My last blog post was written in July 2024. When I wrote that post, I had decided to work somewhat improvisationally on “Persistence,” rather than making a specific plan for placement of the lines of stitching, and I was pleased with the first section as I worked on it. Work was slow, but I continued for a while. By January 2025, I had stitched part of one set of alignments, including a circular arc that represented a configuration of stones found at one end of the alignment, probably lining out an area of gathering.
In January, as part of an online course with Claire Benn, I started meeting with a critique group; we talked once a week, discussing our work in progress. After showing photos of “Persistence,” I realized that I wasn’t satisfied with the composition as it was developing. I followed a suggestion that I test out a different configuration by trying out paper shapes on the fabric, rather than sketching lines, and that led me to a new composition. I’ll still have three sets of alignments, as there are at Carnac, but I won’t try to replicate in any way the kind of winding layout of the three, but have changed them to three parallel sets, and I’ve also left out the semicircular lines of stones.
I realized that I didn’t need to replicate the actual shapes or spatial arrangements of the three major sets of alignments at Carnac, that it would be better to free up the composition in order to express the central themes that interested me (mainly persistence, but also variation, collaboration). This has happened to me in almost every major art piece I’ve made—starting out with a presentation that stays close to the explicit/literal level of content, but then moving further to abstraction/expression. In the course of making the change on this piece, I came across a relevant quotation that I’d put on the bulletin board in my studio but forgotten about:
"Each stage, each track you set off on, requires a great deal of attention. You must learn to recognize which ideas are the most interesting ones: follow the lines that are most expressive, or the trails that are unexpected or intriguing. Learn to focus on the most promising areas and leave out details that are too distracting or conventional, because these may detract from what is interesting. If you set off without a clear goal in mind, you must also gradually learn to recognize your goal as you work and to develop it. Every motif, every source of inspiration can become an inexhaustible field of discovery, as well as a means of enriching your artistic vocabulary and your imagination."
Francois Tellier-Loumagne, The Art of Embroidery
I clipped out the stitches I had already done and started again. I outlined with a white running stitch the three areas to be filled with the small stitches of the alignments and started on one of them. I have been stitching off and on since then, sometimes every morning for a half-hour or so (about all I can do in a sitting), but also with stretches away from it.
Sometime this summer, as the work took shape, I realized that even though I had finalized (and was satisfied with) the plan for the work, and had made significant progress on the stitching of it, I wasn’t sure that the work, when completed, would be that interesting to look at, that it might not work as a large visual piece. But I kept working on it nonetheless, because in the making, I had started thinking of it as a kind of performance piece, but performance art for one person—for me—rather than for a wider audience, a performance that would eventually take about two years. When I mentioned this to my critique group, one member suggested that I make a video of me working on the piece, as a way of sharing my experience of making the work. So I’ve made a video that shows me stitching on the work, talking about how the stitches and the process of stitching are, for me, a kind of homage to the work those people, six thousand years ago, who placed one large stone after another, in line after line. This video is an unedited trial version. Distracting things to ignore: the colorful pattern you see is the carpet beneath my feet; the white rectangle is a piece of paper on which I’d written some notes. I will likely do a revised version, to have available when I eventually exhibit the work. In the meantime, here's the video, about 15 minutes long: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1JPDgrpsQgVipP-sOag2cEGog2KFqp-MM/view
And just one more photo of the stitching, as I think the close-up image I tried to give in the video didn’t show well enough the variation of the silk-wrapped linen yarn from Habu Textiles.
