Progress on "Persistence"

In my earlier post on "Persistence," I mentioned that Sheryl St. Germain would be coloring the background cloth for the project in late August. Last weekend, she travelled from Georgia to come work with me in my basement studio. We chose my studio because I have a very large print table (about 60 x 95"), large enough for the piece of fabric I wanted to work on. I know the piece will be about 90" in length. I'm not sure of the width yet, so we colored the full 57" of the natural linen I'm using. Here's Sheryl at the print table, after we'd put one coat of earth pigment on the cloth.

Here it is drying on my concrete driveway. The warm weather helped it dry quickly, giving us time for a second application later that day.

Here it is back on the print table, after another coat of pigment, done at double the strength of the first coat, to insure we got to the dark value I was aiming for. I've turned over part of the fabric so that you can see the back as well (click on the image to see details). The pigment penetrates to the back, but doesn't cover uniformly as it does on the front, and the patterns can be quite lovely. In fact, many people who use earth pigments use the back side for their art work. I'm going for a solid background, so I'll be using the front. Although I do find myself looking also at the back. . . The fabric has to cure for four weeks before I can stitch into it, so no need to decide now.

Sheryl and me in front of the cloth:

The cloth will be the base for extensive hand stitching. You'll find more about the stitching in this earlier post, and an explanation of how the piece is connected to my experience of neolithic standing stones, in this post. And for a look at the range and beauty of work that can be done with earth pigments, take a look at this collection of images of student pieces--including one by Sheryl--from a recent online class taught by Claire Benn.

Looking with Sheryl at my preliminary pencil sketch for the piece, we decided that a vertical orientation will be best. (I oriented the image horizontally in my earlier post.) Much work remains to be done to figure out details of the stitching and layout, but having prepared the base cloth is a very significant step forward.

My second project about menhirs

My second project based on the menhirs (standing stones) of the Carnac alignments is taking shape.  I'm thinking of a very large piece centered on four stones. Here's a small sketch of the configuration that is my starting point.

When I first started thinking about art work based on the menhirs, my focus was on the variety in the shapes of the stones and the relationships between them as one looked at them from a bit of a distance.

I put this photo into Photoshop Elements and then traced the outlines of the stones to get a simple drawing:

Then I isolated parts of the drawings and did some small monoprints.

Then I made stamps in the shapes of some of the stones and stamped other small pieces.

I took this direction because a few years ago, I had enjoyed making stamps in bowl-shapes, stamping them individually and in relationship to each other (see images here), and I thought that might work for the menhir shapes also. I made several small pieces, but could see that this was not a fruitful direction, and the idea was put aside for some time.

More recently, after some months of extensive reading about the alignments, and about Neolithic stone monuments generally, I decided to turn back to the shapes, but to make something very large.  I cropped out four stones that are about 1/3 of the way in on the photo above, just to the left of the tallest stone:

I played around with flipping the shapes, and decided I preferred this movement of direction:

So, I am now in the midst of working with these shapes. I have enlarged the drawing so that the whole piece will be about 7 feet high. I've pulled some hand-dyed fabric in stone colors to see how these large shapes might look in fabric. I am making progress, but don't yet have anything to show. Perhaps in another couple of weeks.

As I looked at, thought about, and read about these stones, I came to think of them as embodiments of the dead. So I was very glad to come across this statement by Chris Scarre, author of Landscapes of Neolithic Brittany, speaking about the possible meaning of some short alignments (from 3 to 7 stones) at Avrillé: "If these are commemorative or mortuary monuments, they may represent select groups of the deceased, perhaps family or related kin, lined up in rows to face the rising sun." Yes, that's what this new piece is about. 

We will never know what was intended by the people who raised these stones, but I have come to accept that it's OK to go with the resonance that the stones have for me, hoping only that my meaning is at least in some consonance with the original practice.

* * * * * * * * * *

As I was putting together this post, I looked back at some earlier works of mine that take on new meaning in the context of my thinking about Neolithic stone monuments.  Here's a small work I made in 2018, cutting out and piecing together fabric that I had stamped with bowl shapes.  Looking at it now, I see a dolmen, a kind of monumental tomb found at some Neolithic sites.

And this one from 2010, made by playing around with cutting up stone shapes that I had appliquéd, has an echo of the same kind of shape: 

Stones (Trapezoid) 2010, Hand-painted and commercial cotton and linen, hand-appliqué, machine pieced, hand-quilted, 14.5"x13"

And even closer to my current thinking, here's a stitched sketch from 2016, made to see what I could do with simplified large shapes. So it turns out that in this new work, I'm coming back to something I did eight years ago, long before the menhirs drew me into thinking about stones once again: 

Two Stones (2016) Hand-dyed linen, couched silk-wrapped paper thread, 22"x11"

Finally, to leave you with an image that speaks deeply to me, and that shows the power of a simple shape, done very large: Sheila Hicks' Moroccan Prayer Rug:

This photo is from this website, where you can also click through to other photos of the piece. And there's a very moving photo of the work in a blogpost by Judith Martin, here.