slow stitching

 

Our whole process can shift
we will consider our materials and their provenance
we will think about tradition, about cultural attributes, about meaning of the cloth
we will reflect

This is an optimistic way to be
we will be changed
we will appreciate the textiles around us
we will see new connections, understand new and old stories
we will see how much we have in common.

Claire Wellesley-Smith ideas

moon cloth my darling

Never say you don't like something you've made.

time passes over the earth

 

 

breathing
forest
tenderness
time passes over the earth
the weight
tight with the turbulent stuff
compact
essential
substantial
delicate
watchful
strenuous
dust of the world
solitude
exile
life and earth

stitched painting

 

"People don't always want to talk about real things. There are so many conversations that cannot happen.  Every now and then I get to have intimate conversations.  In between, I enjoy painting. Painting offers me everything and I take full advantage of it."

Lucy Mink Cavello

"All the other things in my life are hard, but painting is not."

underlying mystery

 

 

 

 

There is an underlying mystery in the structural system
of the materials we use, and the discovery and expression of
that mystery is a valid pursuit and an art form.

An Anni Albers idea

touch is like dizziness

 

 

All touch traverses the boundary between interiority and externality

and then returns to the agent of touching.


Touch, like dizziness, is a threshold activity.

A place where subject and object are quite close to each other.

Susan Stewart

From her museum of touch essay in Material Memories: Design and Evocation

intuitive flip and stitch

 

 

What is it?
A square of texture.  Desert-hued but soft like fur is.

Why did you make it?

To explore the velvet I dyed with plants.
I wanted to use this slippery cloth in intuitive foundation work.

It is a sample of intuitive flip and stitch.

slow design

 

  

My ideas don't occur in a specific moment.
They are more like processes.

nina canell  sculptor

I don't exactly know

 

 

take away the sun
paint the moon white
put the sun into a darker sky

simplicity / complication

sky

 

 

the window must be large

so that my viewer can step into it

and be enveloped

the moon and the sun

 

In effect there are five senses and thought is the sixth.
That is the best thing that humankind possesses.

Alighiero Boetti artist

intuition / tuition

 

 

An artist starts with chance and works towards order.

Not the other way around.  (starting from order, hoping to introduce chance).

How to teach this?
Can I teach this?

answer from Ben Shahn artist
It is not a built-in.  Intuition is not something with which one is born.  Intuition in art actually is the result of long prolonged tuition."

the experience

 

  

It's during the making.
It's not afterwards.
It's not because of a good review.
It has to do with ideas coming together to somehow make this greater whole where everything becomes clear.
It's quite a strange experience.
I think many artists would say there is a moment when that happens, in whatever medium they're working, and when it is a really good piece of art, it can also give that experience to the viewer.

quote from mike nelson interview in border crossings

 

 

You construct a thing and then you work in a sense of play.
To allow that play within a tight structure is a good thing.
That's the art.

You're being delivered an idea through a language of formal beauty.
That sort of alchemy or magic comes through the act of looking.

Through looking you get this emphatic sense.

Mike Nelson - artist

silence

 

 

I reference the horizon line.
I want to work in a poetic way
I live quite far away from art galleries

being an artist who works with cloth is solitary
But that is who I am.

an idea

 

 

the work of art
is not meant to be
contemplated as an object
but as an
idea

desperately standing still

 

 

I'm comforted by the reminder that for centuries,
creative work has come from the most ordinary things.

Children, pets, fruit trees, seasons and the passage of time.
byron wolfe - everyday: a year long photo diary