Jagna Birecka is a Polish woman living in Belgium with a Dutch husband. After becoming disillusioned with her day job as an architect, she became increasingly involved in her photography and other activities, until they became her full-time occupation.
Her images of the intimate parts of plants are striking, a little reminiscent of the photography of Karl Blossfeldt. They are at the same time delicate and bold, beautifully layered and lit.
euphorbia
When I asked Jagna a few questions about her experiences with art, especially as a child, this was her response.
I have always loved to keep my hands occupied and I don’t remember how it is not to create anything. What I do remember though are the walls of the apartment where I lived with my parents. They were huge and could hold many, many drawings – but I also remember my parents not being very happy with what I thought were beautifully decorated walls.
haworthia
I also remember yarn. My grandma was great at crocheting and knitting; she taught me how and I made a crocheted skirt for my sister’s doll at the age of 7. My other grandma was a painter. She was very talented, I especially like the watercolours she painted when she was young.
hippeastrum
I asked my grandma once to paint a copy of my favourite painting by Modigliani. She was not really convinced since he was by far not her favourite painter – but eventually I did get the painting for my 18th birthday. I also got something even better: my grandma admitted that she fell in love with Modigliani’s art. Now every time I look at the painting I remember what my grandma said: ‘all it takes to get to know new exciting things is to keep your mind open – or let the others open it for you’.
white hoya flowers
Jagna has certainly taken this advice to heart, and her work is constantly evolving.
I don’t look at what I have already done, I always look for new things that I haven’t done yet. This is what keeps me going and gives me the motivation for my work – I am always trying new approaches, new media and new techniques.
Photography, design and art have always been important parts of my life and I always found the time for them. Because of my various activities my creative space is not limited only to my studio. It starts in my head and ends wherever I find myself working at the moment.
epiphyllum
Jagna admits to being crazy about plants, but her current work involves photography in a quite different way. She works on a small scale with polymer clay, layering and slicing it to make modernist-inspired jewellery pieces, and then photographs and prints them on large formats (around 60x90cm and more), to create strongly abstract images.
You can find more of her plant photography in her Etsy shop here, and you can find her polymer clay pieces, as well as the large format photography on her website here.
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I would like to thank Jagna for sharing her images and words.
I first came across Third Half Studios’ All Meat on Spoonflower a year or so back, and laughed and laughed. On further investigation, I found the wonderful Putting a Point on It, with the description “Baroque ornament rendered in a different sized dots. I do not understand how Seurat did it since I only used three colors and nearly went blind.” That made me sit up and tilt my head in a weird kind of quizzical fashion. I didn’t quite understand what conceptual planet they were living on, but have been keeping an eye on them ever since.
reap what you sew
Influenced by a huge variety of stuff, including the vast reaches of art history, mid-century and 70s design, comics, folklore and tattoo culture, their designs are a pot pourri of colour and shapes, whimsy and darkness. It seems just about anything is fodder for their imaginations. A sharp eye (or two) and a keen wit hold it all together. Downspout (Earth) is a particular favourite for its apparently straight 70s design with suggestion of an intestinal tract.
Third Half Studios is based in Atlanta, Georgia, and is the brainchild of Lori Kishlar and Sarah Marks. Despite an affinity for zombie squirrels and two-headed cows, in some ways Lori and Sarah are chalk and cheese – perhaps that is why they work together so well. They were both very excited when I approached them for an interview. Here are there stories.
all meat {in blue}
Welcome Sarah and Lori! Could you briefly outline how your business came about?
Sarah: We started late in 2009 – Lori was in my Craft Group – Atlanta Church of Craft and she was complaining that she couldn’t find any fabrics with creepy, subversive, unusual themes. So I piped up that it couldn’t be THAT hard to make your own fabric, at which point she pretty much dared me to do it. So I did it through Spoonflower. She took one look at it and said, “Maybe we should go into business together.”
