Newsletter July 2021
Notes on the making of my project (previously/tentatively titled) Love, Life, Laughter
I just finished listening to the audio version of Threads of Life, A History of the World Through the Eye of a Needle, by Clare Hunter. I listened (as opposed to reading) so I could do so while continuing work on a body of work consisting of about twelve framed “paintings” that are sculptural tapestries, weavings, embroideries, feltings, and also actual paintings. Sewing and crochet is also a part of it all. They are various sizes, but most of them are pretty large.
This body of work, that I’m now nearly done with, has been a marvelous process that started once I moved back to the Monterey Peninsula, to a city called Marina, in 2018, where I realized I was finally ready to focus on my work in a new way- while in the middle of all the ordinary life “things,” that really took me many, many years to grow comfortable with. Isn’t that a funny thing?
It also took me quite a lot of time to shake off the ways of thinking, implanted into my brain during my late-in-life but really wonderful and definitely necessary experience of art college/graduate school. Everyday living and the rules of art and writing distracted my attention and halted a freedom that came from the kind of creation I did before I went back to college. Of course a lot of that old work was complete shit.
It started with this compulsion I had for years, since maybe 2009, where I wanted to create frames out of branches. It was tricky though, because my living situations didn’t allow me the space to explore this, and also the view of these experiments through the different people I lived around affected my feeling of freedom to move through these inclinations. It meant that there were large, dirty branches in shared spaces where I did not feel confident or supported in this kind of exploring. You know when you are doing something that will most certainly be questioned but you really don’t know how to defend it yet so it seems ridiculous and impractical and so you accept the perception of others instead of plowing through the discomfort? That sort of thing. (I want to vow to never do that again.)
But when I moved back to Marina, watched my father die, and lived for a time with my mother during her initial feelings of grief, I simply made a space in a tool shed to finally start realizing these forms. I suppose the reality of death helped push me along to just start. Life is short.
I also joined a collective art studio where I worked in some small areas with other artists. Seeing my work within the space of what others were doing and engaging in conversations about it all was a big step in my refining the idea and the processes. The branches ended up going away, for the most part. The weaving evolved and the embroidery stayed.
The best thing though, was later moving into a living space that allowed for my partner and I to both focus on our creative work. Before this we lived in the tiniest space in Hollywood, California. Now we have a shared storage unit and I have my own personal room/studio. While it’s not quite as large as I need, it’s a place where the work stares at me and I attend to it at any time of the day or night, if I’m not taking care of those aforementioned “life things.” I now have a private studio where I work things out. Soon we are moving into an even larger space.
But back to Clare Hunter’s book-
If it weren’t for my day job of teaching, I would not have clicked on a video a few months ago, of a fashion show for Christian Dior’s 2021 resort collection show in Puglia, Italy, which was a tribute to Italian arts and crafts from this area. I was teaching fiber arts to a teen.
I went back, in my mind, to when I was my student’s age and how much fashion opened up my world. For me it was the late 1980’s fashion/pop-culture magazines from Europe, as well as the U.S. that introduced me to art. The art made on the Monterey Peninsula wasn’t stuff that led me to think of concepts or big ideas or the stories of the materials- but fashion in magazines did. The articles and interviews with designers and artists opened me up to all kinds of bonkers ideas that were exciting and connected to my young desire for life.
Ever since I moved back home, and since living through my forties, I had been thinking so much about the loss of the wonder I once had and the way that sort of youthful enthusiasm evolves- as it’s all now a life that I have experienced. In fact there were even more fantastic and challenging things that have occurred, that I didn’t expect.
What is exciting and motivating when there are less things that are unknown or un-experienced? That’s a typical middle-aged question, now isn’t it? And I’m not interested in having that question answered- But when I teach art to teens, it’s important to get back to that youthful headspace, albeit in this older skin, brain and heart that’s done a lot of things.
Now, maybe instead of dreams of future experiences, the mystical, magical, labor-intensive work that is my personal art process HAS to be connected to the everyday- despite unwanted obligations and toxic energies of people around us (and on the internet). This is a motivating challenge. It’s not so exciting, but it is something that keeps me trusting and plugging along.
