“I just finished this one last night — he’s hairy,” she says as we both laugh at the shaggy, rug-like embroidered legs of her latest creation.
April Hartley takes the tradition of embroidery, puts it in the wash cycle on high heat, and then throws it dryer for a contemporary spin — just for good measure. Hand washing? Ain’t nobody got time for that.
A month before her solo show at the Studio@620 (opening reception May 14 from 5-9 p.m., with an artist talk at the closing reception on June 11 from 5-9 p.m.), I had the chance to visit her home studio to chat with the artist about her work, which will be a series of carefully embroidered children’s drawings that Hartley has been laboriously working on.
“I have gotten the drawings from pretty much everywhere. The idea is that they’re from kids who are going through some sort of hardship or trauma, and how kids express themselves if they don’t really have the vocabulary to talk about what they are going through. Some of these are from kids who are in refugee camps, so their entire lives have been pretty crazy. That’s how it started, but I’ve added in some happy drawings too because it’s a bit heavy,” she said.
Sometimes adding extra elements to the pieces, the artist tries to keep color and lines true to what the kids have done.
“It’s really about how kids are experiencing the decisions of adults, so I tied it to the household by embroidering everything. Embroidery is a precious thing that people pass down through families as an heirloom, so it’s a symbol of a well-ordered household, like that ‘Home Sweet Home’ piece on your grandma’s wall.
“This is pretty much subverting that. Kids are often experiencing their parent’s decisions, and they sort of become part of the household furniture without a voice. A lot of times kids choices can be dismissed so easily. When you put their voices in thread, for some reason I’ve noticed that with textiles, people spend more time looking at things because they want to see the details, know how long it took, or know whether it was made by hand,” she said.
Kid’s drawings may be made in an instant, but the thoughts are something to dwell upon longer than just a quick, uninterested glance.
“Most of these drawings probably get thrown in the trash after a certain number of years, which I found out first-hand because I’ve been asking my dad and my mom and my grandma, ‘Do you have any of my drawings when I was a kid?’ and everyone’s like, ‘I don’t think so!,’” she says with a laugh.
“I like the idea of making the drawings more precious instead of that thing that gets stuck on the refrigerator and stained, then thrown in a box somewhere. It’s permanent now,” Hartley said.
She got some of the drawings from her friend who teaches an after-school program for under-served kids at the Pérez Art Museum Miami. She relates to the way these kids have to grow up without the same resources other kids may have; she grew up that way too.
Some imagery is pretty intense for a child to be drawing. Let’s start with Exhibit A, for example: a person shooting a tank, that tank shooting an airplane, and the airplane shooting a helicopter in an endless cycle of bullets. (You can’t tell me that video games and media coverage of the wars our country has been waging don’t play a role in this.)
Overall, the show is about how kids deal with things, and see the world around them, without words to truly describe how they’re feeling. The title of her series is called That Child of Always, and aims to explore how children from around the world struggle to express emotion.
“The title is a line from the Reinaldo Arenas poem My Lover the Sea. I chose that because to me it conveys the sense that these kids have always existed and always will," she says. "It also spoke to me because a part of this project is about the concept of the inner child that remains long after growing up that we adults are still caring for and carrying around, who every now and again pipes up and reminds us that they are still there, reacting and influencing decisions whether we are aware of it or not.”
Some works are a bit depressing, but others are pretty hilarious. Case in point:
“Look at this pizza person with fishnets and go-go boots,” she says as we sorted though the drawings. I tell her that should be her next one. Or one of the many drawings of six-packed dudes with beards of epic proportions. She tells me, “I’m sad, I’m probably not going to be able to do all of these. Some take two solid weeks of working, with 12 of those days working eight hours. At least two of those days I worked around 13 hours. That’s sort of a rough estimate. Some don’t take long at all though, especially ones on the machine.”
You can tell which ones are hand-done and which are machine-stitched by the difference in stitch quality; the machine creates a dense, rough layer of thread. Hartley stitches on raw canvas to tie it to the tradition of embroidery and the idea of the household. One piece has even been done on a linen kitchen towel.
“I started becoming drawn to using textiles to communicate because everybody has connection to it, everyone in the world,” Hartley said.
Instead of the usual crafty essence of small embroidery hoops, she plans on making square “hoops” with larger hardware to display her pieces for her show as a way to draw the line between craft and fine art, while keeping them tethered at the same time. It’s pretty amazing how some of the kid’s drawings exhibit better composition and color choices than some adult artists out there, like in the drawing by four-year-old Gemma, called Girls Club, that Hartley has blown up into one of her large-scale pieces. Here, she uses yarn instead of thread to help cover more space a little faster.
“Embroidery has a very long tradition, and I love that. There are so many people before me that have used this medium in so many different ways. I love the connection to women, to history, and to people,” she says.
This long-standing, but somewhat dying, tradition is usually passed down through the family. Sadly, my knitting and crochet skills came directly from a Walmart “I Taught Myself to Crochet!” kit — not exactly the same “bonding experience.” Hartley on the other hand seems to have textiles in her blood, with a needle in her hand since she could walk. (I wonder how many times her parents had to tell her not to run with scissors?)
On Hartley's father’s side of the family, many of the women were professional seamstresses.
“My mom and my grandma made all of our clothes. It was just always around. I only just started using sewing as a medium for art two or three years ago, before that I was just doing drawing, painting, and printmaking. In my mind, I guess they were just separate. I’d sew to make clothes, or to make curtains,” she explains to me.
At some point, she put two and two together: “I was working on these prints, and I had cut them and sewn them back together, and from there I just started messing around with that.”
