Balance and trajectory

I listened to a podcast about speed yesterday (Radiolab). Not the kind we used to take in college to cram for exams, the kind that makes you move from one place to another. They talked about the speed of light, the speed of sound and how this era counts in microseconds and databits.

I experienced the opposite of speed on my travels back from Oregon and the wonderful Design Outside the Lines retreat I taught with Diane Ericson. (f you ever have a chance to study with Diane I highly recommend it. Her approach to garment design changes the axis of the earth.) The folks at the retreat were all hard-working, curious and talented artists. What a joy to work with them!

It took 3 days and 3 cancelled flights to get home. I stood in a lot of lines. I spent time on my phone waiting for help from American Airlines customer service (over two hours!). I had a lot of time to just think and observe. The sound of luggage carts traveling over tiled floors was my soundtrack. It was a test of endurance and one in which I challenged myself to see the humor in it all.

This image really does exist in the Dallas airport. It stopped me in my tracks. I couldn’t imagine why they wanted to show this woman with a lizard on her three breasts.

I saw this unique flower while waiting on hold with the customer service agents. It waved at me.

This little sunscape is actually the leftovers of a STAND 6Ft. APART sticker in the airport security area.

Just when we all thought that the worst was over all the phones in the Dallas airport started buzzing with weather warnings. The PA system told us to move away from the windows and shelter in the bathrooms. We were in the bathrooms for about 30 minutes (luckily I didn’t have to go as it would have been a bit embarrassing. I counted over 50 people in the bathroom I was in. Luckily no damage but the thought that the storm was traveling in the same direction as we were going gave us some pause.

I found a new artist to study—Phillip Curtis. This is his Travelers painting in the Phoenix Art Museum. They look like they are having a lot more fun than I was.

Listening to this podcast brought me around to the present and what I was going to do with it. I am energized, motivated and moved by the details of life — those little uncanny moments of wacko. It is spring in Memphis and my headless team greeted me at the door.

I think I will make more of these until they start making sense to me. You have to have a sense of humor right?

I love a parade

Wrestling with rectangles to create 3D forms just seems like the right thing to do right now. Slicing, folding, forming, stitching, stuffing and exploring dimensional work is a substitute for the quiet contemplation that is required for stitching at the machine. I have to find ways to inject humor and distraction into my news cycle. My body is not my body right now. It aches with worry for the future. I have nervous energy. Itchiness at the edge of consciousness. Sorrow for Ukraine, Syria, Afghanistan, Ethiopia. I feel like we are marching into mountains of disaster. I am building a parade—headless beings marching.

These headless creatures have taken over my studio.

I imagine these creatures as travelers. They could be immigrants, exiles, or blind and willful followers. They have piled their belongings onto their backs to move into a future undefined. They carry their wounds, their heritage and history. They leave family behind and seek family ahead.

They toil and fail and get up again.

Each day they join the parade of the absurd.

I might need more space soon.

Art that travels

I teach next week with the Design Outside the Lines workshop led by Diane Ericson. It’ll be new geography for me. They say that Ashland is a magical town. A week away with creative stitchers always inspires me. It might be best all around for me to let these creatures be for a bit.

My piece, In the Weeds, is showing at the Eastern Tennessee State University Slocum Galleries in a show called Positive/Negative 37. So proud to be part of that innovative show. If you are near their campus drop in to see some great work.

I am preparing a show of my work at the National Quilt Museum in Paducah, Kentucky that debuts in May. The museum has offered me a corner gallery. Working with their curator, I have chosen a selection of my work that represents some of the many directions I have traveled as a stitcher.

I am honored to have been chosen for a residency at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts in June. Working for 22 days in isolation among other artists including writers, painters and photographers will be a new challenge for me. It is on the top of my mind these days. What to bring? All the toys or a slim selection? More on that later. What would you bring to a residency?

I'm breaking out of the rectangle

Cutting up quilts has become a hot topic out in the quilt universe. Many fashion houses and Etsy shops and clothing designers have recognized the incredible raw materials of hand crafted textiles and are beginning to offer items using those scavenged quilts as raw materials for their products. Everything from placemats to red-carpet robes are multiplying and monetizing something that should really be honored, cherished and preserved. Mary Fons made a great presentation regarding this issue on You Tube that has since been taken down. But you can find discussions about it elsewhere on the web.

