I used to really hate spiders. I understand their role in the world, but I don't want to hang around a spider or have one live in my house. I was the kind of person who would say to someone "you have to move" if they told me a spider was in their shower.
The writing on the bottom says "Mygale de leblond." I looked it up and found the Goliath birdeater. The Goliath birdeater is a type of tarantula and is the largest spider by mass in the world. The name is said to have come from the work of Maria Sibylla Merian. She depicted the creature eating a hummingbird in Plate 18. Goliath birdeaters don't actually eat birds; they can, but they don't. However, the name stuck and here we are. Once I saw the sticker, I knew it would be included in my piece. I just had to figure out how to do it.
I credit Louise Bourgeois with changing my mind about spiders. Bourgeois is one of my favorite artists and is known for her use of spiders within her work. I wrote about her a few times during last year's project. She's the reason I devoted an entire week to spiders. Bourgeois associated the spider with her mother, who was not only fiercely protective of her family (like a spider), but was also a weaver by trade. It's through Bourgeois that I began to appreciate the spider. Spider webs are beautiful and there are stitches named after them.
Another artist, Maria Sibylla Merian ended up being the inspiration behind this piece, Goliath, and also liked spiders. And worms and ants and all sorts of other insects. I wrote about Merian during my at-home art retreat earlier in August. Another artist I talk about during tours at the museum, she was an artist and scientist and was one of the first people to draw insect subjects from life. I'm still reading Kim Todd's biography of the artist, Chrysalis. Merian spent two years in Surinam (in the early 1700s) drawing the flora and fauna of the country. Plate 18 from her book Dissertation in Insect Generations and Metamorphosis in Surinam, featured the spider that I have come to admire and is featured in Goliath.
Back in early, a tree fell in my friend Kelly's yard. Thankfully, it didn't hit the house or cause any damage. She posted a photo of the tree and it made me think of spiders.
Something about the thinner branches and the way the tree fell made me think of spiders coming out of the forest or a wandering the woods and encountering a enchanted spider web or a cave protected by a spider. I decided I wanted to try to translate this into an embroidery piece. I wasn't exactly sure what I was going to make, but I wanted to make something. I also really love embroidering trees, so I figured I come with something pretty great. I let the idea simmer in the back of my mind while I worked on other things.
Flash forward to June and my birthday. For my birthday, my aunt and uncle decided to send me a series of gifts that were themed. The theme was the art of John Derian. Derian is a decoupage artist, whose work includes ephemera and has a sort of "Victorian lady would send you a postcard of a spider or beetles" vibe about it. I didn't really know a lot about him before my birthday, but remembered Target sold a line of his home furnishings at one point. My birthday presents included a box of Louis Sherry chocolates in a tin designed by Derian, a tote bag, the John Derian Sticker Book, and a fever dream stuffed cat that my uncle bought on Ebay (he likes to buy weird shit on Ebay). The tote bag also features the cat.
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| Keely likes to sit next to the fever dream cat and stare at me. He's such a weirdo. |
The sticker book includes 700 stickers as well as beautifully detailed non-sticker pages that would be great for art journaling. As I was flipping through the book, I found my spider and Goliath started to take shape.
One of the many things I learned about Goliath birdeaters is that they don't weave traditional spider webs. They're ground dwellers, so they weave webbing on the ground to capture their prey. This factored heavily into my design and reinforced the cave-like feeling I wanted to bring into the piece based on the picture of Kelly's yard. I also knew that I wanted to do this piece on paper. I love embroidering on paper. It's challenging since paper isn't as flexible as fabric, but the results are always worth the hassle.
Most art paper is white or slightly off-white, so I got the idea to coffee stain the paper. You can read more about that process here. I will definitely do more coffee staining for paper and have used some of the pieces in art journal pages. I used a piece of mixed media paper that was stained with both types of coffee I used (instant and a regular medium roast). The stained paper is the perfect background for this piece. I'm really glad I decided to add that element.
I sketched a few ideas when I originally decided to make this piece and the placement of the pieces of ribbon as tree branches are similar to some of my sketches. I also traced the spider sticker so I could move it around the piece without ruining the actual sticker. The ribbon tree branches were fun to make and I opted to use DMC Etoile threads for all of the thread. The glitter of the thread adds another nice element and texture to the piece. Etoile thread makes everything a little more special. It can be a pain to use (not as bad as metallic thread), but the end result is always worth it. It sparkles based on how light hits it.
The web was my favorite part and the thing I had the most fun making. At first I wasn't sure how to make the web once I found out that Goliath birdeaters use webs differently than most spiders. I was trying to fall asleep one night when I came up with the idea of using a circle of thread and then splitting the circle in a random pattern. There are fifteen circles of thread (6 strands) and each circle was split with a length of thread (3 strands) to create the web. I used a combination of Etoile Blanc and C415 (a grayish white). I wasn't sure if this was going to work, but it did. It's so cool looking. It was interesting how the base thread moved and shifted as I brought the anchor thread through. The shapes are all organic; there's no way to plan any of these stitches.
The only thing left to do was to place the sticker. I've been calling the Goliath birdeater sticker Kevin since I started working on this piece. I've always wanted to have a pet named Kevin. I think it would be funny to tell people stories about Kevin and them to not know if Kevin was a person or pet. Anyway, I thought Kevin was a fitting name for my spider.
I trimmed some of the paper from the sticker so there would be less beige. I also used a little Yes paste (a glue for art journaling and scrapbooking) to hold down Kevin's legs. And then I placed Kevin on his web.
Look at how glorious Kevin looks!
I decided to call the piece Goliath rather than Spider Tree as I was calling it earlier in the process. I wanted to give a nod to Maria Sibylla Merian in the piece since it's name comes from her work. I plan to frame the piece, so I'll share an updated photo once that's been done.
This is one of the things I missed last year while I focused on my 365 project. It was so hard to work on anything else and I missed getting a random idea and being able to really go with it. I did go with a lot of my ideas in small scale for the 365 project, but this piece wouldn't have happened last year for lots of reasons. I'm a better artist today than I was a year ago and I have the ability to figure out how to make ideas come to life. Challenging myself with learning new things (coffee staining paper, how to make a ground web) is what I love about making art, specifically embroidery. There aren't patterns for the things I want to make and that makes them very exciting to me.
I bought myself a new Halloween mug yesterday to celebrate the completion of Goliath. Kevin would approve.
Materials
Mixed media paper, coffee stained
DMC Etoile C415, Blanc (3 and 6 strands), C433, C938, C840 (6 strands)
Brown ribbon
Black tulle
Goliath birdeater sticker from The John Derian Sticker Book
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