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.