voluptuous time

It's about time

We had bonfires during the Easter weekend

 The previous week we were on the road and I stitched.

It's medicine, this piece.
I also took photos of the winter trees and of the emerging earth through the car window.

I'm using black wool thread to make the repetitive stitches.
Each mark is different.  They are all the same.

The kids were home for Easter

They've gone back to the city now.
And the fire is out,  the ice still in

One of the first things that Ned did when we moved here was make this fire pit.
That was over 25 years ago.

It's all about time

my work

It is all about time

voluptuous time

medicine earth

I have been spending the last ten days in uncertainty
working on this eco printed 2 sided piece.

I can not tame it into my aesthetic.
It roils and bubbles and gets lumpy and ugly.
I can't seem to please it.
I can't seem to find my way with it, and yet it holds such promise with its beautiful earth - archteype- thin place lovliness/anxiousness

I can't just abandon it.

It is typical of what so often happens for me with dyed fabric.
An example of how hard it is to be simple.
I respond to the marks made by the bundled plants
I respond to the beatuiful accidents and want to sing along with them.
But when I do that, the aesthetic of simplicity that holds my work steady
is abandoned.

These marks are exciting.
Is it possible to carry their energy with my hands back to my simple quiet spirit home?

and also dance with them in their own space?

Yet these exciting and beautiful marks resist me.
They are too strong.  They are willful
They are difficult.

I sit and stare at it a lot.
Does it need some colour?  I pin pink linen to lower right.
Does it need a red bit?  I pin a thin horizontal line.

I make a red cross.
I make black and white borders.

I need to work through this piece.
It needs me.
I've experienced some loss recently

I need to be needed.

Making is medicine for me.

Art work made by hand is a physical outward attempt
to communicate something terribly inner.

(from an old journal)

The archetypal shapes are helping me.

the circle
the cross
the grid
dots
spirals

Marks that connect human psyche across time and place.

painting is so difficult, life is so short 

                                                                                                            Louise Bourgeois

it is impossible to say just what I mean

And indeed there will be time

There will be time, there will be time

Time for you and time for me

And time yet for a hundred in-decisions

And for a hundred visions and revisions

Before the taking of a toast and tea And indeed there will be time

To wonder

Do I dare?

And do I dare?

Do I dare disturb the universe? And would it have been worth it, after all?

Would it have been worth while

To have bitten off the matter with a smile

It is impossible to say just what I mean


T.S. Eliot
from the Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock 1917 (much pared down)