16 months later, continuing with "Persistence"

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. If that link doesn't work, you can also see the video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1JRD_DnUJE

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.  (Click on the photo to enlarge it.)

Coming back to "Persistence"

It's been almost a year since my friend Sheryl came to Galesburg to help me color a large piece of linen with earth pigments, for one of the pieces about menhirs (neolithic standing stones) that I've been thinking about since a trip to Brittany in 2019. I've spent a lot of time reading, thinking, sketching, and doing trial stitching. My placeholder for a plan for the stitching was decided on back in August of last year, and appears at the end of this post. The idea for the plan was based on the actual alignments of stones at Carnac, thousands of stones laid out in parallel arrays, ten to thirteen lines of stones in each long array. I've kept close at hand the plan of the alignments below, where the tan expanses represent the lay-out of the lines of stones:

But as I worked yesterday morning on another version last year's sketch, I decided to abandon it, and to just go to the fabric and start stitching, letting go of any notion of re-creating the layout of the alignments. Instead of following a plan, I will let myself go wherever I find the stitches taking me. I'll also have the marks in the fabric to follow or respond to, if I wish. This is because I've decided to stitch on the "back" side of the cloth Sheryl and I colored, rather than on the solid, brownish-black side that was my original intent. Sheryl had told me that many people end up using the back instead of the front, because of the beautiful, unplanned markings that show through on the back. After doing stitch trials on both the front and the back (on the right and left in the photo below), I've decided to switch, and stitch on the back side. The stitching will not be in as high a contrast to the fabric as I envisioned, but that's OK. The variations on the back, and stitching done in response to marking, is much more in keeping with the nature of the relationship of the neolithic stones to the terrain in which they were "planted," with lines of stones following variations in the terrain. 

And here's stitching done yesterday and today on the full piece of cloth, about two hours spent in total.

Here's the full piece of cloth, draped on my dining room table, which is where I'll work on the stitching.

The next photo shows the fabric in the 12" hoop I'm using. The white cloth with a circle cut in it is a way to prevent the hoop from leaving a mark on the cloth. I'm also using a steam iron after each session of stitching, to iron out the indentation left by the hoop.

And here's a close-up of the stitching, which gives a good view of the actual coloration of the cloth, and also of the texture of the thread I'm using. It's a silk-wrapped linen-paper thread from Habu Textiles. I love the variation in thickness of the thread, the stiffness of it (which leads to some variation in how the thread lays) and the occasional wispiness of the very thin silk thread that sometimes separates from the linen "paper" thread.

So, I have begun. The piece will take a very long time, which is intentional. It is one way to honor the persistence of the communities who placed one stone after another, over many years, six thousand years ago. [Added 8-10-25: Here's a link to a video that gives an aerial overview of the alignments in Brittany.

Following up on "Found Shapes"

Since my workshop with Susan Moss, I've done some further work with the "found shapes" that I happened upon. Here's a reminder of what they looked like in my small sketchbook:

I tried enlarging a couple of shapes and doing a version of them with fabric; the shapes below are each about 6" high.  I made two shapes with hand-dyed fabric, using appliqué. The first one looked clunky. The second one was better, but still didn't move me. Finally I tried a drawing made by couching down some silk-wrapped linen thread that I like. Still no interest in going further.

I decided the found shapes should just stay what they were originally, swatches of gouache outlined with a pen (my favorite for this was a Tombow Fudenosuke brush pen, hard tip). One friend who wrote me about my last post, said that she could see me using these on the cards that I make. Yes, a good use for them, thank you Mary Beth! So I started by putting six on a card, just because that's how many swatches I had put on a page in my sketchbook.

But these seemed too crowded to me, so I cut them all out individually and put just two on a card, and I like this better. I also tried out some colored paper that I had on hand, for the card, and I like that too. So here are eight cards, ready to go:

And then, as I looked again at the squared shapes, I got an idea for a new direction for one of my menhirs  projects, the one that focuses on a grouping of a few stones. Here's a rough sketch that I did back in October; the shapes were based on my photographs of a section of a line of neolithic standing stones at Carnac.

I don't need to stay so close to the original shapes, but I haven't had a sense of another direction to take. On the other hand, I've come to understand better the nature of my attraction to these stones, as I have read and thought about them over the last year or two. I now think of this project with the name "My Beloved Dead," a kind of memorial for my mother, my father, and my son. I recently did another drawing, influenced by looking at the "found shapes" from my sketchbook; I moved the shapes in closer relationship to each other, together forming an overall shape.

This is now going in a more fruitful direction. The new relationship between the shapes connects up with a mental image that came to me in the wake of Jeremy's death--that of Jeremy being comforted by my parents, who had both died in the previous year. And writing this, I realize that I'm working with a theme close to that of "Shelter," a quilt made in 2010.

