Rebecca Gieseking

This is the last piece in a mini-series I folded a couple years ago, playing with complementary painted and lacy patterns. The last piece was light and whimsical, but this piece shifts to solidity and structure. The painted surface and the lace pattern are modeled after the texture of tree bark, with irregular cutouts to suggest the crackling of the bark. The overall form of the vase is intentionally more substantial and weighty like a tree trunk, with more lace higher up suggesting more openness as in the upper parts of a tree.

Since I’m caught up now on older pieces, I’ll be posting about newer work soon!

This piece continues my exploration of lacy vases, shifting the visual language to circles. The overlapping circles in the painted design are reminiscent of the circles that bubbles leave behind on a surface and have a more playful feel than a lot of my work. All of the circles, in both the lace and the painted pattern, were hand-drawn free-form, so there are small inconsistencies and imperfections. Similar to the Sunburst lacy vase, the shape of the vase also echoes the round shapes in the painted and lacy textures. The shape is also a play on shapes common in scientific glassware, playing off of my multiple interests in art and science.

I’ll have one more piece in this mini-series to post soon.

This piece is a continuation of my lacy vase series, continuing the theme of creating complementing paint and lace patterns. Unlike the last form based on waves and curves, this piece is based on a sharper, more angular geometry. As the vase widens in the middle, a painted pattern of bright angular brushstrokes emerges from underneath the black lacy panels. The lace cutouts, the painted pattern, and the overall shape of the vase all reflect similar angularity. However, similar to my previous piece, the painted pattern gives a softer version of the same visual language as the lace does.

I’ll be continuing to explore similar themes in my next two posts.

I’m catching up on posting some pieces from several years ago that I never posted when I folded them. This piece is a continuation of my lacy vase series, continuing to play with the contrast between a black lacy pattern and a contrasting painted section. The new element here is that instead of leaving the non-lacy sections white, I painted them in a pattern reminiscent of water the complements the wavy patterns in the lace.

The lace pattern and the painted pattern represent the flow of water in different ways: the painted section represents it in gradations of color, but the cuts of the lace represent it in fluid curves. Unlike most of my pieces, there are no folds that cross the central lacy section, so the lace is able to flow smoothly all the way around the vase without any interruptions.

I’ll be posting the continuation of this mini-series soon, with several other pieces that explore the connection between painted patterns, lace patterns, and the overall form of the vase.

I’ve been catching up on posting pieces that are currently on display at the Urbandale Art Gallery, and this is the last of those pieces. This piece continues my diagonal shift series and builds on a recent test fold. I continued the theme of cone-based diagonal shifts here, putting the test fold into practice in a finished piece. One of the challenges in designing this piece was volume and balance: all of my diagonal shift vases up to this point have had shifts that naturally tend to have similar volume on either side of the shift, so it was always fairly easy to make the piece look like the top and bottom halves were proportionate. (This type of visual balance is very different from the piece looking or being physically balanced – most of my diagonal shifts include small weights in the bottom so they don’t fall over!) For this piece, the cone on the top half is a lot narrower than on the bottom half, so I had to play more than usual with height to make sure the proportions looked right. This piece ended up an inch or two taller than most of my shift vases to get that balance.

This piece is a return to my long-dormant diagonal shift series. I played a bit before with diagonal shifts based on a cone instead of on a cylinder, along with a test fold of a diagonal shift based on an out-turned cone. Similar to my previous downhill diagonal shifts, the shift in this piece is really a stack of two bends and one shift. To get all the angles correct, the bends are cone-based bends, and the shift is based on an out-turned cone instead of an in-turned cone.

I also included a photo of the painted paper below. For most of my diagonal shifts, I’ve used sine waves for the painted patterns and let the painted lines naturally zig-zag a bit as they crossed the pleats. For this piece, since the narrowest parts of the black stripes are in places where the pleats are the widest, I incorporated zig-zags into the painted pattern. That made for a lot of measuring reference points, but it smooths out the painted lines nicely.

I’m continuing to share some of the pieces currently on display at the Urbandale Art Gallery. This nesting piece builds on the lacy series, but shifts the visual language from curves and circles to sharp angles and triangular forms. As with the circular nesting bowls, this work is composed of four separate pieces that nest together and function as a single object. The triangular cutouts echo the sharp outward angles in the bowl and vase forms. Unlike the circular vases, where gradient from light to dark tended to highlight the distinctions between the forms, these pieces gradient from dark to light. This enhances the unity between the forms because the contrast between the outer, darker piece and the inner, lighter piece viewed in partial shadow is small. The color gradient and the angularity suggests flame-like imagery. Together, the four pieces form a cohesive object defined by repetition, contrast, and gradual transformation.