time intensive trash.

St. John and detail of St John.

Who am I to whine about how long my sampler took...looking at the text heavy detailed oriented work of fiber artists Karen Reimer exhausts me to the max. Her work is extremely detail oriented which in turn means extremely time intensive. And yes these are embroideries if you cannot quite tell.

The American Woman's Home

I love how she re-creates the object and detritus of everyday to create her work, a book page, scrap of paper, and wrapper from a snack. Creating throwaway mass produced objects in the painstakingly slow manual labor of embroidery.

Solution to Last Week's Puzzle

She describes her current work as:

My recent work examines the relationships between beauty, value and meaning by exploiting the tensions between copy and original, object and process and fine art and domestic craft. It demonstrates the out-of-control nature of language and the provisional quality of meaning.

The embroideries are laboriously produced copies of pieces of text taken from sources ranging from great books to candy wrappers. Generally speaking, copies are of less value than originals. However, when I copy by embroidering, the value of the copy is increased because of the elements of labor, handicraft and singularity - traditional criteria of value. The copy is now an "original."

Using a different but equally familiar criteria, the value of the object as a copy is decreased by the technique of embroidery. Not only is it inefficient in terms of time and labor, it also produces a bad copy; it makes the original partially or completely illegible.

Recipient's Copy

Her work is fascinating as a use of medium and subject matter. See more here.