching shape colour and printed motif with the neatest running threads. It looks random.

“It may be as random as child’s play,” says Cobham, “the way a child would create a world out of bits of sticks and stone, shell, leaf, bottle caps, whatever is at hand.”

She’s willing to allow the viewer to interpret the finished “quilt,” but just as ready to guide your looking to the influences that shaped her choices. Touch it, she invites, and see that the underside of each strip is made of other joined pieces of fabric.

She calls these works quilts because they are made of fabric and constructed with needle and thread, and perhaps more accessible because of the domesticity of the materials.

Layered and colourful, Rediscovering History bears looking at its tiny parts and then seeing its complexity.

Meraki collective

We are at Fitzroy Hoyte’s Think Art Work Studio, 11 Cipriani Boulevard, venue of the annual Meraki show. This year is the seventh. Meraki is a collective of six artists curated for this annual show by Andy Jacob.

Evan Samuel is here with his woodwork. With his wife, Stella, he runs a gallery and demonstration workshop at their home in Longdenville.

A self-taught and self-described woodturner, Samuel introduces me to the pieces he has chosen to exhibit. The large samaan platter is finished with indentations of gold acrylic and copper wire. The bowl made from Brazil nut wood is open but weighty.

“Anywhere a tree falls,” he says, “you can call me and I will come.”

He gives them an extended life in vessels which flow from sap and heartwood, following the grain that tells the story of the tree.

Teak and cedar, mahogany and samaan are his familiars. But he is always on the lookout for an unusual species, like the Cuban ebony that fell in a city park and was chopped up and carried off to La Basse before he could rescue it. We may not have another tree like that on our island, he says. He laments that “glory cedar” – the common name for the invasive Gliricidia sepium – occurs wild in Tobago and could be the basis of a woodturning industry.

The samaan bowl features fine dark lines in the lighter (sap wood) area. Spalting occurs when the fallen tree has been exposed to fungus, and contributes to delightful streaks and patterns.

His woodturning skill shows off in a small collection of trembleurs. Each is made from a single piece of wood and shaped like a spindle – beads or onions joined by the thinnest filament – painstakingly and carefully turned.

About 2mm at their thinnest, these delicate sculptures tremble at the slightest movement: thus their French name, trembleur. Samuel’s trembleurs are turned in genipa, purple poui and purpleheart.

Woodturning leads to hollowing. Samuel’s best examples of hollowing can be seen in vessels such as the beaded vase made of cedar and the ebonised mahogany jar. Another cedar bottle features a narrow neck which would have tested Samuel’s hollowing skill

“I make all my tools and chisels.”

He has built lathes and is willing to demonstrate their use at Samuels’ Yard, his gallery.

With a background in metalwork, Samuel spent a lifetime teaching technical drawing. He would love to train another generation of woodturners.

“Imagine, we could be selling bowls and boards, rolling pins, mortar and pestle, made right here from local wood.”

These are just two artists showing in the Meraki 7 exhibition, which runs until December 4.

Leon Bain, one of the originators of Meraki, says part proceeds of this year’s show will go to the Osana Foundation to assist children with special needs.

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