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2017 Asialink Arts Residency

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Crazed Puppets 04

This is not a Kowangan

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Looks like I need to start a new category in my hashtags, for bouquets of flowers from my girlfriends 💐 absolutely gorgeous roses from Afarin. I would love to identify the actual type of rose because these are so fluffy and delicate, they make me think of the chapter “Meg goes to Vanity Fair” in Little Women (probably one of my favourite chapters when I was a child, I spent a lot of time drawing the dresses and outfits described therein and very little worrying about Meg’s morals… same goes for Alcott’s less famous but strong favourite “An Old-Fashioned Girl”). #rosielovesroses #rosieloveslesfleurs

This week is James’s 40th birthday! I made him some pyjama pants (using a @tillybuttons pattern), and did my sneaky cutting and sewing on days when he wasn’t around. I wrapped them in my @hanecdote tissue paper for extra charm 💀 ❤️. I also got James a hammock, and it’s so nice to see him enjoying it in the garden after work!

I am having a rough week (month… year?) due to the impossible labyrinthine administrative nightmare that is life on the French-Swiss border post-Brexit. I am hitting wall after wall, and currently can no longer drive because neither my Australian nor Taiwanese drivers license are accepted, nor am I covered by the car insurance. I cannot get a french driver’s license because the address on my french residency permit is not current — I’ve been waiting for almost a year now for the prefecture to update it. I cannot work because I am neither European nor Swiss, and I cannot apply for French citizenship because despite growing up here and my family all living here, I unknowingly “renounced” my rights when I left France to study overseas, a decade before the word Brexit was even coined. I am trying to fill out our first french tax return as a “frontalier” family — James works and pays taxes in Geneva but we still have to do the tax return here in France and there are no fewer than FIVE separate forms to complete in order to fulfill their requirements. Meanwhile my health is in the toilet, but because the french side of the border is a medical desert we pay extremely high Swiss health insurance for the privilege of using the system over there — and it is a privilege, but it’s expensive and we aren’t covered for the “complementary” healthcare services, such as a specialist in perinatal depression. Meanwhile I am continuing to adjust to the parental life of permanent sleep deprivation and toddler meltdowns, which is about to be even worse as James has to travel for work and will be away for 18 days next month — and I cannot drive our child to daycare. ANYWAY. My neighbour surprised me with these beautiful flowers and I really appreciated her kindness, for all of the reasons stated above. #brexitmeansbrexit

Online textile conservation colloquium alert! On Tuesday 24 April, Viviane Wei-An Chen (@a_costumier_in_the_far_westtt), Andrew W. Mellon Conservation Fellow at the Met Department of Textile Conservation will be presenting her research on three dimensional mounting for non-Western costume. “The display of non-Western costume has often emphasized intricate textile design and decoration, rather than the cultural or fashion-centric perspective of the costume in its entirety” — this is such important work in moving away from outdated concepts of “ethnographic” textiles. Viviane is a personal hero of mine, not least because 2 years ago she stepped in and did an excellent job on a project I had undertaken in transforming this display of 19th century Chinese clothing. Viviane did a huge amount of very precise and beautiful conservation work, stabilising and improving the presentation of some rather neglected and damaged items of dress. I went on maternity leave (and never came back) and she took over and managed the hell out of this project for the following year (in addition to a second, much larger project I signed off on before leaving town!), whilst simultaneously remotely starting her fellowship at the Met (oh yes and finishing up her Masters thesis!). I cannot begin to wrap my head around the amount of dedication, hard work and skill that Viviane has poured into her textile conservation practice across three continents. I am very excited to hear her talk at the “Research Out Loud” Met Fellows Spring Colloquium. I hope some of you will be joining us online for the textiles session at 2pm EST on May 24, 2022. Thank you Viviane for taking over and doing a far better job than I ever could. And thank you also Staphany Cheng @staphanycheng who was also invaluable in doing all the work I signed up for before I disappeared to have a baby! Photos: before we began the project, after Viviane’s intervention, and a photo from a podcast interview Viviane did about her work. #textileconservation #asiancostume #costumeconservation #fashionconservation #chinesedress #metfellows #chinesetextiles #asiantextiles #costumemounting #mountmaking #textilesconservation #conservator

I finally got a darning mushroom after watching too many visible mending videos and suddenly life is much easier. Actually it’s not a even a darning mushroom, I picked it up in Søstrene Grene and according to the label it’s something to do with linocut printing… anyway I have lots of bits of Aubusson wool to use up and a very motheaten merino sweater to patch up, so here we go (pics are front, back, and hole before I started) #darning #visiblemending

Today I got to participate in the collaborative artwork “wāwīndamaw . promise” led by

Nobody warned me that I would become so enamoured with my child that I would actually be entranced whenever he scribbles on my (already incomprehensible) notebook 🥺❤️👩‍👦📝

Swirly, slightly pearlescent backing paper on a framed embroidery I am conserving. It’s funny the little things you reveal when you take the frame off an object nobody has looked at in a long time. This piece is already becoming very special to me, I’m looking forward to posting more about it.