Did either of you have another career before this? Sarah: My first job at fourteen was painting names and teddy bears and things on ruffled parasols at this booth at the shopping mall. It was right next to the men’s bathroom. I started pedalling homemade earrings and art to local shops in a place called little five points when I was sixteen. I had a few other shopping mall type art jobs and then I ended up being a lead sculptor at this tiny studio. We were commissioned to do 128 cast stone planters for the West Wing garden at the Smithsonian. I designed, sculpted and cast them. I have no idea if they are still there, but they are made out of concrete – so they are definitely somewhere.
comic books
What are your childhood experiences and memories of craft and/or design? Lori: There weren’t a lot of kids in my neighbourhood so I became a master of latch hook. There was a bargain clearance store about a mile away and my sister and I would walk up there and steal candy and buy latch hook kits. Once I found 40 bucks at the store. We turned it in and no one claimed it so 2 weeks later I got it and had my dad take me straight to the craft store. Sarah: When I was six years old I inexplicably designed the entire cast of settlers of Roanoke including the dead infant Virginia Dare out of construction paper. In elementary school I was constantly getting dragged in front of counsellors wanting to discuss my “art.” I was a creepy little girl.
Are there any creative people in your family background? Especially any that influenced you? Lori: When my mom was home with us as tiny kids she was a wonderful needle pointer. She made gorgeous pillows and wall hangings. She also was known to make an afghan or two. My sister did tile work for a long time, mosaics, but I don’t think either of these influenced me. I was just always doing something like drawing. Sarah: My paternal grandmother was a painter – oils mostly. I didn’t know her very well when she came to live with us and she was already knee deep in Alzheimer’s. I was her primary caretaker from the ages of 15 to 21 and even though we didn’t really have a traditional grandparent/child relationship, I used to draw her often. So I have a kind of documentation of her decline, which was terrifying and awful and beautiful in a weird way. I have her easel in my living room and I work from it frequently.
bad woods
What is your worst experience as a crafter/designer, and how did you overcome it? Sarah: I was living on the street for a couple of months and that is the only time in my life that I didn’t create anything. Oddly enough a sculptor plucked me up off the street and gave me a place to stay and a job working in his studio, but it wasn’t by my hand that I solved it.
What has been the hardest single obstacle to your life in design/craft? Sarah: Sticking with only a few mediums so I can get better at them. Lori: Time. I work full-time as does Sarah so finding the time to get all of my ideas out is hard. I get bogged down making the items we need a lot of and I don’t find or make time for new stuff. So it gets a little sweat shop-ish before a big festival.
What has been the icing on the cake for you as a designer/craftsperson? Sarah: Partnering up with Lori. She really keeps me in check otherwise artistically I would be going off like a firehose. Lori: When people keep coming back to buy more. And the fact that people really like our stuff.
downspout {earth}
Who do you admire? Sarah: I have so many influences I am not sure I can pick just a few. My parents had this coffee table book called “10,000 years of Art” and I was obsessed with that book from the time I was so young that I had to turn the pages with two hands. I love ancient art and classical and modern and urban, even stuff I don’t like I sort of do in the sense that even though I don’t like it – I am glad it exists. Lori: I admire people who get out there and just do it. You need to do things you want and not just wish you did it.
What is the favourite thing about the place you live in? Lori: I like the green spaces and the temperature of Atlanta. We never get too arctic cold in the winter. In my house- I like my dogs and bed. One of my dogs Turkey comes up each morning and wallows for what we call “Turkey time”. She snorts and grunts and just rolls around for belly scratches. Sarah: We have this remarkable multicultural vibe here (Northern suburb of Atlanta) and we have the best food in 3 square miles than the entire city of Atlanta. I can get Cuban, Chinese, Korean, Mexican, Indian and Italian all delivered to the house. The farmers market is full of fruit I have never seen and packed foods I wouldn’t know what to do with. You can get Frozen Edumame, Lobster tails, Russian Perogi and alligator meat all from the same aisle. There is something really exquisite about that to me.
key lime ornament
Could you describe your creative space in a couple of sentences? Lori: I want to redo my crafting space because it is pretty cluttered. I sit at a desk facing the TV. A lot of the time the TV is just for background. I have WAY too much junk crammed in the room and one day I can expand into the tiny house I rent out back! Sarah: I have citrus green walls, pink flamingos in house plants, piles and piles of craft supplies and half finished projects leaning up against the walls. My electronics soldering station is next to my sewing station.
