The following was posted to restingmotion yesterday. Because it is about stitching, I have decided to double post it here.
I don't yet know if this will be a regular occurrence, or in fact what direction my blog entries will be following as I am finding myself on new ground and am settling in. Still sewing, still playing with thread, just evolving.
Thank you for your patience.
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A week ago today I came home from a workshop at Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts in nearby Gatlinburg. This is what I took: The Boro Stitch as a Brush Stroke, taught by Deborah Fell.
I had been looking forward to the class all year, and although I had ended up missing other classes due to annoying health issues, I was determined not to miss this one. I didn't really know what to expect. I didn't think I would learn a lot, technique wise, but I hoped this would ignite a creative spark. I was right and wrong. Oh so very wrong. And yet completely on point.
In fact I found the workshop overwhelming. I was tired. One week post my third ablation and fourth surgery since March, I was very tired. But sometimes it seems that exhaustion allows cracks to appear that otherwise might have been remained firmly shut.
I had been wanting to play for a long time. I had dreams and ideas and I would sketch them out in my crude fashion, dump my fabrics and yarns in a pile and stare at them in frustration only to pack them up again and go back to something tried and true and familiar.
Our studio space was filled with inspiration. Deborah brought many samples. I took many many photos, most of which seemed to have disappeared, although I am certain I took them. That doesn't really matter. It seems to me, and I do not think my brain is the only brain wired this way, that inspiration files both inspire and limit. Perhaps better that ideas become fleeting memories.
Some photos remained though, and I made a collage of some of Deborah's work that she brought to share. For me, perhaps the collage itself, both in the act of combining the images and as a reference piece for my own folder, is greater generator of ideas than the individual works were, as much as I admired them.
That first day, I was very overwhelmed. I was tired. I was dehydrated. My pulse was erratic. I perhaps had too much to drink the night before following a very stressful drive. I was too literal in my intent and that is quite a statement from a woman who believes life itself is a metaphor.
We were supposed to let grow of rules but I struggled with that idea. I wanted to make neat orderly controlled embroidery stitches, exactly the kind of stitching I used to make, but at the same time the kind of stitching I have been struggling with lately. My hands do not work they way my younger hands worked. But eventually something snapped in place and I realized that it is not just my hands that do not want to do what they used to do; my psyche also wander in new fields, fields of random stitches and overlapped collages of life.
Things started to loosen up on the second day. I had always been happy to be there, in this workshop with my fellow students, but something started to become easier. At some point on Wednesday I was bubbling with excitement. An idea had cropped into my head, and as I pursued it, sparks started firing and one little patchwork sampler took on a life of its own. Black canvas, various upholstery fabrics, thread, bronzed wire, sisal twine. This was the first piece that I felt was really finished, was itself, and came from some place outside my conscious control. It is still perhaps my favorite piece of the workshop, although I did not say that at the end, when we were supposed to evaluate our own work. It was all too emotional for me then, too connected to what I wanted it to be, too connected intention and desire, struggle and hope. Even a day later my perspective changed.
Honestly, I think everything I did was a success, even those pieces that are not successful in and of themselves, not successful as something I want to save. I suspect that some are simply unfinished. Some might be cut up again and take on new lives. Who knows. But the success is in the play, in taking those first steps and sometimes in learning that forcing the issue is the wrong path to take. There are one or two pieces I want to love, that started off with promise, and which I initially was quite satisfied with, but which now I see took a hard turn in the wrong direction, where I forced the issue, letting my conscious mind determine the direction the work should. Somewhere, subconsciously, it knew what it wanted to be. But I lacked trust.
Looking at the photo above, at my own body of work, I see things differently than I did at the time. Distance. Perspective. I see connectivity that I had not noticed; potential as well.
That one week at Arrowmont was probably the best thing I did this year, even at the risk of exhaustion, or as mentioned above perhaps because of that very same exhaustion. It wasn't just me. It wasn't being inspired by Deborah Fell's work, but by the entire class, by the people I met, the work I saw around me both in the studio I was working in, in artist's presentations, in odd corners here and there. I had misplaced something and I found it again. My hold is still tenuous. But that is part of the journey.
My other favorite piece is not in the photo above. I finished it the last morning. It started out as a stitch sampler, an attempt to solve a problem in another one of the sampler squares (which is on that wall), but it suddenly took on a life of its own, becoming its own thing. It doesn't matter what kind of thing it is, or in a sense if it is "art" or not, if it is "good" or not, simply that it is what it needs to be.
I see a lot of playing in my future. Everything is a new spark. Everyday is a new ignition point.
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