Work
BLACK & WHITE &
RED ALL OVER
A series of tapestries by Micala Sidore
In the United States, one of the first jokes a child
learns begins, What’s black and white and red all over?
The answer is, of course, a newspaper. As a weaver of tapestries, I wanted
to express the pun in visual terms, or at least, to see what happened
when I limited my palette to black, white and red.
The resulting series of tapestries calls attention to words, puns, clichés.
In #17, for the masthead of the left-wing newspaper, WORKERS VANGUARD,
red sewing thread plied with the white and black yarns gives a visual
illusion of pink; pinko is a label with which the left is often
tagged in the United States
In other tapestries materials and techniques of weaving come into play.
In #14 and #19, cotton makes one shape which gets embedded in a field
of the same color in wool. White cotton is far whiter than white wool;
bleaching would destroy the wool fibers. [In addition, the color of white
wool varies enormously.] Further, light reflects from wool and cotton
differently, so shapes or words are both more and less visible than if
the shapes were embedded in a contrasting color. In other tapestries the
order of the words follows the sequence both of reading and of the weaving
itself. Thus, words are, as in #4,The Radical Right, #13, Up
and Down, even #26, the Hebrew Labor and Likud, woven in
the order in which they are read.
Many of the early pieces read like a line of type. Normally, tapestry
weavers weave from left to right, or from bottom to top. In #9, as in
some otheres, I take advantage of this order of weaving, weaving from
the word bottom to the word top. Future pieces will
incorporate large squares, rectangles, or perhaps organic shapes. Other
pieces will incorporate symbols rather than words—like the outlines
of hands and feet that follow the sequence of a cartwheel, or perhaps
the police outline of a body on the street, with the red as blood.
Over the years of the work on this series, variations on the original
question—as in What’s black and white and red
all over?—have sprung up. The answers now include
an embarrassed zebra, a bleeding skunk, or even a penguin with lipstick.
Those punch lines might form the basis of a tapestry I haven’t yet
woven.
As of November, 2005, I have completed thirty-two pieces, with several
more planned.