Unexpectedly, my student and I both watched, via Zoom (during a pandemic), a fashion show that told this giant story that both of us didn’t really understand but we felt connected to it. It led me to finding some more videos with Maria Grazia Chiuri, where she talked about the long history of crafting and making in Puglia, and how her father was from there. She even had a line of ceramic dishes created with tarot card symbols. The tarot symbols tell something about the area, but also something about the actual designer, Christian Dior, and how he used to use the cards to try and connect with the spirit of his sister. All really cool things- so many layers and so inspiring! (Even though the whole thing is a commercial project and funded by giant corporate goblins and so much of it is all a big dirty business…)
In any case, my student moved on to learning of other designers, finding her own voice and inspiration in many places, as she should, but I now knew about this creative person (Chiuri) and began following her on social media, which led to the Dior winter collection and this giant collaborative tapestry made for the show. She mentioned Clare Hunter’s book being a huge inspiration and that is when I purchased the audio book.
In the book Hunter talks about the ways sewing and embroidery projects have been done because they can be easily worked on and put away. Sometimes hidden. They can tell the stories of people without anyone needing to read or spell anything. A visual language that can be created out of scraps. This is part of what I had been exploring in my own work.
She talks about the Arpilleras of Chile. Women in the 1970’s who lost their children during the time of Pinochet’s dictatorship. They made tapestries that told the story of their missing children. It was a way of being subversive, as the works made their ways to other places in order to communicate what was happening. Their “women’s work” was viewed as harmless (for a time), and as well, could be made secretly.
My mother left Chile for America in 1969 and didn’t learn about the Arpilleras, but I felt something familiar when I learned about them. It connected me to some reason why I might be inclined to use these mediums- why it all feels so right.
I feel my work is connected to my own personal kind of spirituality- wherever that comes from. It’s devotional and in the process, discoveries are made. Like a personal form of communication/communion and esoteric learning. It means a lot to me.
For as long as I can remember I’ve been making work that explores eyes- most recently forming my own version of one of those woven “God’s Eye” pieces, and in it I created an eye out of some moldable plastic. While it might remind one of those glass evil-eye talismans, I never, ever get away from depicting the eye, in one way or another.
Once that latest “eye” piece was completed I donated it to an organization that was raising money to support the Black Lives Matter movement.
During the time of making that piece, I saw an article having to do with people in Chile that were having their eyes permanently damaged by the police who were shooting rubber bullets and spraying tear gas into the faces of those who were demanding change. This damage was so prevalent and horrific that protesters adopted the wearing of an eye patch to symbolize the issue of police abuse and injustice. People drew eyes onto cardboard and held these signs up as a symbol of protest. I was intrigued by this unexpected connection, and glad to be able to connect my heritage (although I don’t speak Spanish and have never been to Chile) to this intuitive process and also the feelings of injustice and the need for change in my own country.
All that said, my own process with these mediums has less to do with a direct story or message. Instead, I’m mining my past visual tendencies, now that I know more and have learned more about form. I’m following my intuition again, when it comes to working with color and texture, shapes and even “concepts,” although I always have done this when things were going well. It’s all an exploration of form and it’s revealing itself to me. It all takes a lot longer than I’d like, even when I have the time to focus only on the making.
The story I’m telling involves creatures and eyes and even teeth… It tells the story of form through materials. If it’s a tapestry that tells the viewer about where I come from then it says I come from a land of colorful monsters, so take that for whatever it’s worth-
But, as well, when I walk around the communities I grew up within, here on the central coast of California, I see the landscape of ice plants and sand, oak trees, eucalyptus, pine and the big redwoods, as well as the ocean and seaweed. Sea lion and feathery bird corpses decomposing on the beach where the wind blows the fog inland and makes everything taste salty.
I’m accepting my visual, internal “database,” whether it’s corporeal or not, and sharing my confidence within the parameters of this language, as well as my use of materials. I’m finding connections within these worlds of thinking and making and I’m trusting that the work will connect with others as it does to me.
