Conversation with my daughter

You can only talk about your own experience and your own family heritage.  

Mending this bed quilt is more than re-claiming the linen damask backing cloth and more than extending its life.  Mending it in a beautiful, artful manner will honour the life-cycle of the flax and the labour that went into processing the fibres and the weaving of them.  

You are moving this linen from domestic work and allowing it to rest.  

  

Like an ocean. Like the sky.

Why do it? 

The older I get, the more mysterious that seems.  When I’m really working well, the work has no meaning.  I want to get in touch with something more mindless.  Intuitive.  

Things are formless, hard to grasp.  Like an ocean.  Like the sky.  I never thought to call my work a pleasure.  I just felt the compulsion to do it.  The making is not just busy work.  The making and the thinking bypass the brain yet still leave signs of intelligence.  

Vija ‘s Celmin’s  interview in Border Crossing #87 much shortened and paraphrased.  

Linen

Space and Time!  

What I guessed at.  

What I guessed when I loafed on the grass.  

What I guessed while I lay alone in my bed

and again as I walked the beach 

under the paling stars of the morning.  Space and Time.  

Walt Whitman

that story was your life

 I sometimes imagine my whole life as though I was a needle leaving a trail of thread that sewed together the world as I went by, quilting it altogether in some way that matters even though it can hardly be traced.  As though walking was sewing and sewing was telling a story and that story was your life.  

Rebecca Solnit. (Abbreviated slightly) 

Processing Mortality

David Hockney’s work is a manifestation of unconditional love for the universe.  

“Don’t you see?  In my pictures, I take all the trauma out.  That’s my form of resistance.  “ David Hockney 
 

The golden notebook

 6 am

We are both up.  He has started the coffee and is unloading the dishwasher.  Today - I’m finishing the Beauty sleeve.  Because I’m up early, I think I can do 30 minutes of journal transcribing.  I’m working on the journal I kept the summer I turned 40.  The Golden Notebook.    

the monstera

There is a lot of demand to perform biographical confessions as a means to authenticity.  Yet these expectations come with moral obligation to provide solution for world problems. Artists aren't given room to think about the world in complex ways outside of their autobiography.  

Artists tell stories about what is happening in the world we inhabit.  The story does not have to be exclusively about us.  We can be witnesses.  

Abbas Akhaven - 2026 Venice Biennale representative from Canada