Here’s Jo with the fantasy fibre world of her building Our last mystery box, “The Illumination Mystery Box,” was a tour de force. More participants joined than ever before. Voters came out in droves (certainly by comparison to previous mystery boxes), lending us a helping hand in crowning a winner. Tears aplenty were shed by exhausted makers who’d managed to submit their competition entries just in the nick of time. And the illuminative energy of the challenge was palpable: even from a phone screen.
From the sidelines, The Illumination Mystery Box Challenge felt like a triumph in community building. It felt like we managed to cultivate a supportive space for creative people to push themselves, to tackle creative risks, and to bask in the what ifs of a friendly IG “neighbourhood” art competition.
Early on in the challenge, Jo McAlpine‘s (aka “The Wool Witch of Yarnia”) emerged as a fan favourite for her mesmerizing Floating Isles of Yarnia installation. To say that Jo’s work struck a chord with viewers feels an understatement. She gripped us in that nostalgic place of wonderment and held us there for months. So, let’s spend some time exploring The Floating Isles of Yarnia along with the talented fiber artist who built them.
Before unveiling Jo’s winning entry, let me acquaint you with the contents of the Illumination Mystery Box
Each question-mark clad mystery box left our warehouse with the same ingredients.
1) A handcrafted grow-light frame; our hybridized version of a plant hanger and pendant light powder coated in any colour of choice.
2) An easy-glide yarn shuttle
3) A wall bracket arm (for attaching the pendant light, if necessary)
4) A packet of seeds (either tomato, pepper, basil, or spinach)
5) A set of 4 metal chains and s hooks (for attaching both halves of the pendant light frame, if necessary)
6) A dorky letter (very important to set the tone)
7) An exploratory sensory box, filled with a range of sample fibers to feel out in person
8) Four rolls of our Recycled Hollow Braided Cotton
I detail this list of inclusions simply to give you a sense of what Illumination Mystery Box participants were working with. They had no rules, no patterns, and no guidelines outside of a deadline and a single-word theme: illumination. For added Mystery Box context and further reading, I’ve written a blog post about Why We Mystery
Here’s what Jo turned those ingredients into
Along the way, Jo (like many fellow “mystery boxers” shared glimpses of her creative process with us all in her Instagram feed). These beautiful images are Jo’s and I hope you’ll visit her online spaces to see her work in action!
First, we saw her warp one half of her frame. By the point of sharing this initial image, Jo had actually already completed 80% of her project. This is actually quite a telling little factoid! And, if you keep reading, you’ll be given some clues as to why that might have been 😉
In a subsequent post, we were treated to a sketch. Over the course of The Illumination Mystery Box’s proceedings, much debate was had over whether or not to sketch the piece. Artists fall into two disparate camps on this, we discovered–and there’s a real 50/50 split. About 50% of us sketch our project fully before embarking on it. And about 50% love to wing it, remaining open to different creative possibilities along the way. Jo, as she told it, fell somewhere between both of those poles:
“While not usually a sketcher, I knew immediately that with the lampshade frames I wanted to make floating islands. I also knew that I wanted to stick to my usual asymmetrical and exposed warp vibez and would need to find a way to literally balance the lampshade so my waterfalls would not pull the whole thing down–so then I started sketching out ideas and this is the last one before I started.
While EXTREMELY helpful for envisioning the piece in its entirety–I **absentmindedly sketched** little houses and trees–and I loved them. [They were] something I could easily draw but was not sure I could do in real life.
The project had already creeped out of scope and I had to decide whether to follow the little floating village in my mind or not.”
What’s so interesting here is that the “absent-minded” sketch encouraged Jo’s use of different techniques and materials. There’s something undeniably interesting about the sorts of pushes and pulls that can result from moments of absent-mindedness. But there’s also something crucial about brining pencil to paper as a way of temporarily suspending the constraints of fiber as a medium.
The rock faces, trees, and little homes that Jordan intuitively sketched in her Yarnia blueprints motivated her to work in plaster, wire, and paint. Totally new-to-her and totally exploratory media! When I met Jo in person (YES! that happened!) months after the Illumination Mystery Box had come to an end, I asked her if she could pinpoint one of the ways that this art challenge altered her approach to making. Jo responded that it was with Yarnia that she was able to shed unspoken pressure to remain loyal to fiber as a monolithic medium. It’s not that there are ever rules preventing multi media projects per se, and yet I can also relate to an almost puritanical sensibility: a sense of pride that EVERYTHING/ANYTHING can be made with fiber. That challenge, however, should never impede us from opening up to different materials and processes. Sometimes, operating within niche creative spaces (“niching down”) as a way to build community–can actually sometimes deter imagination. It can be a blessing and curse.