When she was in Miami earning her BFA in painting and textiles from Florida International University, she worked at a gallery whose curator has championed fiber artists since the 1970s.
“She helped me surround myself with other artists working with fibers that quickly became my art family. I was an assistant to a couple of these artists, got to travel to Mexico for textile research, and delve into my practice within this context. When you’re around people who use textiles and sewing materials in different ways, things just start to come out,” Hartley says.
In 2015, Hartley received an Individual Artist Grant Award from the St. Petersburg Art Alliance to help fund an art book featuring her embroideries. Having all of her pieces in one book will give off a more narrative quality, something that the individual pieces on their own may not have to the same extent. The book release will be during her solo show opening reception, with the proceeds of the book sales going towards the Florida Guardian ad Litem.
“I didn’t realize how long this art book project was going to take because I started my handmade leather goods business at the same time,” she says.
Besides her series of children’s drawings, she also has a series of geometric designs on ripped paper, and her take on graffiti slaps (which are art stickers that artists can “slap” on a wall to tag it quickly).
“I haven’t done them in a little while," she tells me. "The ‘Slaps’ were kind of a joke for me, I just thought it would be funny to take something that’s so temporary and put embroidery on it.” Using small shipping labels you can grab by the handfuls at USPS, Hartley embroiders slang terms like “Srsly tho” or “Kool” onto them. Juxtaposing the craft of embroidery (typically viewed as a feminine endeavor) with graffiti (which makes you think of some young guy who has a knack for getting into trouble), it’s interesting to consider temporal objects versus heirloom keepsakes.
Conceptually, her geometric paper “sculptures” are miles away from the slaps.
“They’re about digging deep, and introspection. The patterns in nature and the cosmos all have a meaning, which creates this mysterious quality to life. Sewing is a really meditative practice, which goes along with these thoughts,” she says.
There is visual depth to them, as each layer of paper is spaced out about a half-inch from the next, creating a shallow hole for your eye to fall into. The precise patterns are mesmerizing, with some looking like a chain-linked fence. Fences can represent barred access if you look at it that way; or a fence can represent (like in knitting) the continual connection of linked joints made of one strand. Individual links can be broken easily, but together they form a bond that is strong.
“Sometimes I think about each stitch as a step, as part of a journey,” she says.
And as we journey to find ourselves, or our place in the world, things can get messy as we dig. There’s something powerful about these self-inflicted rips, which are then mended again with extreme care and attention (which in some ways reminds me of Yoko Ono’s Mend Piece).
Since the paper is heavy duty, Hartley has to punch each individual hole in a grid pattern beforehand, or else she would have some really wrinkled paper trying to stab through the paper with the needle alone.
“It really just started with the process, and I was making decisions intuitively. It was funny because before this project, I wasn’t doing anything abstract,” she says.
She shows me some of her earlier paintings for comparison, and her still lifes are impeccable.
“I really want to paint more, I just don’t have the time," she says. "Maybe after the next couple of projects I can get back to painting, because I really, really miss it.”
Hartley embroiders anything from grocery store paper bags to Plexiglass, but she’s about to take things to the next level. Brainstorming with Kenny Jensen, the curator at Studio@620, they came up with a sweet plan for her solo show.
“The space is really big and my pieces are very small, so we were trying to come up with how to fill up a wall quickly, but with high impact. I decided that embroidering the drywall might be cool. There’s going to be one whole wall that’s site-specific. We have sheets of drywall that I’ll drill holes into and embroider that, then we’ll have to hang the drywall, seal it, and paint it to make it look like it was always there. It’s the same process as embroidering the Plexiglass, but on a much larger scale. Depending on how this show goes, I’m hoping to take the whole show to Miami,” she says.
I always like asking what new and exciting projects have been bubbling on the back burner, and Hartley certainly has a lot of ideas on her mind.
“Starting about a year ago, I’ve been collecting and saving all of my receipts. I mean, you carry a bag, and how often do you have to dig through a pile of your receipts? So I’ve started sewing them together,” she says as she pulls out a shoebox with the long, scarf-like work-in-progress. The ink of some receipts has already started to fade, while others sport some coffee stains. Some are incredibly soft (and kind of sad-looking) from being crumpled, wadded, and wrinkled into submission.
“I have boxes and boxes of receipts — everywhere. I wanted to see how many receipts I accumulated just by myself over a certain period of time. At first I was thinking about making a quilt, but I want it to be one giant sheet of paper, and then I have to figure out what to do with that. But people are going to know everything, all of my habits. I don’t know where it will lead to yet, but we’ll see,” she says.
With her steady hand, a heart of gold, and patience out the wazoo, I look forward to keeping tabs on this Femme Visuale in the years to come.
To see more of Hartley’s work, visit aprilhartley.com
Hartley's solo show at the Studio@620 will run from May 14 from 5-9 p.m., with an artist talk held during the closing reception on June 11 at 7:30 p.m. To find out more, visit: thestudioat620.org. Follow her leather goods, too.
Urban Dictionary defines Femme Fatale as “a woman with both intelligence and sex appeal that uses these skills to manipulate poor helpless men into doing what she wants. May cause death.” Keeping in line with this concept, the women highlighted in Caitlin Albritton's "Femme Visuale" series aims to highlight local women artists and show off some lesser-known talent that's been hiding in the shadows. In the art world, if it ain't big and loud, it ain't being seen (looking at you, Koons). Art as a grand spectacle leaves little room for modest, sincere, or quiet voices, especially women's voices. And I promise, we won’t bite.
This article appears in May 12-19, 2016.