I remember seeing an ad with the Kardashians in underwear sitting on quilts. I admit I was affronted by it. The juxtaposition of a vintage quilt and white tidy-whiteys on social media personalities was somehow reprehensible to me. It felt like appropriation of something I held dear. I do understand why the art director thought it might be clever though. Quilts have gravitas, memory, comfort and soul.

Melee is breaking out of the rectangle that normally holds my work. This piece includes pieces of cut up quilts that have diverse textures, colors and stitching. It has since been morphed into a pod seen below.

Some have asked me what I think and how my practice of using cut up quilts fits into the discussion. Yes, I do cut up quilts. They are quilts that I have made or have acquired through friends. They represent work that I did in the past and no longer seems relevant in my here and now. The act of cutting them up is deliberate, catalytic and scary. I know when I get out the rotary cutter that I could ruin something that I once cherished.

At first I was using cast off trimmings in the new collages. Then I looked around at some of the pieces that I had created earlier in my career and realized that storing them rolled up in the back room was getting me and them nowhere. Many of them had excellent texture, color or story in them that could live on in a new piece.

Here’s my base understanding as an artist: It’s process, not product. If I think of a piece as something that could have monetary value or brand recognition it loses it’s soul. I will cut up my work to use it again. I will not cut up someone else’s quilt without permission. I won’t cut up vintage quilts found in estate sales. Those have soul. Those have history. They are still warm, comfortable and represent someone’s careful work.

For now, I am cutting up quilts to create 3D forms. I connect the pieces, cut in darts, resew and add curves, then stitch again.

It’s process, not product.

cut and come again

In vegetable gardening the term cut and come again means you harvest the outer mature leaves of lettuce, spinach or greens and let the inner leaves continue growing. I thought about that when I cut up a couple of my quilts this month. Disrupting and Disruptors are two quilts made from cloth I printed with a steamroller a few years back. The design began as a sketch, was transformed to a 4’x8’ woodcut, printed onto fabric with a steamroller and then quilted into three different quilts.

The final quilts looked like this

One of them (the green one below) actually ended up in Quilt National. But the other two travelled a bit and ended up in my storeroom. Because they had similar stitching and similar content I thought it might be interesting to cut them up to create a new piece.

I started with the Disruptors piece by cutting small pieces to create a traditional Storm at Sea pattern . It had light, dark and medium areas that would work for that pattern.

I spent about a week rearranging and cutting pieces up to create variations of this pattern. But I wasn’t getting anywhere, the piece looked boring, bland and bad. I needed more variety and depth as well as a looseness that the Storm at Sea pattern didn’t give me. So I took out the second quilt and cut out some more of the pattern pieces. Adding color to the monochrome composition helped but didn’t inspire me to continue. I piled up the scraps and waited for a miracle to give me a new idea.

I thought that I had just ruined two good quilts.

It’s process not product

When I got into the studio the next day one of the quilts was laying on the table with the holes cut into it. I realized immediately that I liked it better than the patterned work that seemed so labored and boring.

I filled the holes with pieces from the second quilt. The inserted fabric pieces are connected with a ladder stitch by butting the edges together. Then, more stitching merges the background with foreground. Below are some details of that added stitching.

Thus, two became one. I’m still fiddling with more details and I’ll have to stabilize those loose ends but I think this one is about done now. On to the next challenge.

Layered Chaos, 66”x44”

speechless

Navigating the new normal, I am speechless. I can’t seem to get my head into the holiday spirit. It is almost 70 degrees here in Memphis, blustery. That’s just not right. There are hardly any acorns in the yard. The news keeps offering challenging perspectives. Another shooting. More variants. Planes grounded. I could go on. and on. I look for ways to escape the worry by using saturated colors, stitching in mandala form, creating puffy, comforting soft rounded shapes with a hint of rebirth.

At play with stitch

The galleries below offer some distractions in the colors of the season (thank you Kaffe Fasset for the jumping off point). These are 7.5 x 2.5 little collages that give me room to play. I might go looking for some spring colors next. Can you cure melancholia with color?

Many wishes

May your new year be filled with more good news than bad. More potlucks, less politics. More quality, less inequality. More dancing, more laughter, more hugs, more color, more sunshine, more music, more family.