and now the back

When you tell your life story it helps you live longer.

Carol Shields

folding, unpicking, sticking

 

 

Be like the humble postage stamp.
Stick at one thing until you get there.

merry christmas

I have begun to think about the coming year and that I am turning 65 in 2016.  I am inspired by my own life.   This will be the year of reflection.  When I read those old journals, I still find things that teach me.  Now I am thinking of using my own body of work as another way to reflect  - and am turning to the unfinished projects as a way to move ahead, if that makes sense.  I am using the limit of my design wall as a metaphor for my own mortality - my own limits - and it is pretty big.  The finished pieces are beyond my reach in all directions - which is how I have always wanted to work.  That's what I keep saying - but in 2015, all the pieces I completed were small.  2016 - I want to work as large as my limit.

This is the quilt top today, December 22.  It has been ten years since I have pieced a quilt like this from multiple patterns and with a lot of colour.  Sewing has been therapeutic for me and also thought provoking.  I may never show this particular piece but the quilt top at least will be completed by the end of the month.  I already have ideas for the next two quilts, also based on the 9 patch but much much simpler and as big as my design wall.  2016 will be the year of making.

pieces of time

"I can't believe that form is more important than life."  Eva Hesse

Eva Hesse became original as an artist by letting the materials dominate.

feeling better

I am filling the wall.

Year's ago, Ned made me a false wall of foam for my home studio.  It's covered with linen and was cleaned up with latex wall paint once.  It's square.  I should measure it I guess.  Although it's not as large as the 10 foot walls I had in my town studio (lost in 2013) it is what I have to work with and I will use its limitations, not whine about them.  I am colouring right up to the edges.  It's large enough that I have to stand outside of the room to take a photo,

I can't explain exactly why making is so healing, but it is.

reach

In 1962 Magdalena Abakanowicz was invited to participate in the Lausanne International Tapestry Biennale.

"I found it fascinating, not realizing that I was entering a kind of ghetto, and that from this moment on I would be labelled a fiber artist".  M. A. 

all my life, later

 

 

No imagination is great enough to know before the works are done what they will be like.
We do not clearly know where we will arrive in our work.
Although we set the compass, we are led by materials and work process.  We have plans and blue prints, but the finished work is still a surprise.

In art work experience is immediate.
We can't postpone the use of what we learn.
Our education prepares us for a later day - a day that never comes.

Knowing for later is not knowing at all.

Anni Albers  1944

in the Dominican

 

 

I love that she tells me everything will be all right.
I love that she tells me this again and again.
She's my mother and that's what mother's say.
Bob Marley says it too but he says every LITTLE thing gonna be all right
and that  strikes me as an appropriate qualifier.

Miriam Toews

My travel hoop

 

My goal is to fill at least one travel hoop a day.