And finally, what is the best piece of advice you’ve ever been given? Sarah: Don’t fight your own vision, just let it happen and even if it doesn’t make sense to you when you are doing it, it might when you step back. Lori: Don’t say should. Say I will try it or I will do it. What’s the worst that can happen?
The Children by Charlotte Wood is an intriguing story of a family, as normal as most. ‘As normal as most’ includes the usual collection of an elderly mother coming to grips with prospect of a life alone, the private hell of a war correspondent who has seen too much, the self-imposed estrangement of a disenchanted brother, and the struggle of a sibling trying to hold together the whole ungainly mess.
The story opens with the father fixing the roof of the family home, staring at the sky and backyard, considering ideas of memory and the workings of the human brain, and dreaming of things yet to discover in decades-familiar places. When he ungracefully slips to a tragic encounter with the concrete below, the remaining family is forced to reassemble, to confront each other and their inadequacies through and around the backdrop of the brand new intensive care unit of their local hospital. The plot is further complicated by a hospital wardsman whose obsession with a dark secret, unremembered by its protagonist, intensifies to breaking point.
Wood’s writing style throughout is beautifully inclusive of little visual details, and compelling in its study of humanity. However, I did find the opening scenes awkward and unpolished – rather too filled with adjectives for my liking.
Nevertheless, I must say that overall I enjoyed this book. Despite the unwieldy first chapter, and a plot that owes a bit to Hollywood, this story succeeds because the relationships are so beautifully and subtly explored. Relationships are rendered as vivid, living things, and when forced, there are rediscoveries and realisations between siblings and parents who, despite separations, are still bound together in indescribable and indestructible ways.
Strange creatures inhabit Danielle O’Malley’s head. They are wild and messy, sociable, scary yet gentle. And above all else, they love music.
Principally an illustrator and printmaker, Danielle’s work straddles a variety of mediums and scales; she is also a sculptor, puppet maker, painter, and maker of fabulous dioramas. It is these dioramas that first grabbed my attention when I spotted them on Etsy – detailed and elaborate, I felt like I was spying through a looking glass into another secret world.
Leave Me On the Moon {mandolin playin' angels floatin' in the clouds.}
Danielle’s inventiveness is beguiling; her stories of these odd folk sit somewhere between children’s tales, folklore, and the surreal underbelly of nightmares. Her inventiveness is not restricted to the ideas; she is also a gifted maker, using a mix of old and new materials to create her creatures and their world. Paper, sticks, cardboard, old barbecues, and dental floss – anything that fits. And it is all handled so very beautifully – intricate papercuts frame whimsical scenes of mandolin-playing angels, a carpet of sticks are elaborately bound together to form a path.
They are so, so good!
I’ll let Danielle tell her own story.
Are you home? Are we there? {Homeless houses roaming wild and lost, over gingerbread houses and little elves.}
My favorite artists are Margaret Kilgallen and Mark Ryden. They have both created these strange worlds with their artwork that I feel happy and comfortable in.
I’ve been making art since I was very young, and I’ve been trying to sell it here and there for the past 6 years or so. I haven’t ever thought about having some other career, and all other odd jobs I have ever had just seem to support my art. While I was in college, I worked at a middle school as an art teacher’s assistant for three years. It was probably the most important, meaningful job I’ve ever had.
Fairy Godmother {the fairy godmother of an invisible forgotten forest..}
For several years when I was little, I would take art classes that were held in the back of a shop. The woman who ran them was the mother of one of my classmates, and she sold her own artwork in the shop. I would go there once a week and she would always have new activities for us to do. It was such an important part of my childhood – without those art classes, I don’t think I’d have my creativity.
Several of my aunts are artists. One of my aunts particularly inspires me. She seems to always be travelling and has worked on numerous different projects. Her life has helped me to understand that as an artist your life becomes a series of different projects in different places. My dad and grandfather were pretty creative as well, though they never did anything with it. I remember my grandfather drawing cartoons, and my dad has always given me handmade birthday cards.
Witch Train {comin' round the mountain, on a track of found sticks.}
The worst part of being a craft/designer is uncertainty, of not knowing what your next project is, or how you will be able to make money – just feeling like you don’t have any opportunities in sight, which is something I don’t think I will ever overcome. But maybe you just have to invent your own projects, instead of looking for opportunities.
