whole cloth

 

self knowledge of our own mortality rises up

string piecing

 

Why let material be inert when it can be dynamic?

at least y - o - u should know

 

Embroidery is very closely related to painting.  It is constantly changing with every new style each epoch brings.  It is an art and ought to be treated like one, even if thousands upon thousands of sweet female hands- displaying scant skill, no taste or colour sense, and not a hint of inspiration - 'mis'handle quantities of good material as foolishly as possible and call the results embroidery.

Have you no eyes to see what is happening in your own time?  How art now, right now, is going through major revolutions and that soon it will be changed, cleansed and with huge momentum?

Just as it is no longer enough for a painter to just replicate naturalistic little flowers, a still life, a nude, it is essential that in the future embroidery should once again develop a feeling for abstract forms, so that beauty, emotions, spirit and yes, soul will return to it.

Doesn't Japanese embroidery display its own civilization and are not peasant embroideries and folk art the embodiment of feelings executed with primal force?  What qualities!

But you, craftswomen, modern women, who feel that your spirit is in your work, who are determined to lay claim to your rights (economic and moral), who believe your feet are firmly planted in reality, at least y - o - u should know your embroidery work is a documentation of your own era.

Hannah Hoch  wrote this in  1918.

plant dyed wool

Joyce Wieland

Working from the well spring of who she was, a woman and a feminist, meant accepting an inescapable identity that modified her position in art.  Because as a woman she was marginal even though she was the country's leading woman artist by the late 60's.

Her art was her life and her life was her art.

She discovered that time in plenty and an abundance of ideas are the necessary basics of creativity. She dreamed.    She used her ideas to create works from her own experiences and the layers of who she was.

In March 1955 she worried over a question.  Either-Or.

Marriage - or - an artist career.

what I know

 

It's still hard for me to believe that what I know is what others want to learn.

stroke of genius

 

 

I woke up early and finished the needle wrap.  I love it.

I've been working hard on the prep for the workshop in Newfoundland.  On the phone yesterday, daughter asked if I'd received my 'stroke of genius' yet.

Partly because of the slow stitch meeting on Thursday. ( I had asked for advice and the ladies were opinionated and supportive.)

Partly because of the new Slow Stitch book that arrived in the mail.

I said that yes I had!

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.

the constant danger

 

The constant danger of spiritual death that confronts the creative woman.

Merely to speak out, to describe the daily ways of your life, is political.

how should a person be?

 

Most people lead their private lives.
They have been given a natural modesty that feels to them like morality, but it's not.  It's luck.

They shake their heads at the people with their clothes off rather than learning about human life from their example,
but they are wrong to act superior.

Some of us have to be naked, so the rest can be exempted by fate.

Sheila Heti page 60  How Should A Person Be?

the matriarchal aesthetic

 

 

matriarchal aesthetic

art is not a thing
art is a process

a process of magical transformation