My work is positive

I believe in myself. 

I make things that are sometimes useful. 

I make things that are about being alive in this beautiful world, and about loving people and telling them so.  

Time is the material

 Time independent from me.  Time going on without my intervention, even if I don’t pay attention .  Even if I don’t take a photo or make a note in my diary. 

Time is irreversible.  Time is rhythm and flux.  Time is continuous, even when things within it discontinue.  

And even with a diary, even with noticing, paying attention, yet time is passing anyway.  Time is being used up.  

Lucky

I won the monopoly game last night with luck and karma.  

how content I feel, complete

 Played the piano at the dress rehearsal, made tacos and dough for gingerbread cookies, practiced piano with the girls and lost patience with all of them- am now going to quilt on my commission, Ned is watching Mash.  Now he has gone up to bed.  ‘You lazy dog’ he says to Rufus who is lying on the sofa.  December 1991 journal entry.  

That was then.

This is now.  30 years later.  On the wall in my town studio, the reverse side of Mended World, one of the 4 meditation panels I made with members of my community in 2011.  Blocked and cleaned after world tour with Masterworks: Abstract and Geometric.  There is a Marimekko print on the back of each panel - 90 inches square, they hang in a local church.

When I go into the town studio, I start by reading one of my old journals to set a mood and find my self.  It astounds me how busy I was with the children, yet still did the art. 

walking away, swaying

 artistic experience folded into the textile like dough

Working on the reverse side of endless horizons, using shape as much as line, using space as a place to enter.  

softer is stronger

 

And so I just made it.  I thought “I just want to see what it looks like.”  And somebody asked me, “what does this mean?”  And you know— I can’t quite say.    Kiki Smith

Journey to softness

 Mending all the broken edges and worn out sections with velvet. 

Touch is the mother 

two linen and damask quilt backs

 

"From the age of six I had a penchant for  copying the form of things, and from about fifty, my pictures were frequently published; but until the age of seventy, nothing that I drew was worthy of notice.  At seventy-three years, I was somewhat able to fathom the growth of plants and trees, and the structure of birds, animals, insects and fish.
Then when I reach eighty years, I hope to have made increasing progress, and at ninety to see further the underlying principles of things, so that at one hundred years I will have achieved a divine state in my art, and at one hundred and ten, every dot and every stroke will be as though alive.  Those of you who live long enough, bear witness that these words of mine  prove not false. "

Hokusai's postscript  to One Hundred Views Of Mount Fugi, written at age 73

and I look out the window

and gaze and gaze over Manitowaning Bay
smooth and white and silent.

aunt diana's Indian shawl

the cloud in me
large emptiness small marks
not to know but to go on
sun moon stars
red thread II
cross my heart
manitoulin circle project
story quilts
millennium journal
stitched paper
red thread I
vulnerable
the house with the golden windows
paintings

these are the 14 portfolios I have been sorting all weekend for my new website

don't cry

 

Stop believing in meaning.
Hurry by staying very still.  There is no meaning.
Watch all of time flick by.
Don't cry in front of the children.
Cry all the time.

Lisa Moore   February

gift cloth

I finally sewed these two pieces of cloth together to make a quilt back.
I don't have a front ready, but....

Gasali Adeyemo made the indigo spiral
another friend gave me the border fabric before she died
Cloth holds so many memories, doesn't it. 

these fabrics together

 

I have been cleaning - death cleaning - each night before bed
I bring up 3 books from the stack April put on the floor from the shelf in the studio I am loaning her
and also a handful of something from a shelf or a cupboard...something that I have been saving.

Now I am in my cloth cupboard, and it's interesting how going through everything slowly causes me to re-evaluate, be inspired anew, or give away.