more on the laundry...

And yes, somehow this all relates to the Oriole's nests.

There is a compelling intimacy in cloth -- aprons, dishcloths, towels, shirts, sheets, etc. And the rhythm of laundry, the cycles and the meditative folding (peaceful if you don't have more of it than you have time for), all are meaningful. Domestic, that's an aspect of this, but not the whole story.

Magdalene is trembling, like the washing on the line

Trembling and gleaming...


Two lines from a Joni Mitchell song. I wrote a poem once that took some inspiration from those two lines, concerning cloth. (Read it here if you can tolerate some poetry.)

The "Ash Wednesday" piece from the 2007 series made the most direct reference to the Lenten season of that year and what a difficult time it was. (See below.) The series itself came in response to a call for work for a show I was helping to organize at the time, called Capax: The Extraordinary Within the Ordinary. And laundry, as an ordinary activity with interesting byproducts (lint, dryer sheets etc) was already on my mind. So I found some thoughts and notions within that, evoked for me and not entirely universal, and attached them to the objects in the series. It started with the Laundry List: worn out, expelled, vacant, shed, delivered, emerges. A list of words describing some of the materials I would use, and alluding abstractly to a state of mind as well. But "emerges" -- a hopeful new state of being, something from nothing. It was Lent, after all, and I work for the church so there are references here to Easter and resurrection as well. It's a distinctly Christian reference, but wasn't intended as the body of the message. Not that these references are separable, either, and I make no excuse for them.

(One feels a little defensive in expressing the overtly spiritual in contemporary art, since the two worlds, art and faith, often collide rather than combining.)

In "Ash Wednesday" the bleached sheets on the line represent souls freed by death, willingly I hope, though suddenly in many cases. But clean, finally, and relieved of suffering. Death has I think that association for me, overall -- in my poem about my grandmother's death, there are references to clean white paper and a field of snow. And I've seen death over my shoulder too, though just once, and to my eye it was a field of white static, the void. Frightening then, but it was a bad time for me then and even in my suffering at the time death wasn't truly what I sought. So. On the tag at the top of "Ash Wednesday" it said "white sale," a play on words with reference to the t.s. elliot poem on the opposite side of the piece; ironically, the ink has almost completely faded from that one particular piece of cloth.

Lenten Laundry

Lenten Laundry: There is no human experience it seems that does not somehow involve the use of cloth, or weaving. In the incidental details of life lived I often locate the folds of some material always imbued with the detritus of living: the clothes on our backs and the stains and scents of where we've been, the evidence; the process of laundering that past, and the telltale byproducts of the laundering, the dryer lint, the paper accidentally wadded and washed, the spent softener sheets. Similar evidence washes up on the shores of consciousness: eggshells from a newly fledged songbird, or the bones of a songbird caught in the pellet left by the owl or the hawk. A worn out dishrag, a stained coffee filter, a tuft of cat hair -- we leave so much behind and the clues are often wrought of fibers, are organic, they continue after our use for them is exhausted, they go unnoticed in the sea of objects and ciphers. I am captivated by the intimacy of what we leave behind, by the cloth of our experiences.

Each of the seven pieces seen below are double-sided. All are roughly six by eight inches, except for Ash Wednesday, which is closer to eight by ten inches. Special materials include dryer lint, vintage aprons, an owl pellet, chickadee egg shells, a wire mesh hose filter (for the laundry tub), communion wafer, wine, fabric softener sheets and other found materials.

This series informs the piece I'm currently working on (see below). The experiment has since morphed into a series of fabric pieces (art quilts?) diverging along lines of spiritual expression, politics, death and decay, nature and the domestic. The series has been exhibited twice, installed in a church space and in the basement of a warehouse, hung by pins on clothesline, in no particular order.

Lenten Laundry Series: Through the Wringer, 2007

Please note that this is a new posting of old work. Originally I'd conceived this series of objects as pages in a book -- "Through the Wringer" would have been the cover -- but I found as I progressed that they didn't especially want to be pages. The objects are scraps really, laundry leavings.

I tend to try new techniques by jumping in with both feet, and my technical skills have continued to improve since this project began (an apology to the purists.) 7x4" -- paper, cloth, wire, lint, netting, ink.

Lenten Laundry Series: If Desired, 2007

5 1/2 x 7" -- cloth (recycled apron), lint, flannel, cotton batting, paper, ink, pins, recycled brewing bag.

Lenten Laundry Series: Hung Out to Dry, 2007

5 3/4 x 7 1/4" -- fabric, batting, recycled brewing bag, plastic, paper, ink, owl pellet.

Lenten Laundry Series: To the Cleaners (dirty laundry), 2007

6x7 1/2" -- synthetic netting, recycled brewing bag, found plastic, cloth, thread, lint, beads, thorns, batting, used dryer sheet, drycleaners tags, ink.

Lenten Laundry Series: Delicate Cycle, 2007

6x6 1/2" -- cloth, paper, button, beads, decorative yarn, plastic mint container, chickadee eggshells, recycled brewing bags, used dryer sheet.

Lenten Laundry Series: Deep Colors Bleed, 2007

4 1/2 x 6" -- cloth, lint, recycled brewing bag, batting, communion wafer, wine, beads, thread.

