Joan Diamond
It Helps Sometimes to Take the Long View, 2021
wool, silk noil, silk organza, acid dyes, single use plastic bags, embroidery floss 52"H x 48"W
Machine stitch Shibori using Katano (Shibori master) inspired patterning meant to evoke thoughts on man's artificial world interacting with a more natural world.
Joan Diamond
Enduring, 2020
Single use plastic bags, quilt fragments, organza, netting, thread 64"H x 44"W
A quilt is a tangible link to family, imbued with sensory and emotive triggers, often too precious to toss in spite of worn spots and holes. The aerial landscape evokes a sense of place. Concepts of love and home, whether an idea, a real place, or a longing are collective experiences lasting a lifetime and cross all gender and social class lines.. Collectively, globally, we live in partnership with our artificial man-made world. Single use plastic bags live well beyond their momentary utility. It takes 500 years for a plastic bag to degrade in a landfill. They contaminate marine eco-systems, soil, water, animals ingesting them. Blue, the color of expansiveness, neutrality and lack of aggression, was chosen as ironic commentary. Here the news is packaged in blue, as if innocent of its greater toxicity? "Enduring" asks: are we mindful enough of what we hold dear?
Joan Diamond
Tethered, 2019
Clay mono-print; archival pigment print; monofilament, floss, silk and wax linen threads 19"H x 37"W x 19"D
A web of barely visible threads straddles across all three images on the convex side. These threads are meant to be suggestive of the invisibilia (i.e., unseeable forces that shape our ideas, beliefs, and assumptions) which ties us to our place, our time, our loves. On the concave side this mixed media sculpture showcases clay mono prints. Until this print I had faithfully done as instructed: make three pulls of an image, decide the best, toss out the others (hence: the mono-print). This print caused a pause: why not celebrate the differences amongst them instead? Heavy stitching emphasizes these differences, yet does not abstract their relatedness.
Joan Diamond
Floating Boundaries, 2019
Silk, Procion dye, discharge, machine and hand stitch, embroidery floss 46"H x 40.5"W
Nearly finished with the printing of this piece, attempts to remove a well adhered stencil with my fingers failed. A pointy object, a moment of inattention, and just like that a hole was born dead center. Being silk it unraveled mercilessly. In spite of attempts to befriend the hole I was beset with irritation and disappointment. I decided I could cut it out and set about making mock-ups on paper how the piece would look with a seam in it, then with more seams, until finally, the seams became the story. Broken imagery anchored thru stitch is a far cry from elements of weightlessness, the original intention. the cup shaped stitching refers to a sense of fractured containment, like the images. I struggled about the border, feeling that conforming to a conventional rectangle wasn't right. In the spirit of the piece I kept the edges raw, unraveling some (with great intentional pleasure!) even further.
Joan Diamond
Possibilities, 2017
Commercial fabrics, silk organza, netting, silk and cotton thread 48"W x 60"H
This piece was inspired by a trip to Morocco, and my interpretation with their concept of "bare requirements" necessary to build community. The necessary five are community: fountain, oven, bath, madressa (school), and mosque. Using Bojagi renders finished seams on both back and front. These seams, with the shadows that they cast, blend into a kind of network. When the piece sways in a breeze the quivering roadmap pattern felt appropriate to convey a sense of shifting possibilities when visiting a city for the first time.
Joan Diamond
Portal, 2019
Cotton, Procion dyes, cotton and silk thread 41"H x 46"W
This started as a very large cotton square, but the composition of my surface design that evolved was undesirable. I found myself with a static T shaped design, not unlike the shape of a kimono. Free wheeling black swirly lines failed to break up the composition and realizing the piece needed a dramatic over-haul, I put it away. By the time I looked at it again I had coincidently been looking at a lot of pre-Renaissance paintings, and was admiring how important all those triangle sight lines were to those compositions-portals to cohesiveness and perspective. Click! I realized I could be brave and not be bound by the original size or shape that this piece was as it had been dyed, and without further ado, re-addressed it.
Joan Diamond
Covid 2, 2020
Cotton flannel, wool, commercial fabrics, yarn, thread 8 1/4"H x 12"
Joan Diamond
Covid 3, 2020
Cotton flannel, commercial fabrics, yarn, thread 8 3'4" H x 12"W
Joan Diamond
Dancing, 2018
Artist-made embossed paper; clay mono-print; monofilament, silk, and embroidery threads 15"H x 20"W
I had begun stitching experimentally onto things found around studio and housem my embossed prints included. Immediately I loved the way thread, white embossed image, and clay print seemed to marry. Stitching with monofilament, silk, and cotton threads adds dimension, meaning and reflection of light to the mat surfaces of clay and paper. Although this piece appears as if playful, ironically, it is a contemplation on cancerous cells multiplying madly in a beloved friend's body.
