The Immensity Work

the cloud in me in the outdoor gallery

Immensity is within ourselves.  It is attached to a sort of expansion of being that life curbs and caution arrests, but which starts again when we are alone.”    Gaston Bachelard   The Poetics of Space.

These pieces from 2017 seem empty, but are in actuality filled with textural small marks put there one at a time with hand stitch.  I’ll never be finished with exploring the immensity within.    

longing cloth

longing cloth (verso)

 Longing Cloth 

I feel that yearning is our strongest emotion, more powerful than love itself.  I used indigo dyed velvet because it is such a sensual fabric to touch and a bright red inner layer that I revealed by cutting away some of the cloth in the reverse of the piece. 

the cloud in me

 Luce Irigaray’s book To be Two  has a section about women and men and how each has a unique and huge interior life. 

"Each remote from the other, we are kept alive by an insuperable gap.  Nothing can ever fill it.  Is it because I do not know you that I know you are?  How do I protect without restraining?  You remain a mystery to me.  Our union will always remain a mystery.  Such is the union between woman and man.  I want to live in harmony with you and still remain other.  I want to draw nearer to you while protecting myself from you.  In which part of myself to I preserve you?  In which breath?  

How do I remain without suffocating? How do I make earth out of air and protect the cloud in me?  Neither mine nor yours but each living and breathing with the other.  What makes me one, and perhaps unique, is that you are, and I am not you.” 

I had to do some reflecting this past week because I'm being interviewed by Sophie Anne Edwards at the Art Gallery of Sudbury this coming Saturday and I remembered how I had to write a thesis for my Fine Art degree with a major in Embroidery from Middlesex University and the work that came from that.