When Sola Fiedler sets her mind to something, big things happen. Literally.
The Vancouver-based fibre artist known as Sola has dedicated her career to creating large-scale tapestries of iconic city skylines around the world, relocating for months at a time to new cities to immortalize their bricks and trees and waterways in yarn.
The pieces span upwards of 12 feet, take years to create, and occasionally fetch in the six figures. And the work, painstakingly rendered by hand in her East Vancouver apartment, captures cities on the brink of change – Olympic cities, World’s Fair sites, the Vegas strip and the like – and is motivated, says Fiedler, by an urgent desire to preserve the character of these metropolises.
“I started in 1986 when we got the Vancouver World’s Fair,” she recalls, her rose-gold tinted hair hinting at a latent punk sensibility. “I was lying in the dentist chair up on Broadway on the 19th floor, and I looked down and thought, ‘Oh they’re going to change everything, and we don’t have a picture of what it looks like now.’”
“The heritage buildings are being preserved,” she muses, later. “It’s those buildings that we’ve come to love, where some developer comes in and they’re gone, in an instant.”
That first Vancouver tapestry sparked a career of capturing history in pieces meant more for a museum than a living-room wall.
To make matters even more impressive, the 80-year-old knitter works entirely from memory, eschewing photographs (weavers call them “cartoons”) of her subjects for studied walks that allow her to see and “feel” the spaces more accurately in three dimensions. “If you take a photograph, it immediately goes flat and doesn’t quite work,” she explains.
She also knits using only recycled materials, sourcing yarn and cotton from items at Value Village that she unravels or cuts into strips. Sweaters from the Gap, says Fiedler, yield the best yarn for her purposes.
The results are expertly nuanced portraits – documenting everything from gravestones and mountain ripples to the quality of light on buildings at specific times of the day.
For Canada Day, however, she wanted to try her hand at something new. A flag, made using upcycled cotton and sequins from donated clothing from all walks of life, woven together to create a new take on the iconic Maple Leaf.
“We all contributed to this incredible life we have in Canada,” says the London-born artist, who is entirely self-taught, of the inspiration. “And most of us wear T-shirts,” she adds, cheekily. “I’ve got about 50 T-shirts in there that people have worn […]. I’m always taking clothing from the community and saving it forever.”
The Canada 150 tapestry will be hung in the window of the Ian Tan Gallery on South Granville from July 1-31 as part of the gallery’s Canada 150 exhibition, and will be up for buying, touching (yes, touching) and picture-taking for all the patriots at heart.
People picturing a simple hand-rendering of red and white might be surprised, though. This flag is all rainbow all the time.
“I just wanted to put in as many colours as I could, and it turned out to be a rainbow,” Fiedler says, with a laugh. “I wasn’t really planning that. But then, well, what a beautiful idea. The rainbow is so important to us. And our gay community is so important to us.”
“I love to do tapestries that celebrate something,” she adds.
Once the Canada 150 celebrations die down, Fiedler intends to start on a Grand Canyon tapestry to commemorate its 100th anniversary in 2019. After that? “Fingers crossed, it’s looking like with the Olympic Committee that L.A. is going to get 2024, so I can do that tapestry and celebrate my 88th birthday in the middle of the Summer Olympics, which I usually do,” she says.
“Have 188 countries come to my birthday party?” she giggles. “How great is that.”
