There is a particular and spectacular view of the self that one only gets to glance after slow and dedicated progress toward something. After many strenuous days of hiking a mountain trail or after months of struggling and plunking at a musical instrument; one gets an opportunity to pause, to glance back across the many steps and hours of effort and see shining growth. One sees oneself in the shimmery glittering light of hard earned accomplishment. It is beautiful! The view is fleeting, for there is always trail up ahead, but oh so invigorating and sustaining. Embroidering, a process I’ve embraced in recent months, certainly offers me opportunity for slow progress. Very SLOW progress! I look forward to the views ahead.
Art imitates life imitates art…
I’ve had some extra time to stitch these past few days as I have been home with the Covid. It only occurred to me in my newly infected state, how very corona-virus-esque the center of this work is. I drew it and began the stitching long before contracting the virus. Art as a form of fortune telling, I suppose.
This is my first bout of Covid and I admit that my symptoms, at least at first, were as much fear, shame and anxiety as they were physical aches and pains. All the news, statistics and community stories I’d absorbed over the past 2 years had coallesced into a dark vision, a hellish realm, a desolate land of Covid into which I had just been thrust. I honestly had to kinda talk myself off a Covid cliff, settle on a new way of seeing the thing inside me. Maybe stitching a vision of it was part of my coming to grips. There is something beautiful and quintessential about the form of corona viruses. And maybe there is something to respecting and admiring it as it passes through my body.
More on the Circle
Growing up in rural Alaska, church was one of the few regular, all ages, social events on the calendar. My parents bundled us up and traipsed us through the snow to Nome Methodist most sundays. I liked the singing, the donuts afterwards, the big satin stitched banners that hung above the alter and I loved when all the congregation moved out to the edges of the sanctuary and held hands in a giant human circle. I was always in between my parents, so holding some strange adult’s clammy hand was not a concern. I could suddenly see faces instead of backsides, witness the fish mouth looks of people singing, and I felt the electricity of all those connected beings.
I am not religious now. I did not feel particularly religious then, but I felt the power of the human circle and the collective human voice. It affected me and still feels potent now. The circle contains magic.
Centering
Naming my work is often a multi-draft, meander-think process that plays out along side the actual manifestation of the piece. I love the naming effort! I love words, how precise or vague they can be. I spent this tuesday in the studio focusing my efforts on the center of this circular piece. It got me chewing on the word CENTER. The word is a changeling. Its single meaning shifts subtly depending on the center of what. The pit lies at the center of a peach. We refer to our heart center, centering oneself, the center of a conflict, being the center of attention, even the center for disease control. The center points us at a place, a location but the location is infinitely variable, taking on the qualities and conditions of the body that surrounds it. While sewing little golden nodules onto the center of this piece I was listening to a story about a drug rehab facility that was scamming clients and insurance companies. It was refered to as ‘rotten at its center’.
Tuesdays!
I just “retired” from my part time teaching work. I will miss playing music with young people. I will miss the beautiful chaos of the high school environmment. I will miss daily contact with my teacher colleagues. I will miss the homemade lunches. There are many things I will miss but I will no longer have to juggle two work lives with their seperate complexities AND, most excitingly, I will spend my Tuesdays in the studio. This week was my first tuesday, stitching, cutting fabric, choosing losing myself in color, listening to a 3 part series on the House of Gucci. The Tuesdays in my future feel like shiny precious beads strung on a woven cord.
pencil, paint and pen
Studio time, no fear, intention, focus, play and music. Can you find these words inside the image?
Being in Touch
I made a collection of small leather bound journals for our recent Art Chics sale. The simple efforts of folding and tearing paper, cutting and stitching leather, tracing line, and threading needle; were each a healing action, a sacrament to the holiness of hands. I feel awe and gratitude for the many delicate and intricate things hands can do. Their complex motion (each finger moving and tensing seperately) and their finely calibrated sensitivity (from lightly brushing a moth wing to grasping and bending a metal rod) astound me. How lucky are we to have two of them!? Two mighty and responsive hands!
Handmade Journals