"Persistence" close to done, and a new project

 

I am close to finishing "Persistence," the large piece (about 55x90") that originated in my experience of the neolithic standing stones in the alignments of Carnac. Thousands of stitches have been put into the cloth, which was colored with earth pigments. I'm still finalizing plans on how to hang the piece. I didn't want to finish the edges with any of the bindings typical of a quilt, and this has implications for how to hang the quilt. I'm thinking I will just turn the top edge over to make a channel, and hang it with the help of a long branch I found in my back yard. I'll post a photo of the finished piece once I've figured this out.

This spring and summer, I also started working on a new project. I have an established perennial garden, and each spring I am thrilled by three flowers that come into bloom at the same time: baptisia (also known as wild indigo, deep blue-purple), poppies (pale coral), and peonies (dark pink/magenta). I am in awe of their beauty.

I've done homage before to the baptisia, with this watercolor: 

But now I'd like to work on a textile project that is about all three. This will be very different subject matter for my textile work. I have no clear ideas about what the composition will be. Rather than working on sketches for a design, I'd like to work it out through making small maquettes with fabrics, so I've been dyeing fabrics this summer, looking to get the specific colors I want. It's really the colors I'm interested in rather than the specific forms of the flowers, though it's possible those will eventually come into play. Here's a pile of the fabrics I've dyed so far; the pile includes green, in case I want to reference leaves as well. The colors include some that are on target, though the blue needs a darker value and the green needs more blue. 

Here's a photo annotated with some information about the various trials (click on any photo to enlarge):

 

And a shout out to Carol Soderlund, who teaches a method for dyeing fabric that enables one to get precise colors (among many other aspects of working with fabric dyes). For some of my work, often the work that has the most personal meaning to me, there's a connection to a very specific color--either in the natural/material world or in my mind. Getting a specific color from dye is more challenging than from paint, so I'm grateful for the work Carol has done in this field. And she is such a great teacher!

 

 

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.)

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!

 

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!!