Inspiraculum

I’m writing from my laptop, which I rarely use as it has Vista as it’s OS and I have been waiting to install Windows XP. I have Windows XP on my desktop pc and just find it a lot more user-friendly and also easier to install my printer drivers, camera software, copies of MS Office, Photoshop, etc. My friend Simon up in Scotland is going to give me some long distance help with this.

Yesterday, I switched on my desktop and it simply wouldn’t. I’ll try to replace the fuse tomorrow. In the meantime, all of my photos are stored on it, so I don’t have access to my archives. (I’m still waiting to replace my camera). Just as well I don’t have it yet, as I can’t publish photos of what I’m currently working on.

I’m finishing two quilts for the Festival of Quilts 2008 at the NEC in Birmingham this August. ‘Manhattan Angel’ is an homage to the photographer Lee Miller. I’m working on her dress and some Art Deco angel wings and just about to fuse all of it into place. Then I’ll sandwich the three layers and do the machine quilting.

‘Ivory Fish’ is a paper quilt made from monographs on cartridge paper. It tells the story about a fish I carved from a bar of soap when I was eight years old. I have glued the centre squares together and added a border. Just finishing up hand stitching the border to the centre, then I will ‘tie quilt’ a fabric back with a hanging sleeve and blanket stitch around the edges. Then, voila!

My low-tech difficulty is that I have lost the 2nd leather thimble I bought for the hand stitching. I’m sewing through 2 or 3 layers of cartridge paper and PVA, so can only work for about 30 minutes at a time until my finger gets too sore!

Yesterday, I went to the South West Quilters Summer Meeting in Okehampton. I got a lift from my friend Dorrie who was hosting one of the speakers, Edinburgh-based textile artist Pat Archibald. Her talk was ‘A Creative Journey to the Roof of Africa’ in which Pat told the story in words, slides and quilts of her inspirational climb to the top of Mount Kilamanjaro and the resulting award winning quilt ‘From Addis to Kili: From Dawn to Dusk’. Quite a journey and turning point.

Pat will have a booth at the Festival of Quilts 2008 where she will also be teaching, lecturing and doing demos. During this year’s Edinburgh Festival, Pat will be showing and selling her textile art at Venue 123. So if you are in Birmingham or Edinburgh this August, check her out.

During the journey Pat and I had a really nice blether about Edinburgh, creativity, fibre art, solo vs group art making and tattie scones. Besides the serendipity of meeting a new fibre art friend, I have been looking all over Exeter lately for foils. Pat had taught her workshop Travellers’ Tales Told in Little Landscapes yesterday and just happened to have packets of foil, special foil glue and glue crystals. So I bought everything I need and got expert advice to boot! I’m looking forward to playing with these in between all of my other projects!

I’m working on ‘Winter Trees Wept’, another piece in the riverjourney series. Besides working on sketches and some preliminary pieces in fibre, I’m reading the history of my ancestors, the Muscogee, around the time of the Removal.

The Muscogee tribe had occupied what are now the states of Georgia and Alabama for about 10,000 years until they were removed to Indian Territory in what is now the state of Oklahoma. The Removal happened between 1831 to 1836. The earlier Muscogee went more or less ‘voluntarily’, though duped by treaties with the US government and taken advantage of by unscrupulous Indian agents and speculators along the journey and once they arrived. The final Muscogee were forcibly removed by the US Army in November 1836, with the men in shackles. It is estimated that 45% of the Muscogee tribe perished during the Removal. Such a devastating loss to a people of their ancestral homelands and their community.

I’ve also been thinking about the land itself, the rivers and forests that had sheltered and supported and been cared for by the Muscogee. I wonder if the land felt the loss of a people who had spoken the language of the forest and lived in harmony with the earth.

The winter trees wept
a river of blood
when we were torn
from the land.

I made this monoprint by laying a piece of white cloth over a thin layer of black and then red printing ink, and reverse writing and making marks with a pencil and my fingertips onto it.

Monoprint

For the quilt I am making, I’m using some of the fabric that I monoprinted a couple of weeks ago using leaves, stencils and marks rubbed onto paper. I stamped onto the fabric with a feather and fabric paint.

I’m using white silk dupioni for the border and fixed the printed fabric with artist’s spray fixative to make sure that the ink doesn’t rub off onto the silk while I am sewing it together.

I printed the words of the haiku I have written for the piece onto tissue paper.

The design in progress . . .

Today someone left a very thoughtful comment on my blog and observed that I create various textures of my feelings, and display them artistically. It’s nice that the feeling comes through not only in my art work, but also via cyberspace, which can be a dehumanising method of communication.

