true companion

Wednesday, August 26, 2009

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.

Monday, August 24, 2009

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.