In the meantime, I have also gone back to "Persistence," my other menhirs project, a hand-stitching project that focuses on the phenomenon of the thousands of stones that make up the alignments of Carnac. Once I get this project to the point where I can begin the actual stitching, not much thought will be needed, and I can turn back to concentrated work on "My Beloved Dead." I will work first on drawings, perhaps with charcoal, which I enjoyed using in the April workshop. I may try watercolor. I may also try painting fabric. I expect that this will eventually turn more abstract and gestural, but it will take a long while to get there. I'm in no hurry. The final piece will likely be about 45" x 60," to fit a space I have in my studio.

I am very glad to once again be engaged with these larger art projects, which have their origin in a 2019 trip to Brittany, where I was entranced by the menhirs. I recently found this 15-minute video that shows multiple aerial videos of the alignments, which give a very good sense of the nature and scope of these monuments: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uoQYMA3_kB8

The April sketchbook workshop definitely spurred me to get back into my own work!

 

Workshop with Jane Davies, Part 2 (work on menhirs)

I last wrote about my second planned piece neolithic menhirs back in August, here.The first thing I did when I turned to this project again during my second week at the Jane Davies workshop was to draw a full scale sketch of a composition, using a roll of newsprint I'd brought with me for this purpose. I knew the facility would have ample wall space available for this, and it's more difficult to do on my design wall at home which is large enough, but is composed of foam core covered with flannel, not too good for drawing. 

This drawing is not in any way final, but I was glad to see an image in something like the size I am want to end up with (about 90" high). This is enough to serve as a placeholder, while I go on to work through the details of the composition. I am still at the very beginning of this process.

From there, I wanted to experiment with color. When I last worked on the project in my home studio several months ago (when I was thinking of four shapes rather than three), I'd cut out the menhir shapes from hand-dyed fabric I had on hand:

But this left me dissatisfied, reminding me of the challenge I'd faced before in making abstract work about stones, which are already such simple shapes. Of course, another possibility would be to move away from abstraction, towards a more realistic approach. But I'm not drawn to that for my own work, even while I much admire the superb work in this vein by quilt artist Denise Labadie.

In my previous work about stones, I got to abstraction by focusing on color only, resulting in the piece "Holiness." So, I started thinking that maybe for this piece, I would focus on shape only, and not use the natural colors of stone. I looked forward to the workshop for the time it would give me to experiment, and the tool of collage for coming up with possible colors and arrangements. I decided to try colors very far away from natural stone colors, thinking this would bring the focus to shape; I used a mottled black for the background. Here are the resulting 11x14" maquettes, with the second one pulling the shapes apart a bit.

And since one of the demos at the workshop was about texture, I decided to test out texture (and shading) on one of the shapes.

While I felt engaged in these experiments as I did them, I didn't feel gripped by the results, and I would now say they were a dead end. Indeed, I'm embarrassed to even include in this post the collage sketches in green-turquoise-magenta. But I know that once the work is finally done, I'll be interested to look back and be reminded of the paths not taken. I may hold onto the possibility of some kind of texture, but the bright colors are definitely out. So the next steps will be more exploration, sketching, and testing. I have accumulated a pile of books about Giorgio Morandi to look at. His quiet, simple, forceful still life paintings are deeply moving; I think I will learn much by looking closely at his compositions.

And I find myself also looking back again at the stitched drawing of two stones that I made back in about 2015:

21" x 11"

And I also keep looking at this pencil sketch that I made during the workshop, in preparation for the large-scale drawing (click to enlarge):

11" x 14"

Who knows, maybe I'll end up with a large-scale black and white drawing of some kind.  

I'm thinking I will continue to work on this piece until I come up with what seems a promising direction, and then put it aside for a while as I go back to "Persistence," the first menhirs piece, for which I prepared the fabric this summer. The earth pigmented fabric has now cured, and is waiting for the stitching to begin. . . Once the stitching plan finalized and the contemplative stitching begun, I'll be able to come back to the second piece. I just can't do hard thinking about two big pieces at once.

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.

Persistence

Here's what I'm thinking about for my work about "persistence"--a large piece of cloth (about 90" in longest dimension), on which I stitch thousands of marks in linear configurations.  I've made a full-size sketch that roughly replicates the layout of the three major alignments in Carnac. This is just a very early starting point and the final piece may bear little resemblance to this, but it's enough to serve as a kind of placeholder. Right now, it is hanging vertically on my design wall, but it may end up horizontal.

This rough sketch in place, I went on to do stitching trials, trying out the kinds of marks I might make, with what kind of thread, and in what colors.  I started out with the heavy natural linen I enjoy working with (4C22 from Fabrics-Store), and a black silk-wrapped linen thread that I had on hand from Habu Textiles. 

Then more sampling with different threads, this time stitching on linen that has been colored with different hues/values of earth pigments (more on earth pigments below):

This helped me decide that I prefer a light or medium-light color for the stitches, on a dark background. 

In order to try out a range of colors/values for the thread, I purchased a few different flat threads from Habu, which I can dye myself. (I like how a flat thread yields unexpected shapes in the stitches.)

Here's one of the threads, dyed with 2 different light grays, though it is difficult to tell the difference in hue at this light value.

