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

Jouissance

Joyful passion that extols female sexual pleasure and the maternal.

The tremendous strength of the female spirit.

This time last year, I was in England, and visited Levens Hall and saw these joyful trees.

circles, domes, eggs, spheres,
boxes, biomorphic shapes, body like materials,
fragmentary, non-linear
are abstractions that represent the female

Lucy Lippard said this in the 70's

planned freedom

About twenty years ago, I saw large embroideries from India in the Textile Museum of Canada.

 They were so cheerful, colourful, beautiful, and powerful that they hit me in the heart.

 I remember that there was a folk-art quality to them.  I remember miles of chain stitch.

Those cloths were taller than I was, wide enough to cover a bed.
They were completely covered with thread.

 Huge immense spaces of stitched marks.

I get similar heart felt feelings when I visit  English gardens.

My eye and heart eagerly follow the masses of blooms and foliage.
Masses of small unique marks.

There is an aesthetic of labour in both gardens and large embroideries,
There is time.

Gardens and large hand made textiles reach something deep inside us and that feeling is more natural than we can understand.