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 

commonplace holiness

 

we have astonishment
there is life held within materials
and in the art made from them

This is an idea Giuseppe Penone speaks about often.
Astonishment.  Poetry.
That there is life held within materials.

My friend, Connie Wilson,  gave me these handkerchiefs.  (I wrote about them here)
She died on Saturday and I miss her.

 

she was a daughter of the spirit,
a friend for two dozen years,
she taught me how to love

started stitching again

Yesterday I started stitching again.

I needed to, so I did.

 

For me, stitching is like breathing.

 

Like heart beat.

the quiltness of the quilt

I am interested in the long tradition of making pieced quilts.

I mean the tradition of women finding patterns in their every day life and arranging the colours and shapes to represent abstract notions from their lives. 
But also I mean the joy we receive from the juxtaposition of colour and shape and fabrics and the feel of it all.

I believe that quilt making is one of the places a creative hard  working woman could find herself.  Even when there were so many other daily tasks and children and old people to be responsible for, a women could turn to the quilt she had on the go in stolen moments and look at it.  Adjust it.

This is the tradition I mean.
Women who make quilts are artists and they always have been.
I love that.

Laying it on the floor to figure it out - moving one colour here and there...realizing that this particular piece of cloth needs to be removed.

Denyse Schmidt says:
"Looking and seeing is the only way to know.  If I am not happy with how a quilt looks, the only way past this is to uncover what is not working by trying other solutions.  I wish I could say it gets easier, but somehow it is always the same.  It is less painful if you give yourself over to it and accept that design is a process of trial and error, of getting out of your own way, and of knowing your tools."

If you have seen my process blog (link in upper bar) you will know that I made a lot of adjustments in the medallion quilt top pictured in this post.

In an old journal, I wrote about some luxurious deep-coloured wool crepes and silks meant for dress making that I saw in a fabric store and my idea of hand piecing and hand quilting them.

"These luxurious quilts, hand pieced and densely hand quilted, would rely on those materials and their quilt-ness for their value.  The meaning of these beautiful quilts would be themselves." 1995

This old longing inspires me to work again with the quilt-ness of the quilt as a metaphor for an elder, a  woman who is beautiful from within herself.

Her own quilt-ness.
All those little adjustments
made over a long period of time.

connected across continents with time and thread

The white cloths are from India.
The black cloths are from Sweden.
These are inspiring me now.
Don't you love how they resemble each other even though the makers never met?
Central floral, circular border decor, fantastical animals.  Red thread.
(The images are from books:   kantha and yllebroderier  )

The intensity of work built with thread, with its suggestion of obsession or even a kind of brilliant insanity is part of the viewer's experience.                                                                                                                                                                                     The process of stitching is meditative, essential in many cultures and traditions to quiet the mind and allow the spirit to evolve. Yet at the same time, there is a link to time passing and to the artist as a being in this world and the work is thus both physical and transcendent.

The contemplative, reflective nature of the process lends the work a depth and compelling gravity.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   There is a tradition of needlework through the ages and all that it means for women and cultures.  The ancestral legacy and dignity of needlecraft connects generations.    

                                                                                                                                                            Elaine Lipson (paraphrased a bit)                               

running in circles

running

running

the running stitch

above, not running stitch
start with two drawn circles instead

running stitch on hankerchiefs

one sided flat stitch

running in zig zags

running and running and running

I've been enjoying producing samples for the workshops in London Ontario next month.
Inspired by traditional embroideries from India, Japan and Scandinavia, I am finding powerful and beautiful connections in our human hand-work across centuries and continents.

A work of art is a gift.

It circulates among us as a reservoir of available life.

Lewis Hyde

At the same time

Repetition is a way to organize the world.
It is a way to help us experience our selves.

In the time it takes to look at the sixty four hankies I am basting into a grid
I experience many other kinds of time.

I experience life and find my own aesthetic in a series of disconnects.

Repetition invokes the already made (memory) at the same time that it invokes the possibility of making something new.

Proust reminds that it is the understated and the apparently indifferent that gives the necessary ground for heightened intensity.

(journal thoughts after reading The Infinite Line by Briony Fer)