Yesterday I was cutting open a package of secondhand onesies, when I was distracted by a motorbike outside and committed the ULTIMATE horror crime for a conservator — I cut through one of the onesies! I did a quick repair using scraps from previous projects, and now it’s just got to hold up to the wear and tear of a toddler on the go. #visiblemending

I’m back to stitching for my sanity and this morning my mood was somewhat boosted by a visit to my local haberdashery who had received my order of an entire box of DMC mouliné spécial in 311. No more blotchy blues for me! Who knew how incredibly soothing it could be to look at a box of perfectly packed thread. I might have to order a second box and just keep this one to look at when I need the pick-me-up. #dmcthreads

My sister @bindweedmind painted this scene of James and me on Elephant Mountain, looking out over Taipei, as a gift some time back. I finally framed it properly, and now it’s in our hallway where I can be regularly reminded of a time I wasn’t anaemic and could climb mountains. The picture is based on a photo by @daisyandskyblog my 🌶💃— all in all a super memory from a fun day.

I’ve been working on and off fixing up my weaving from the workshop I did with @petramarcin. This has mostly involved weaving in the edges, but also some rectification of little mistakes along the way, such as this coral-coloured weft that jumped a few warps on one side. I also made a small mistake when warping the loom but I have successfully rewoven it by needle (I hope!). It would help if I could just choose one side of the weaving and leave the mistakes on the other side, but I’m still undecided, even though I plan to make it into a cushion eventually, because I love both sides equally! One side is more coral as the wefts are more prominent, the other is more blue-green as the warps show more strongly #weaving #rosielovesteal

Bottom two rows complete! A few mistakes/customisations along the way but I’m enjoying every minute of it. Annoyingly I’ve mislaid the thread I use for gridding, but I am determined to grid the rest of the canvas because every mistake I have made was in an area I hadn’t gridded. Anyway now I’m just about 50% along on the #longdogsamplers #quintoacuto #pointedfifth #rosielovesquintoacuto #xstitch

On Sunday we attended the Tushoo Kesuu ceremony for our friends’ daughter, which is a tradition in their home country of Kyrgyzstan to mark when a baby starts walking. The child’s legs are bound (loosely!) with a rope of natural wool, twisting dark and white wool to represent the balance of dark and light in life, or of good and evil. Then the community’s children and teens run a race and the first one to reach the toddler cuts the rope and then holds the little one’s hands as they walk forward together, as a sort of mentor towards independence. Then all other groups run races to the child (swipe to see me run very graciously 😅 in the “women’s race”), and gifts are given to all the children as well as the winners. We had a really fun day running and celebrating at the Park des Bastions (as well as a delicious brunch of galettes)! Here is the rope after it had been cut — the little girl’s grandmother brought it to Geneva from Kyrgyzstan. #tushookesuu

When you think “that’s ok, I’ve got a book or two on Asian textiles” and then you pull them off your shelf and realise it would take you a month to parse them all (Bonus: books on Andes and Berber textiles because North Africa and the Americas sometimes get rolled into “ethnographic” collections in weird, racist ways). #rosieshelfie

I can’t believe how long it’s been since this 2019 exhibition by my friend and amazing textile artist Pamela Hevia. She paints and stitches on antique fabrics and I really should own one of her works by now. But I have finally organised a suitable customised mat for the poster for her Taiwan exhibition “Through an intimate journey” so I could mount it properly — after travelling via my scooter and then shipping container, two extreme ends of the spectrum in terms of “intimate journeys”, it’s now hanging in a frame on our bedroom wall 🤎❤️‍🔥 #pamelahevia

My already unwieldy TV embroidery set-up has been crashed by @karl_and_karl who insists on sitting in my lap 🥲

I bought this sweater secondhand for Taiga last year, but it turns out our baby isn’t really a sweater-wearing baby (much to the horror of all french people who feel we don’t put enough clothes on him). He only wore it a handful of times before he outgrew it, now it’s a bit ragged to be passed on to another owner, but I didn’t want to say goodbye to this sweet sequinned pom-pom royal dinosaur so I turned him into a stuffie. An evening of sewing (whilst watching Our Flag Means Death) and we have this somewhat wobbly dino-pillow. Taiga has already tried to pull the pom-poms off…

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