Jo introduced another material into Yarnia in its later stages of creation. To represent a cascading waterfall, she brought carefully staged clay beads into the mix. They not only look sensational when catching the light, but they also bring sound into the installation. It’s not that fiber is soundless. It swishes and sashays in a sumptuous whisper. But clinking clay against clay is decidedly more sonorous.
In revisiting The Floating Isles of Yarnia for this blog post, I’m struck by the relationship between Jo’s initial sketch (that which pushed her to sculpt hard plaster surfaces for miniature elements that wouldn’t have made sense made with fiber), and the finishing touches that pulled Yarnia together. These were whimsical fibrous textures that, reciprocally, would have made very little sense illustrated. In the same way that Jo sculpted tiny, charismatic worlds that were both disparate and connected, she also tackled the creative process with feet (and fingers) planted in differently mediated worlds. She built her worlds through bricolage wherein the assemblage of diverse media was in fact the message.
I love this reinforcement of concept in approach.
A Mystery Box FIRST was getting to meet its winner in person
We had the good fortune of meeting Jo (and her partner, Nathanael), who’d travelled from their home in BC’s Okanaagan to Vancouver Island for an annual anniversary getaway. Having spent an afternoon with Jo, hearing a little about her life, and watching the way that she approached frame-making I learned quite a lot. We of course took some moments for goofy faces photographs.
Always a creative person, Jo found macrame and weaving (or, perhaps they found her) as creative outlets in 2018. I learned that Jo was a a former dancer. She insists that she practiced dance in its contemporary, experimental, interpretive manifestations: the sort of dance that made ugly shapes along with beautiful silhouettes, she describes. But brain injury forced Jo to abandon dancing altogether, and she needed to find creative solace in another form of self-expression. Fiber art became that space of solace for her. Jo talks of embodiment quite frequently, both as a reality but also as an approach to creativity. When she can’t do one thing, she learns another skill. It’s this creative nomadism that seems to provide momentum.
When I asked Jo about the truth of her experience creating The Floating Isles of Yarnia, she admitted that she felt she had no clue what she was doing. It was her first mystery box and she approached it with no expectation of outcome whatsoever. At this point, her partner Nathanaelchimed in to say “she felt the idea of Yarnia was dumb; she doubted her creation every step of the way, but I kept seeing it unfold and it was fantastic at every juncture.” Jo conceded that she did in fact feel it was “dumb” and was nervous that Yarnia would be poorly received.
I wondered if, after the sense of uncertainty while building Yarnia was finally relieved, if Jo had an inkling that she might win the competition. She admitted that she didn’t dream of winning, but knew she had something special when there was an immediate outpouring of support from fellow fibre artists and viewers seeing Yarnia for the first time. Messages started turning up in her inbox that were more than simply congratulating her on her art. They were more unusual messages. They were the sort of messages where people spoke to a sense of personal connectedness with the piece:
“This reminds me of…..”;
“I read this book once….”;
“I had this dream and….”;
“When I was a little kid….”;
“There’s this fantasy place….”
“My children loved it because…”
“This made me feel so much nostalgia for….”
They were these sorts of messages. Conjurings and spellbindings that only a “Wool Witch” could have manifested.
As minted Illumination Mystery Box Winner, Jo’s prize was to concoct a custom frame of her choosing.
Jo interpretively danced her custom frame into existence. This is true. It happened, and you’ll just have to take my word for it! When asked for dimensions, Jo gesticulated playfully. When interrogated about functionality, Jo was more interested in the feeling of the frame. She wanted a blob with dimension: with peaks and valleys. She was dreaming of a piece that could sit unflat on a desktop, but also be mounted to come away from a wall. The goal of the frame, for Jo, was to be able to keep building Yarnia’s story–to keep building a dreamscape world of floating isles.
I can think of a lot of reasons why Jo won the Illumination Mystery Box Challenge–as I’m sure you can too. What sticks with me, though, like really sticks is that this is a whole world and not simply a piece. It’s a world whose story is open-ended because it’s perpetually in creation. Jo managed to accomplish this because she lives in that openness to possibility. And art that offers a meditation on the process of its own creation is art that we just don’t forget.
You can find Jo McAlpine’s Fibre Art at Little Valley Weave Co
And you can visit Yarnia @littlevalleyweaveco
Thank you so much for reading