A couple of years ago I read about therapeutic work being done with Native American tribes addressing Historical Unresolved Grief. In their pioneering studies involving American Indians, Brave Heart and DeBruyn (1998 ) describe the monumental losses of life, land, and culture experienced by peoples native to the Americas as a result of European contact and colonization. They contend that descendants of these native peoples, in response to these losses, suffer from historical unresolved grief. “Like children of Jewish Holocaust survivors, subsequent generations of American Indians also have a pervasive sense of pain from what happened to their ancestors and incomplete mourning of those losses”.

A keynote talk by Dr. Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart given at the Fifth Annual White Bison Wellbriety Conference in 2005 From Intergenerational Trauma to Intergenerational Healing.

1836. Into the winter, away from our home and land of our ancestors. A long, difficult journey marked by loss, grief and despair. A journey which has been passed down through the generations. A burden far too big for any one person to carry. I can only hold it, witness it and in doing so hope to heal it, not pass it on yet again.

It’s a difficult part of the journey. Though moments of joy when I see the swallows flying through the summer skies, the fields lush with grass and flowers and the water striders skating across the river surface.

My map is where my art work takes me, each piece of art work in my riverjourney series will take me where I need to go, to be. The making of each piece will heal what needs to be healed, not only within myself, but also for my ancestors.

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When I hold a feather

in my hand

my soul remembers

the angels.

Last week my studio was photographed for publication in a magazine. Details to follow at a later date. The photographer, Nick Rouillard, was accompanied by his girl and technical consultant, Wendy Edwards and his artistic director, Mike Rouillard.

I served vanilla cupcakes frosted with orange buttercream, studded with chocolate chips and tea.

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Vanilla Cupcakes with Orange Buttercream Frosting

• 4 oz/115g butter, at room temperature
• 4 oz/115g caster (granulated) sugar
• 2 large eggs, at room temperature
• half teaspoon vanilla extract
• 4 oz/115g self-raising flour or plain flour plus 1 teaspoon baking powder
• juice of half an orange
• softened butter
• icing (powdered) sugar
• Belgian milk chocolate chips

Preheat the oven to 170C/325F.

Line a 12 hole muffin tin with paper cases.

N.B. When I made these I used an American 12 hole muffin pan and paper muffin cases that I bought in the UK. There was enough batter to fill 8-9 of the cases about 2/3 full. There are paper cupcake cases available over here which are slightly smaller than the muffin cases. If you are using these, you should get about 12 cupcakes from this recipe.

Cream together the butter, sugar, eggs and vanilla. Stir in the flour. Divide the mixture between the paper cases. Bake for 15-20 minutes until golden and springy.

Frosting

Mix together the juice of half an orange and a few tablespoons of softened butter. Add enough icing sugar to make a fluffy frosting. Spread lavishly over the cupcakes. Garnish with chocolate chips.

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Wendy and the Cupcake

Photograph by N. Rouillard

Nickel Tailings # 30, Sudbury, Ontario, 1996 Photo © Edward Burtynsky

Edward Burtynsky has been acclaimed as one of Canada’s most respected photographers. His specialty is photographs of global industrial landscapes, and they have been showcased in 15 major museums around the world. In a statement, Burtynsky talks about his explorations:

“Nature transformed through industry is a predominant theme in my work. I set course to intersect with a contemporary view of the great ages of man; from stone, to minerals, oil, transportation, silicon, and so on. To make these ideas visible I search for subjects that are rich in detail and scale yet open in their meaning. Recycling yards, mine tailings, quarries and refineries are all places that are outside of our normal experience, yet we partake of their output on a daily basis.

These images are meant as metaphors to the dilemma of our modern existence; they search for a dialogue between attraction and repulsion, seduction and fear. We are drawn by desire — a chance at good living — yet we are consciously or unconsciously aware that the world is suffering for our success. Our dependence on nature to provide the materials for our consumption and our concern for the health of our planet sets us into an uneasy contradiction. For me, these images function as reflecting pools of our times.”

Burtynsky’s work can be unsettling. He extracts beautiful, sometimes poetic images from outrageous alterations and destructions of the environment. He calls himself an artist - not a reporter - and refrains form judging what he photographs or from politicising it, wanting to “make people think harder about our planet’s future” without suggesting a direction.

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Rock of Ages No. 15, Active Section, E.L. Smith Quarry, Barre, Vermont 1992 Photo © Edward Burtynsky

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Last weekend I saw Manufactured Landscapes, a beautifully shot and edited film, exploring the aesthetics and social and spiritual dimensions of globalisation around the world today. Filmmaker Jennifer Baichwal follows Edward Burtynsky to Bangladesh and China as he documents the “manufacturer to the world”. There, Burtynsky, has photographed factories, huge container ports, quarries, the Three Gorges Dam, electronics graveyards, and the rapid urbanization of Shanghai.

The film presents a truly unsettling look at comtemporary existence and it illustrates how, as we transform nature, we redefine who we are and our relationship to the planet.

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