Time is moving fast, though maybe it always feels that way. I missed the last 2 weeks of showing up here, but I’m determined not to always write about my failure to write. I want to practice acknowledging gaps (though they don’t always need to be acknowledged), and moving on.
Life has been hectic, and it seems we have emerged from the slow heavy flatness of winter into spring at a full sprint. The clocks changed, my day job became unimaginably hectic overnight, the calendar is suddenly full. All at once I am too busy, and feeling chronically behind, and yet also all at once I feel momentum. I lean forward downhill and let my feet carry me. There is an energy in me, in my days. The months-long physical ramifications of my neurological stress event last year are finally gone. I hesitate to wave my hand and pronounce the depression of my last many, many grueling seasons over, but I harbor a nascent hope. The narcotic power of sunshine surely helps. (As do vitamin D and B-12, sunshine lamps, the right drugs, and generous support from loved ones.)
In my newfound energy, things are getting done. For the last many months I have been working on and off on a large commission piece, and last weekend I finally completed the top. At approximately 92” x 94”, said top took up the entire design wall in my studio, and so for months on end I have not been able to effectively stand back and observe my other ideas. The night the final seam of the commission piece pulled it all together, I stood looking at that blank white wall feeling somewhat like a kid on xmas — I couldn’t wait to go home to bed, so that the morning would arrive and I could play.
Last month I referenced a body of work I’m currently developing, with each piece operating both as its own container and also as a part of the whole. Right now there are seven known family members in this collection, but they may end up a larger — or smaller — group (my new rule being: fret not, not knowing thy destination).
It’s my memory that I began preparing — collecting, documenting, purchasing, washing, ironing, cutting — the fabric for these last September. I filled my enormous worktable with piles and piles of cut fabric; I made a few tentative blocks. For quite some time after I had done so, I felt a regret, a resistance — I didn’t know if I could make this work, or if I should make it. I didn’t know what it meant to devote myself to this idea, when it seemed probable that forgetting, that putting away, the seed of this work was the “right” thing to do. Not to give it air, and light, but to stifle it in the dark, and hope it would die.
So I took my time. I threw myself fully into other projects, joyful experiments in learning new things without the burden of embodying such personal experiences. Happy work; lighter, freer, and confidence-building. Months went by, and I ignored the piles on my table, shoving them out of the way when I needed the space.
And then the commission piece came down last weekend, and was folded neatly. The back came together in a few quick seams, joined the top in an orderly pile, and the wall was empty. And I was filled with an urgency — a desire — to return to this body of work.
These two, above, are the furthest developed of the family; I think of them as the focal point of the overall concept. I have been calling these pieces The Sisters. They are independent and yet wholly dependent on each other — they are made of the same materials in differing combination. They are two separate bodies, and yet they inform and speak to each other, influence and reference each other; they can both injure and protect each other.
Now that I can finally stand back and take them in, there are ways in which both works are currently failing my initial conception, as well as places where they have created their own unexpected successes. The blue piece is neither dark or cold enough for my liking yet; the red one too soft and gentle, not yet chaotic and unbound. Both will change; neither will likely end up where I anticipate. The plan is that they will both be much, much larger than you see here.
There is a third piece, a ghost piece, that will also be made in the style of these first two; I have not started her yet, but she rolls around in my thoughts these last many months. I first made a sketch of her in a notebook on 10/17, five months ago to the day. In truth I am most afraid of this third piece, as it asks things of me that make me deeply uncomfortable. But unlike last fall, I know that feeling is telling me that I must make the work; and I will.
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PS. The yellow is an unrelated work; a joy-piece. Its name in my head is “The Vat of Acid Episode,” and it exists (at this moment) solely to delight me with color play. This is the piece I referenced in my vintage-fabric-buying binge, and recently on social media, looking for that perfect, elusive, barely-there-dirty lilac. When I need a reprieve from processing the heaviness of The Sisters, I have this bright bit of joy to dip into.