The Things I Used to Do – More on Those Artist Retreats

Beach chair at Puget Sound
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This is a photo I took at Puget Sound when our artist retreat was there for a week of working and talking and looking closely. This chair was left on the beach and looked so inviting. It was a place you could sit and forget everything, just let yourself go and pretend there was nothing more important than just letting go. But I did realize that sooner or later I would have to get back to the work I thought was important at the time. I was hand stitching with secret written spun shifu threads that were made to hold patches of old clothes belonging to my husband and I into small panels to then be pieced into a large quilt shaped like a calendar month of our anniversary. At the time of the retreat we had been married for over thirty years and it seemed like a good project to work on – commentary on being together for so long. (Now we are coming up to number forty-eight, rare in this day and age.)

Marriage
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This is a detail of what turned out to be more than five by seven. Each square is a day of the month of October. Coffee filters, spun and cut into quarters, clothes and a transparent cloth for the backing. Some days there were bits of gold, some days the thread of shifu was ragged. I like this piece and exhibited it shortly after it was finished.

Near Puget Sound
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When I wasn’t wandering the beach, I found other places to sit and write. I will be taking a writing class this next week and my head will be on character and story development. It won’t be my story but I see myself in almost all of the women I have conjured up. It is going to be good to get back to them and others that may just suddenly show up in a writing class when the instructor gives a prompt.

I sketched some of the pieces I photographed and referred to two books I was using at the time, Anne Lindbergh’s Gift From the Sea, and Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space. After a year of sketching and writing in my book not only quotes from their books but my response to some of what they said, I created this work. It was a way to interpret the three way dialog we shared for about a year and ended up on another quilt piece. The pages from the sketch book were torn out and hand stitched to hand written text pages. The remains of the book became a receptacle for a small vial with a tiny burr in it. The book was embedded with soils of home and roots.

One Year Away on Exhibit
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Here it is on exhibit and a detail below. What I learned was that Anne Lindbergh came and wrote from a place of privilege and much as I loved her descriptions, I did not find her all that easy to identify with.  On the other hand, Gaston Bachelard is someone I have referred to over and over again. It is the one important book I talk about to students who are thinking about ways to visually describe space. My copy of Poetics of Space is the most dog-eared book on my shelves.

One Year Away
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And now I am going to go off and do more supervised writing, do as much listening as i possibly can, which is hard at my age (seventy-one) when my mind is in a state of constant chatter and insists I pay attention.

 

 

The Things I Used to Do – Textile Influences in New Mexico

Ghost Ranch rag on pipe
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I used to belong to an art group that consisted of several artists from around the country. It seemed like a good idea to be with others who I respected and shared common interests in how we worked. Many had textile backgrounds and were recognized in the field of tapestry and stitch. We would meet somewhere in the United States that was inspiring for the one week of making and discussing, making and discussing.

The members changed over time. Some left, other joined and then it ended. The first one was one I set up at the original site of Black Mountain College. We had a large old house away from others at the location that is now a spiritual camp of some sort. We made our own meals, worked on a large covered porch, drank wine and talked art. Sometimes I read from Remembrance of Things Past by Proust. A couple of years later with some leaving and others joining, we met out on the Pacific Coast. It was on this retreat that I spent more time by myself and more time writing. And a few years after that we gathered at Ghost Ranch in New Mexico. I took the picture above on a walk into the outback. I set out to concentrate on using just gauzy fabrics to capture visually how it felt to be there through layered images of what I saw.

Here are what ended up being some of the pages of a book.

Ghost Ranch Textile 1
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Ghost Ranch Lizard
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Ghost Ranch Holes
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I liked doing these small pieces. And I liked sketching and walking and visiting. I also liked that I could get up extremely early and do my tai chi in the desert where no one could watch and prepare myself for how to proceed that day with fabric and thread – how I could ignore everyone around me until the magic hour of five o’clock when we gathered to show what we had accomplished, talk about our journey and drink the wine that made that last part easier to do. It was our final meeting. Life, careers and other more important things took our interest and time. I assume all of them are still doing their artwork. A few I keep in touch with, but mostly I simply remember those times as ones of great discovery about myself and my passions.

Ghost Ranch Sketchbook
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Back to In Search of Lost Time

Proust palace and first book clock
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I have come back to the present and am working on more of the series titled, In Search of Lost Time. The second one is finished now and is another sculpture made of old brass clock parts, frames and foundry molds. The entire last section of Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past is cut into one quarter inch strips and glued one to the other end to end to make one long, long bit of text….rather like his sentences. Here is a picture of it sitting next to the first of the series. And a picture of the back.

proust synopsis out the back
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Now I am working on the accordion style book made from wooden covers and another clock part.

I wanted eight collagraphs that had holes that went through all the way to the back of the book.  Here is the process so far. The cover, the collagraphs before and after being inked, and finally the prints 1-8 hung to dry before holes are cut and the book finished.

wood covered book
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eight collagraphs
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collagraph plates
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collagraphs 1-4
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collagraphs 5-8
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Some More of Those Things I Used to Do – Tribal Influences

South Africa
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Soweto
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In the early 90s I had collected quite a few pieces from Africa. Mostly they were textiles and baskets that I would buy from my favorite importers who I would see at conferences. It was also at the time that apartheid was coming to a close in South Africa and the Turnley brothers had published a book of their amazing photographs of the transition of living conditions for those steeped in those political conditions. I bought the book simply because once picked up, it was impossible to put down. I used the faces of two couples from the book. It gave me an opportunity to really study the faces, the expressions that reflected the harshness of their situations. And especially their closeness in hard times. These two works were never exhibited as I remember, but I could never quite part with them either. I still love looking into their faces and the bits and pieces from my studio that I chose to represent their individual surroundings. I have always felt the use of the images and African culture was an appropriation of something not my own. Although I can be amazed that I actually got the likenesses so well with painting on tapa cloth, they still were not photos that I took and the photo imagery is what makes them work.

Later during the war of the former Yugoslavia I would cross this line again, and for four years of that war collect the newspaper images that I simply could not throw away. And after a year of collecting them and the letters I wrote to a journalist and the president, I covered coats made from old blankets with them. Four years of coats that showed in images how the war changed not only its victims but how it was reported. I still have those coats and the child’s casket that holds all those photos and letters and the remains of flowers that I picked for those women who endured so much. I have no idea how to get rid of them all, but I will, some day.

But back to the influences of the tribal. I made this small tapestry of a young woman in a doorway wearing what she sees in her landscape. At the time I was weaving baskets on the loom using a warp of threads and filling in every shed change with fibers only used to make baskets. This small tapestry had a lovely time out this past year on exhibit called “The Art of the Cloth.” The image below it is a chair I made in 1994 with Don Brundrick. It is mountain laurel and all the coverings are African mud cloth.

Tapestry Woman
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African Chair with Don Bundrick
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And one more image of gourd baskets made with knotting techniques and a collection of beads from Africa. One long gourd was cut in two pieces. the knotted cap with beads and bronze pieces closes the top and is filled with clay beads from there. The long neck of the gourd has brass coins and beads that give a muffled jingle sound when it is tipped back and forth. The cut end of it is also knotted closed. These along with the fertile female figure with a clay head and coiled head dress for a closure still sit together on a chest in the foyer with African baskets and the two couples portraits close by.

African Gourd Pieces
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I don’t do work like this anymore. But I still love the feel, the smell, the look and the sound of these pieces. They share space with other gourd pieces, a Masai yogurt pouch with a hide cover and unbelievably strong odor inside and an incised gourd from the Smithsonian Museum. So much of this work has the mark and identity of the hands that made them.