The phrase “I’m all ears” comes to mind when I reflect on this last week of hand stitching. Each eye felt exciting and compelling. What small variation in eye color and pattern will I make this time?, I’d ask myself as my needle began the path of ringing an iris, defining a pupil. It is so wonderful and unpredictable somehow when I stumble into a creative task that I can’t get enough of.
Circling back
My deer people (see their heads in my previous post) will all need adornments. For instance one of them will look fetching in the collection of bright red silk circular patterns. She will be me, remembering my recent circle making complusion, that I may not yet be out of. This is certainly not my first compulsion. I was reminded of that tuesday when I discovered these groupings of odd stitched shapes in a basket on my work table. I made them without really knowing their application. How wonderful to discover my deer people’s costume needs have already been addressed!
A face off
This week I sculpted faces for another collection of sewn and ceramic figures. I think these will all be antlered, a herd of deer people. Imagine hiking in some remote summer wilderness and coming upon them, grazing in a high mountain valley. I wonder, would deer people graze on four legs with their mouths to the turf, or would they crouch to pluck a handful then straighten up and gaze around while feeding themselves, hand to mouth?
This weekend!
Still Circling
I’m working on number 9 of these hand stitched circular experiments. I plan to show them all at the Art Chics sale in early November (see info below). Hand stitching is tedious, time consuming, delayed gratification work. I am ready to begin a new series with more high speed sewing involved!
On Slow Progress
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.