Donna Clement: India Flint and Tim Harding

India Flint was one of the gems of the SDA conference.

She had an exhibit called The Windfall Maps at the Katherine E. Nash Gallery in Minneapolis. She is a South Australian artist and author of Eco Colour: Botanical Dyes for Beautiful Color, who works with cloth, felt, paper and stitch to make pieced textiles in which the color is printed directly onto cloth from botanical materials. Each object is a document of place; a kind of landscape drawing or textural map formed through the application of color derived from the land.

She was the featured speaker with a talk called "Ecologically Sustainable Color: Bio-regional Dyes for Cloth". The subtitle could have been 'a peek into the caldron of a whirled-wandering alchemist.' Hilarious and enlightening on plant based dyeing and eco-management.

And she taught a five day class called "Enfoldments–a Traveler’s Notebook". The course description read: In this workshop participants explore ways of recording and describing their responses to place and country as a means of making sense of wherever they are in the world/whirled. Through talking, walking, writing, felting, dyeing, and stitching, they create a small and precious book. The pages are enriched with stitched and drawn marks, layering, collage, and found objects. Participants fold and stitch paper and cloth to make a souvenir in the truest sense of that word (in French: memory). Although working on a small scale, the dye, stitch, and felt techniques may later be applied to larger works.

Why didn't I take it??? Another from our group did and continues to rave about the class and how the philosophy behind it has permanently changed her. (As this was my first SDA conference I wanted to stay low key and only attend the conference part, leaving the pre- and post- classes for another time.)

I only got three shots of her work in the Nash Gallery but gently encourage you to check out her web site here about her philosophy and work methods.

Tim Harding is an internationally recognized, Minnesota-based artist who is self taught in fibre techniques. His exhibition at the Nash entitled Apparitions is based upon the theme of body and soul, continuing his exploration of the deconstructive process of his materials to images of the figure.

This set, called Exposed Figure Series, are solar UV burnouts using body tracings of his partner who has undergone a series of surgeries for skin cancer. The beauty and fragility of the silk is his metaphor for those same attributes of the human form.

The Shroud Series are stapled squares of polyester fabrics with digital printing that, up close are the pixelated dots of stapled squares of fabric, but from a distance form an image.

This series is a collection of self portraits, traced outlines of his body done with growing recognition of his own mortality, the Shroud of Turin, and the 9/11 tragedy in New York.