While she was installing the yurt on an engineered frame in the
museum’s glass-walled conservatory, a fellow exhibitor asked if she
had a big team. Her answer was simply, “No.” Arnold creates large-
scale handmade felt objects with a few assistants at a time. She
developed the fabric for the 24-foot-tall
Palace Turt
on her own,
enlisting assistants only to help with the logistics of preparing and
transporting the large, cumbersome panels. The piece was inspired
by traditional yurts of Central Asia. When Genghis Khan reigned,
tribal members lived in the collapsible wood-framed felt yurts erect-
ed around a more elaborately decorated central palace yurt, which
was used for celebrations and performances consisting of song,
dance, poetry and storytelling. Responding to the domed shape of
the Cooper-Hewitt conservatory and keying her design specifically
to its measurements, Arnold went to work at her studio in Centralia,
W A, creating a contemporary interpretation of the ancient gather-
ing place. She nodded to tradition by incorporating talismanic sym-
bols and embedding a blessing text at a ceremonial entrance.
With the exception of blue entry panels, the
Palace Turt
was
constructed primarily from creamy white felt impregnated with
metallic fabrics, which gives the wool a subdued luster. Translucent
pieces of white silk were felted into the panels in traditional pat-
terns and as organically shaped windows that let in light. The ceil-
ing pieces were individually formed to reflect the shape of the
dome—every diamond of glass was matched by a diamond of felt,
while pieces of sheer silk mirrored the mullions. She covered the
conservatory’s built-in benches using white and gray felt with silky
tufts of curly wool that could be touched and toyed with.
Arnold produced some of her most innovative projects as she
worked on
Palace Turt
, including an installation for Cut, a W olf-
gang Puck steakhouse in Las Vegas, and curtains for an artists’ resi-
dency called the Lumber Room in Portland, OR. All three featured
predominantly white felt with an emphasis on texture. In one of her
few uses of industrially made felt, Arnold wove 10 rows of broad
white strips into a metal warp high on three of the four walls at Cut,
two of them 90 feet long. The regular surface in conjunction with
the simple basket weave evokes a clean, understated elegance.
For the Lumber Room, an undertaking started by arts patron
Sarah Meigs, Arnold went hack to organic handmade textures.
Meigs’s family history is in the lumber industry, so wood became
a decorative theme. Arnold made 24 i2-by-4-foot handmade felt
window coverings with patterns replicating the cellular structure
of wood. In each panel, Arnold included tiny Vi-inch to 3-inch cell-
like silk windows, which allow a considerable amount of light into
the space.
Despite the monochromatic treatment in these three works,
Arnold is no stranger to color. For the Los Angeles Opera’s 2006
production of
Gretulel,
she made costumes, designed by Constance
Hoffman, with fiery' reds, vibrant greens and shiny coppers. “That
was the most complex fabric I’ve ever made,” she explains. “Just
completely wild.” The felt used for the dragon’s tongue (a single
player’s costume) and the dragonettes (a three-person costume rep-
resenting the dragon’s tail) depicted licking red flames alternating
with copper fabric from the floor to the waist. The plaj'ers wore
red felt hats with elongated flame-shaped points. In contrast to the
scorching dragonettes, Queen Wealtheow’s costume was a shim-
mery ice-blue felt gown, with glacial textures and silk panels similar
to those used later in the
Palace Turt.
Arnold also played with color when Cirque du Soleil partnered
with Celebrity Cruises and asked her to decorate The Bar at the
Edge of the Earth. For this ship’s bar, she used wool felt with silk,
rayon and velvet to transform the art environment and performance
space into a haven of ebullient pinks, oranges and blues. The fabrics»
Arnold's ambitious projects reflect her intrepid imagi-
nation and determination to surmount obstacles artistic
and logistic while remaining focused on texture.
Left to right:
Process of installing
Janice Arnold’s
P a lace
T u r t
in the Cooper-
Hewitt’s conservator)'
for the 2009 '‘Fashioning
Felt” show: sketch of
the north door, the site
for the installation, the
artist adjusting the felt-
ed fabric.
042 american craft feb/mario
www.journal-plaza.net & www.freedowns.net
