boxes three and four : In the Middle of the World

 I am not like you, the old woman said slowly.

I do not tell stories.

I see visions.

I see that life is not a line, but a circle.

To be human is to be circled in the cycles of nature,

rooted in the processes that nurture us in life, 

just as plants breathe in and out their photo synthesis

breathing in and breathing out.

Elizabeth Dodson Gray   from Green Paradise Lost  (1979) 

Installation happens this week.

Four boxes of art, one box of rods arrived at the gallery on Friday, September 24.

I can not find the words to name how I am feeling. 

quilts as women's art: a quilt poetics

The body of the quilt is the work of coming to like in yourself what was only adored or ignored by your mother, or other objects of your love or your lovers;

The body of the quilt is the work of coming to like the work of another woman, and the passing through of all rejection and neglect by another woman or man;

The body of the quilt is the work of coming to like yourself as a little old lady and an old little girl and a new little sister;

The body of the quilt is the work of going over all your mistakes and lost dreams liking yourself all the way all over inside and out and all around the whole border not knowing where to start and not knowing where to stop;

The body of the quilt is the work repeating all your moves and liking the fact that you did it all, did all the moving;

The body of the quilt is the endless search, your endless search, but as your companion as you go through the motions of work, as you work your way: by focusing, waiting, turning, twisting, aligning, matching, fitting, pulling in the faraway, visiting with the absent, drawing out the ineffable, amplifying the vestigial, leaving well-enough alone, enduring the unendurable, practicing readiness for the other, learning the lesson late and liking yourself for forgetting it again, and you’re finally looking up and seeing the body of your quilt behind your cat, behind your potted plants, up to your neck, coming out of your ears, and before the body of your quilt you see the people you want to see the body of your quilt and they like it, more than anyone every liked your body, and said so, and you know now it does not matter whether you did because you’ve come to like yourself even more than the body of the quilt, and you can look at it and like it by yourself.

Radka Donnell

The Quilt's Body by Radka Donnell is on page 113 of Quilts As Women's Art:  A Quilt Poetics.  

I read this book at age 40.  It gave me the foundation of my career as an artist/quiltmaker.  I copied many things into my journal at the time, including this entire poem.  

New Beginning, the other side.  I speak about making it in the lecture my pandemic summer.

"Quilts are to mainstream art what poetry is to prose".  Radka Donnell

Fare Well

Today is the last day of 2020 and I am thinking about endings.                                                         About things feeling finished.     About turning the page.

Above is  Underfoot The Earth Divine, one of the few pieces I finished during the pandemic.

The first image in this post is the reverse side of the piece, and it high lights the lovely wool thread drawing that happened spontaneously.   

The second image shows the front, pieced from rescued damask table linens.  You can see where I cut holes into the piecework in the lower half, and then repaired them with velvet.  

Good bye 2020.  

We've had many challenges this year.  

We've learned a lot about our selves.  We've learned that we can rely on our own selves.                 We've learned that we are strong and we are beautiful.  We've learned that we will figure it out.

I spoke about these ideas of inner strength and softness in the lecture I gave in Toronto last October.  The lecture shares about where I live and about the creation of my work.  It details the spring and summer of 2020 and shows how my work helps me to carry on through emotional turmoil. I learn to trust myself through the step by step making of each piece.   

The lecture shows how I've learned how to let things rest when I don't know quite what to do next.  

And that mending and correcting errors  are essential because the journey of broken-ness is part of each piece and also part of me as a human.

The lecture seems a little slow at the beginning, but I encourage you to visit it when you have a quiet 45 minutes.  I hope that you can find the time for a visit with me, my dear friends.  Here's the link.

Thank you very much for being with me through 2020.  I felt your support.  Love You!   

quilt for baby earth

I trimmed the PK Page Planet Earth little quilt and added a pale pink linen binding.  

Handling it made me think of the last baby quilt I made - for our little Maia.

I called it "Feel Invincible Sweetheart"   (here)

This new one is the same size as a baby quilt.

I realized that it is a quilt for baby Earth.

We have to be as kind and nurturing to this planet as if she were a baby.

If Planet Earth was a real baby, we would be kind.  We would protect her, wouldn't we?

 Well she is.

like a star in my sky

 What a time we are living through.

At the end of February Ned and I went to Mexico.
I started a new little quilt because I wanted something to do in my swim suit lap.

I wanted to make something small that I could pick up and work on without thinking
but all quilts are acts of mindfulness.

I used red thread and circluar shapes and slowly found that path to my inner self.
It always works.

The weather was often windy or chilly while we were there.
Still beautiful though, to hear the waves.

My little quilt is made of light weight wool and the warmth it gave was perfect.
I couldn't stop working on it.

I continued to stitch in the plane and also in the car as we drove north towards home.

The world is in the middle of a pandemic crises.
My quilt continues to hold me safe.
Doing it helps me.

We're in self isolation now and still I continue and continue.

Continuing to stitch this little quilt.
A red star in my sky, a mothering star. 

 I sit by the window, and the birds watch me stitch.

Here I am.
This is the proof.

poetic

 the poetic image is sudden

psychologists and psychoanalysts can never really explain the unexpected nature of the poetic image

 the sudden flare-up of being that happens in the imagination

 it's metaphysical

when confronted with a poetic image we experience a resonance with deep repercussions

something about it seems really true
we are pushed over a border line within us
between non-knowing and knowing with all our hearts

 our soul responds

 our inner light

I brought three linen cloths to work  on
while Ned and I are in Mexico for a bit

 last night I realized that I could look at them as sculptures and photographed them hanging from the outdoor shower in the balcony

Gaston Bachelard has written about the poetic image in the Poetics of Space