Lenten Laundry Series: Ash Wednesday, 2007

This piece may not have been the last one completed, though as I recall each object was progressively larger than the last. 7 x 10 3/4" -- cloth, recycled brewing bag, ink, fresh dryer sheets. Each of the eight sheets blowing from the line stands for one of the eight people who died, in my personal and professional worlds, during Lent 2007. An old friend of my husband's died suddenly from an undiagnosed cancer; my cousin Paul committed suicide; the granddaughter of church members died of aneurysm in her eighth month of pregnancy (baby Caleb was delivered safely); and then elder member Dorothy stopped eating, and passed; two other elderly women of the congregation died; a pillar of the church died suddenly after choking in a restaurant and slipping into a coma; and right after Easter the wife of a friend and Pastor died of colon cancer, after a long decline. It was one funeral per week, and then some, throughout Lent that year. We were all pretty shell-shocked in the end.

And of course, after that there's only t.s. elliot.

more great nests!

nests...

It's been a long week. Late meetings, lots of angst and wrangling, lots of people feeling blue with all this rain coming down. And a tornado just a mile or so from work/church, in the midst of it all. And a few moments of completely hilarious wonder and peacefulness and guilty hope.

I went to the lake. I mentioned this on the other blog, we had three nights up at Mille Lacs, and I brought the work in progress with me, did a little hand-stitching -- not much, just filling up a ten or 20 minute gap here and there between trips to the shore and bird-watching and kid-watching.

Right outside our cabin door, hanging above the patio, was a spent Oriole nest. My husband first pointed it out to me -- it was just above the sightline, and I was so preoccupied with the big lake's long horizon line that at first I didn't see this wondrous little weaving right in front of me. Ron explained a bit of how the Oriole weaves her nest from fibers and grass and bits, makes a little basket for her eggs and self; and after the young birds have flown, the nest is abandoned. But -- each year, a mated pair will return to the same nesting area, and very often the same tree. The Oriole will tear open her old nest, throw out the dirty bits (poop, mites) and save the solid shreds for re-weaving, into a new nest that is structured from fresh materials.

I love that. I want Oriole nests in my work now, in this moon-bird-cats-hair-nest-eggs thing. I have a plan.

But, I haven't picked it up all week. Sunday and Monday were busy -- returning home, catching up -- and then Tuesday and Wednesday were both 12 hour days at work. Here it is, Thursday already, and tomorrow will be another busy one.

Fortunately I have next week off. I can and must work in some time for sewing, between Monday and Wednesday; Thursday we'll go to the Fair, and Friday...maybe I'll go to the Fair alone, I don't know. Have to check the calendar. Hopefully daycare won't be closed. But Monday/Tuesday/Wednesday for sure. Maybe even this weekend, if I'm lucky. It's hard to do this stuff at night, though I should try. It's not my most creative time.

Oriole nests!

flickr.com/photos/25647024@N02/2549035394

The middle picture, which shows much of the current composition, indicates there are troubled areas where I'll need to rearrange or break up the blocks -- particularly on the left side, where the central piece wants to break out of its frame and tumble into space. That's why I find it so useful to post pictures of work in progress -- it gives me distance. (Sorry also about the blurring, my camera doesn't deal with detail when the lighting isn't right.)

from the moon

"What we can learn from the moon is reflection," wrote Jude Hill, and because the moon is very possibly one of the inspirations or themes for my current piece (which has formed in its attributes quite influenced by Jude's own work) I am Taking Note.

The moon. My project has colors in it that are both washed out (except for the reds) and prone to sudden contrasts, and to glimmers -- like colors under bright moonlight, the yellows and greens completely absent, lots of light and dark, and occasional reds (which escape the dumbing-down powers of sunglasses too, I've noticed.)

Washed out. I'm using "laundry leavings" as materials here, dryer lint and ragged ends and soforth. Worn bits, wads of paper smooth like ocean pebbles after being left in pockets and washed and dried, etc...

and because there is a nest (a nest with three cat-hair eggs inside it, more wads from the washer), I now have two resting songbirds in the piece as well...
where are we heading, this piece and I?

The moon, and laundry, and birds. And an overall Asian motif, the results of my fabric choices.

How in the world (or above it) will this all come together?

The moon above...and birds. But laundry is a decidedly earthly process. Hmm.

Posting pictures separately from the text to see if that makes for better formatting. Seen below (earlier images posted first) -- Two days' work on a new piece, inspired by laundry leavings and...something more, as yet undetermined.

Dryer lint, cat hair in wads and other detritus picked from the lint trap; layered on wool batting and felt, beneath strips of tinted organza. Metallic threads, raveling strips of cloth. Then adding some hand-printed and vintage cotton, upholstery textiles, etc. I admit to approaching this with Jude Hill's work in mind, hoping to achieve some of the mystery of her "slow cloth" pieces. The nest-eggs in the lower left corner, the chrysanthemum/lotus on its long stem -- or something like a path, the corner of a maze -- I like where the piece seems to be going, though I couldn't describe the destination. Asian dryer lint? Chinese laundry? Something foggy and fragile...

I like walking in a place where I can't see the end of the road -- or more than a few feet in any direction. We were out at Wood Lake yesterday, and the boardwalk was surrounded by tall green cattails waving and undulating in a strong breeze, hypnotically repetitive. And I like a fog too, on the rare occasion that we see one hereabouts. I even appreciate a really bad head-cold, the kind where you walk around half-deaf for days -- all the world's sounds are muffled, senses dulled and calmed by congestion and cold meds.

Somehow, amusingly, interestingly, this is somewhat the same. I'm thinking of this as a place.

laundry leavings - beginning