It's me

It's me who begins to cry or needs to lie down or put my face into the wind. 

My emotions overwhelm me.  I become weepy or cranky.

Are you alright? the kids ask

I'm fine.  It's just hard for me to put a meal on the table these days, I say to them.  

We need to eat outside because we are still distancing ourselves, but it's not the meal that does it.

Not really.

It's all the other things going on.  The travel to England for one.

The Air Canada lady says that Pearson airport is worse than we can imagine and to get there 4 hours before a flight rather than 3.

I don't want to face that airport;  Ned and I leave on Monday.

He watches me, so wobbly most of the time.  If I ask, he hugs me and says "it'll be fine". 

I played board games with the boys and lost.  There was lots of teasing.  I am a good grand mom.  

(It's not every meal.  Most of them are fine.)

I say to myself "You're fine!"  

But it's me.  It's not them.  

I read Maria Popova's newsletter.  Recently, she wrote about the writer, Iris Murdoch.

Murdoch understood that we act out a 'middle - emotion' because it is too complex, contradictory, and category-defying for us to know what we are really feeling.  Unwilling to fully live into what we are, (anxious, uncertain, tender and terrified creatures), we act ourselves into being, costumed in false certitude. 

I turn to the large soft organic cotton quilt I've nearly finished.  

It's a real thing and it is very fine.

April's horizon work

April took her new ceramics down to the shore
and photographed them during the beautiful hour of the day.

She brought them from her Toronto kiln to our house when she came home for the holiday.

We recently spoke about the colours in these bowls and jars.   

She told me that she is making glazes that blush.

'All glazes are mixtures of chemicals that melt and form a glass layer
across the ceramic to protect it', she informed me. 

'And blushes happen when two chemicals get near each other.'

She also said that to her, the sunset is like a blush.

Sky, water and sun nudge each other

and we go on.  

wrecked

People are not aware of their abstract emotions,
which are a big part of their lives,
except when they listen to music
or look at art.

Agnes Martin

A woman made utility quilts as fast as she could 

so that her familly wouldn't freeze, and

she made them as beautiful as she could 

so that her heart wouldn't break.

American folk saying

image from April 2012
both quotes from my current journal
glad to be walking on my road again, the ice has gone. 

a new body of work

I am pleased to be working on a new body of work for my exhbition in October,

I have eight pieces under way.
This one is an organic cotton landscape quilted into a wool batt.
Backed with an old linen table cloth. it feels cozy yet light.  Dreamy.  Serene.

We have just returned from a few days in the city.
Ned has monthly meetings there this year and I tag along.  We visit our kids.

 

 She's nearly 6 weeks now.

 

I stitched in the car both ways.  Sally Mann's audio book Hold Still kept us company.

Joy is a sublime emotion because it is accompanied by a kind of terror.  A feeling that it can't last.
Zadie Smith said that.    Joy just comes across us, unlike pleasure which is chosen.

nature's embroidery and a memory

When I was a little girl I hid in the pantry.
I wanted to see how long it would take before people missed me.

There was a hook on the kitchen side of the swing door, but none on the pantry side where I was.   My mother had sent me in for some can or box.

I didn't really intend to hide, but once I heard my mother lock the door from the kitchen side, I realized she had forgotten about me.

So it become a test.
How long would it take before people noticed I wasn't around?

It took forever.

Eventually I had to rattle the door.

feel better

I made my first bundles after my mother died in 2007.  I was inspired by Magdalena Abakanowicz's burlap and sisal pieces that she made in 1978-80 entitled Embriology.  She made about 800 bundles in a variety of sizes.

I used soft batting at first (see here) and they took me about six months to carefully make. I was teased a bit, (Ned referred to them as hoo-doos), but I was coming to understand that it was the process of making that was helping me to deal with my recent personal trauma.

After them I began to wrap tree branches and clover stalks as a way to connect caring for the environment with a human metaphor of nurturing.

Although the good feelings would come over me as I wrapped the branches, the resulting bundles raised more complicated emotions.  The figures I made looked shrouded, not swaddled.  They looked mummified and sad. (see here if interested)

As an artist who wishes to communicate on an emotional level, this set up a challenge for me.  The bundles on the wall here are white with red thread, but they did not begin like this.  They have been wrapped three times.  They started off in 2011 as happy little things with four coniferous twigs wrapped in colourful cloth.  See here.

Over time, those twigs became bald and I needed to nurture them, and so wrapped them first with thick yarn, and then as you see here, with soft white cloth.

Arranging each of these little bundles in my hands, each one different from the next, gave me the same positive feelings as those first wrapped forms had.

In order to understand this perhaps you need to do it yourself.  The materials are here.  Make a bundle and take it home.

 Try it, you will feel better.

These images from my installation up until April 18 at la galerie du nouvel ontario in Sudbury, Ontario, part of a curated exhibition entitled Pop Folk Textiles  The text is from my little artist-talk at the vernissage.

Reparation cloth

My goal was to follow through on the thesis of my dissertation which was that a large cloth filled with small hand made marks would set the viewer off into their own inner immensity. See here. Although it seemed straightforward enough, I found it very difficult to focus on just that and kept finding ways to add a more figurative element which I would wreck and then repair.

Apparently, this creative process is quite normal and important from a psycho-analytic viewpoint. Hanna Segal believed that art is more about nourishment than self expression.
Although for the degree exhibition I am going to show just the one piece, Monumental Simplicity, I decided today to clean the white cloth that I struggled with over the winter in order to show the examiners my process.

Seeing it fill up with air did nourish me, actually.

painted ruin

It took twelve hours to drive home from Kingston yesterday. We had a lovely family visit with two kids, their partners, my father). I was also able to see my sister who lives nearby. The visit with my aging father seemed more emotional this time and once back in the studio today, I fell into my art as a kind of therapy. I may have ruined monumental simplicity. It's really hard to stay cool and minimalist. The paint did become lighter once it dried, and I am now in the process of removing months of red thread. The idea is to show absence.

all the same, each different

I love that these are individuals. Even though they re all the same, each is very different. I love that they fit in my hand. playful / serious