about orbits and dreams and also about bed / boat and melancholy / fragility / durability and also about stars

In this dark month, 

I'm looking at things differently.

Embroideries I made in a younger time,

for a different project,

are cut and re-arranged into a garden,

stitched to new cloth.  

Seeing them being reborn enlivens me.  

enlarges my spirit. 

This new work is round and bright

and fragile and soft.

Stitching it, making it

helps me to accept the winter coming

and my ageing 

I have been stitching new circles

one after the other.

Bowls of silence.  (Rumi's words)

Circles and dots

that represent Gaia's rhythm.

The natural cycles of the sun and the moon and the planets and the stars

and how they relate to earth. 

Cosmic time pieces.

The earth revolves on her axis in one day,

the moon orbits the earth in one female month,

the earth orbits the sun in one year.

Gaia rhythm.

Earth clocks.

under the blue sky my clock-faced flowerbeds reflect the orb of the sun

they never sleep

lying awake under the starry constellations, they listen to the music of  time.

they chuckle, yes they chuckle 

and gossip.

I walk in this garden holding the hands of dead friends  

Old age came quickly. 

Cold, cold, cold, they died so silently.

My gilly flowers, roses, violets blue, 

sweet garden of varnished pleasures, 

please come back next year.

                                                                  Derek Jarman

everything is curved

Anne Truitt was in an airplane, flying over the desert.  She looked out the window and suddenly noticed that everything is curved.

"Seen whole from the air, the global horizon confronted one bluntly as a context all its own.  I had the startling impression that I was looking at something intelligent."

"Every delicate pulsation of colour was met, matched, challenged, repulsed, embraced by another, none out of proportion.  Each was at once a unique and a proper part of the whole.  The straight lines with which human beings have marked the land are impositions of a different intelligence, abstract in that arena of the natural."

She began to see her own life as something between natural and abstract.

nature - culture
earth - human
natural organic - abstract geometry
curved - straight
balance - imbalance
woman - man

"As I live, certain aspects of what is happening adhere to me as if magnetized by psychic gravity. I have learned to trust this center."

"It is as if there are external equivalents for truth which I already know.
I have to stay tuned in to catch these equivalents.
Vulnerability is implicit in this process."

"The process of art contains my intensities but also exorcises those that are beyond my endurance.
I do all this with haste akin to panic.
I depend on making objects as a kind of defense."    Anne Truitt

text found in 1995 journal, paraphrased slightly from the original
new quilt top finished before the end of the year.  Glad both year and quilt top are done.

quilt making

Did you ever think, child, how much piecing a quilt is like living a life?

Life gives you the fabrics, the scraps, the colours, the time...

but it's you who gathers them up, arranges them, and stitches them together.

 

I read Aunt Jane of Kentucky's story when I was about our daughter April's age.
(when I was learning about making quilts, and so busy living my life)

It's lovely to watch her continue the long tradition,

days like this

 cloud of time 2014, reverse side shown in progress

 Our weather has been heavenly.  Above, morning with brush pile.

I am completing the large piece, Cloud of Time. (pictured above in the foreground and on the right in the image below)

Inspired by rag rugs, it has already shown in two art galleries.  I am stitching a year, one day at a time.  (One day = one  complete skein of embroidery floss couched around strips of linen damask and found blue cloth)  Last fall in exhibition the piece held about 90 days (shown here) and by February there were 301 days completed. (here).  

Above, the final 64 days.  I'll stitch these panels to the rest of the artwork and there it will be.
A year of days.

Ned and the brush pile, early evening, same day.

foundations

The fourth meditation circle within its surrounding square.

 bias bindings

(note the original sketch above on the left)

poof, it's in the frame and we start quilting

Manitoulin Circle Project, every Thursday at the Little Current United Church, Manitoulin Island, Ontario, Canada.
All welcome.

intense simplicity

2011 in stitch

one skein of embroidery floss each day

a handmade nervousness

making time

These five panels span the period from October 2 - December 1, 2011.

One skein of embroidery floss marks one day. I am using up my stash of fabrics. Sometimes, the fabrics are related to my life, but just as often they are not. This piece is not about remembering each day in its specifics...it's more about making time visible. I've been keeping this journal for a year and a half now.

We have our Alaskan grand kids with us until Christmas and are enjoying them very much.

eleven months of obsession

I pinned my daily stitching up today. The walls are nine feet high. The chair gives an idea of scale, the white bar in the image is part of the building. I've been stitching one skein of embroidery floss each day since last July. Not finished yet.

Not to know, but to go on