There are also the periods of inactivity, where I don’t even want to think about creating anything. I usually feel pretty lost during those times, but I think it’s just a part of the process. At that point, you have to let yourself become inactive, and try to search for new inspiration.
Hoedown {10 foot tall puppets, playing the banjo and washboard in an appalachian mountain town. made from paper, old barbeques, books, cardboard boxes, sticks and old tire treads.}
Tin Can Telephone {Romantic serenades through a rusty, homemade, tin can telephone. ink drawing, from postcard edition: lands of danlilly)
There is no greater feeling than working non-stop on a project, and being really happy with the end results – that feeling of accomplishment. I also love being able to create this world I feel I can hide in, and I feel comfortable in. It’s an escape from certain realities.
I recently read Jenny Holzer’s piece, “Truisms”. It changed the way I thought about a lot of things, and how I deal with my art practice. There were two quotes that I particularly liked.
“At times, inactivity is preferable to mindless functioning.”
This is the second offering from Lori Howarth – her first offering was a photographic one here. Lori’s ancestry is partly of North American Indian, hence this soup recipe. Enjoy.
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Butternut Pumpkin Soup(Native American Style)
Ingredients:
2 tablespoons butter
1 tablespoon vegetable oil
3 cups of butternut pumpkin, peeled, seeded and cut into
1-inch cubes
1 small white onion peeled & chopped
3 cups vegetable stock
1 medium sized potato peeled & chopped
Spice sachet consisting of: bay leaf, 1 clove, 1 small cinnamon stick – tie up in a piece of cheesecloth
2 tablespoons maple syrup
Salt & pepper to taste
Method:
In a large saucepan melt butter and oil over a med-low heat. Add pumpkin, onion, potato, maple syrup, salt & pepper, spice sachet and sauté on low-heat until tender (40 mins). Add stock. Simmer gently for 40 minutes. Remove spice sachet. Check seasoning and sweetness of maple syrup and adjust as needed. Cool. Add to blender and blitz until smooth.
Alternatives:
Serve heated with cream. Do not boil as it may separate.
Serve with coconut milk, a shredded kaffir lime leaf, chilli & fresh coriander for a Thai influence.
You can also make this with pink sweet potato (kumara).
Lori would like to thank the Mitsitam Café Cookbook for the inspiration for this recipe. Photography by Lori Howarth.
Oh my! I’m a bit slow on introducing my lovely sponsors for May – it’s been pretty crazy in the tractor-shed of late. But here I am, and here they are!
So happy to share Middlemost with you again. I know I introduced her to you last month, but she’s just told me her shop is now absolutely jam-packed with new stuff! I bought a couple of quirky and sweet brooches off her recently, and I love them. She’s stocking a whole range of new accessories – collars, hairpins, cufflinks, and earrings. Of course she is still making dresses and skirts from beautiful vintage fabrics – here’s some gorgeousness from a recent photoshoot. You can find the Middlemost shop here.
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My other lovely sponsor is the wonderful Sarah Louise Matthews, and she is one talented person. Have you seen her work yet? I wrote about her back here, and I was so very impressed with her amazing skills – the precision of these cuts is wonderful (and her sketchbooks are definitely worth a look-see!). Sarah does a wide range of papercuts, including layered pieces suitable for box-framing, great 3D Christmas and special occasion decorations, as well as seriously good greeting cards. I’m still imagining the fabulous shadows this Origami Bird cut would cast if you framed it between two sheets of perspex and shined a light through! This paper is THE perfect gift for a first wedding anniversary, or any time, really! You can find her shop here.
I do really love the work of both of these people, I would not support something I don’t like. I would like to thank both Sarah and Janine for generously supporting me and this blog, and I would like you to support these people too.
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Sponsor spots are worth a couple of cups of coffee. If you would like to support this blog through a Sponsor spot too, that would be fabulous! You can check out the details here.
I want to share with you the things I am passionate about - contemporary craft, surface design, books, images, and food - and the people behind them. It is a collection of the stories and ideas I surround myself with.
Julie x {more here}
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All images featured here are copyright, and shown with permission from the owners of those images/artworks, unless the images are my own. If I forget something, or make an error in attribution, please feel free to contact me with the full details & I will do my best to rectify it.