And here are trials with three different threads from Habu, all dyed very light gray:

Now to explain the earth pigmented fabric. From an early stage, I've been talking with my friend Sheryl St. Germain about this project. Sheryl and I both attended a 2022 workshop by Susan Brandeis that centered on hand-stitching. I focused on stitching that I might use for my work about menhirs, and Sheryl was working with cloth that she had painted with earth pigments, a method of coloring cloth that she had recently learned from Claire Benn. We continued to e-mail back and forth about our work after the workshop. When I wrote about my decision to not use the natural linen, along with some thoughts about dyeing the background fabric, Sheryl suggested using earth pigments instead of chemical dyes. I liked the idea of this--because of the close association of earth and stone in these neolithic monuments--but I knew from hearing about Sheryl's experience that the process of using earth pigments was very different from anything I had done before, and I just didn't have it in me to learn a whole new process that I might not use again after this one project. Sheryl then offered to color the cloth for me. This was such a deeply generous offer that I hesitated to accept, but her offer came from the heart, and I opened my heart to accept. (It happens that this was one thing that has led me to think about how hard it can be to accept help, and I'm learning that accepting help is as important to a life well lived as is giving help.) 

Here are the samples that Sheryl worked up for me early in the design process, before I had decided whether I wanted the background to be light or dark. Sheryl tested three different earth pigments (all in the grayish/brown range that I wanted), in 2 or 3 different values.

I've picked the color in the lower right corner. My cloth will have the earth pigment applied late in August, and then it will need another four weeks to cure before I can work with it. This gives me the additional time I need to do some further thread trials, both of dyeing and stitching.

This is the first time that one of my personal works has become a collaborative project, and that scared me at first--how could I give over a central, physical part of the project to someone else? All of my work has been shaped significantly by extended discussion with friends and teachers, but I've always done all the actual work myself. But giving up control can be a good thing, and having Sheryl move forward with the cloth experiments has helped keep me moving forward on my part of the project. And of course our discussions all along the way have helped me find my way to the composition this will become.

THANK YOU SHERYL!!

Menhirs

In 2019, my husband and I went to France, and we spent several days in Brittany, including two days in Carnac. The neolithic stone monuments there made a deep impression on me--thousands of menhirs (large stones placed upright) arranged in rows over a space of over two miles.  The monuments date from about 4500-3300 BCE, so about 6,000 years ago (1,000 or more years earlier than Stonehenge). 

Here are a couple of aerial views of portions of the stone alignments: from way above and closer in. And here's a video that puts together aerial views of many alignments in Brittany. (Ignore the creepy music at the start; it soon quiets down. There's no narration.)

Of course standing amongst the stones, one doesn't get such an overview. Instead, there is a feeling of immersion in a massive enterprise.

The stones range in size from about 2 to 13 feet. You can see the scale of some of the larger stones in the next photo, which includes a human visitor in the center foreground.

The stones are many different shapes, and were taken from outcrops of stones right in the area. The stones are mostly unworked, but some have been lightly shaped.

You can see the overall plan of the 3 major alignments here, and some additional photos here. [Added 8-25-25: And here's a video with great aerial views of the alignments in Brittany.]

My initial response was a sense of awe at the enormity of the human project, which must have required persistence over many years. There had to be a collective commitment to an endeavor that would eventually result in the lines of stones and the corridors in between them. This was my starting place: that the stones were a kind of witness to the persistence of humans, creating together a monument of deep meaning to them.  So, the first words I had in mind as I thought about a possible art work in response to the alignments were "persistence" and "witness," and I have one piece sketched out that is centered on this theme. (More about that in a subsequent post.)

But I was also driven to find out what I could about the possible meaning of these lines of stones to the neolithic people who placed them. From the museum in Carnac and from early reading, it quickly became clear that there will never be a consensus on the issue of meaning. Archaeoastronomical explanations (e.g. connection to a solstice) don't work for these configurations, and of course there is no written record to refer to. I've been driven to do a fair amount of reading in the scholarship on these and other neolithic sites--a practice of reading and note-taking that I thought I'd left behind when I stopped doing historical scholarship in 2004. But here I am again, trying to piece together what some human actions meant, based on whatever evidence one could find--in this case physical evidence rather than written.

I am still reading and thinking about this, but it now makes sense to me that the overarching meaning of the alignments, taken together with other kinds of contemporary monuments in the same area--dolmens (stone tombs) and tumuli (burial mounds)--is connected to death and remembrance. That the manipulation of stone and earth (the stones "planted" in the earth, and earth mounded over stones) is an elemental response to human loss. (There are no burials associated with the menhirs, but the location of the lines of menhirs in relationship to the dolmens and tumuli puts the overall complex in close relationship to death and its associated emotions and practices.)

So. . . this brings me back to familiar territory, as a significant part of my previous work on loss was centered on stone, described here. I am in the midst of sketching out a second piece on the alignments that centers on this theme. I'll also write more about this in a later post.