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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.)

 

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.

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.

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.

 

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.

 

 

 

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.

 

 

 

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.