A new beginning

I woke on November 1st to a beautiful dawn.

This is the first day of the new year according to the Celts. I felt cleaved in two and on the cusp of new beginnings.

I reread my journal from the past six months. Quandaries, musings, new directions . . .

This is a pivotal time. Time to be fleet of foot and to pivot away from what no longer serves me and towards my deepest desires and longings.

I took a deep breath. I remembered what Inspiraculum is all about: a place to breathe, dream, explore, be inspired, find yourself.

I booked 6 months of workshop space from January to June. This will be held creative space for people to come and find just that.

Vanguard

Earlier this year I completed Road to Oklahoma, which I have been working on for about four years.  It has evolved as I have learned about and got in touch with my Muscogee ancestry and heritage.

I entered it in the 48th  Annual Trail of Tears At Show in Talequah, Oklahoma.  The Trail of Tears Art Show began in 1972 with the intent to create a venue where diverse art forms can be used to exhibit American Indian heritage.  TOTAS s the longest-running American Indian art show in Oklahoma.  I first heard about this show in 2016 and it was my dream to have a piece of artwork juried in to it.  I’ve shown and sold my work in the UK, but I feel that when Native people view my work, that it is ‘gotten’ at the deep level that it is made from.

Road to Oklahoma – Artist’s Statement
A road is just a road until you travel upon it. Then it becomes part of you. This road began with the Missisipian peoples, ancestors of my tribe, the Muscogee (Creek). Some of their motifs are part of this piece. Later, the Mvskoke were forced from their river towns – represented here by beads – along the Trail of Tears to Indian Territory, later Oklahoma. For my dad, the road promised escape from the traumas of the past to a new life. But, however far he travelled, the trauma travelled with him. Further down the road, he passed it on to me.

Road to Oklahoma,   34 x 11″

At the bottom of the piece, I added a bundle of red sticks to honor my Upper Creek ancestors  and my dad, Frank Charles Schwakhofer who was born in a time and place where he could not be Mvskoke.

I also made and added the Mississippian Hand, originally made from mica, from Angelina fibres.  My ancestors believed that our newly dead gathered in a hand shaped constellation of stars, prior to joining our ancestors on the Milky Way.

I am very, very proud that Road to Oklahoma won two prizes in this year’s Trail of Tears Art Show.  First place in it’s category and I won an Emerging Artist Award.  🙂

Next year is 2020, the centenary year of my dad’s birth.  I have been longing to go to Oklahoma for several years, to put my feet on the ground where my dad and ancestors lived and to re-connect with my people, the Muscogee (Creek).  I have had six pieces of artwork in Oklahoma over the past year.  I feel that these are emissaries and paving the way for me.  I spoke at a conference in Norwich this summer and met a few Southeastern Native artists, including two Muscogee (Creeks).   It feels great to be connected to some people in advance of my journey there.  I will be going Home.

Handle with Care

Handle with Care is a textile piece about my experience of caring for my terminally ill mother in 1979, the summer I turned 16.   I had never thought of myself as a ‘carer’ until earlier this year when I was involved as an Arts & Health Practitioner in a community arts project in Devon called The Craft of Caring.   The main project was engaging with carers in a series of workshops to make a piece of community artwork.

There was a call for art submissions from people about their experience of being a carer.  After hemming and hawing for a few weeks, I decided to make this piece.  Although I have done a lot of work on this loss over the years, I have carried vivid visual memories around with me for the past 40 years.  This piece of artwork gave me the opportunity to process my experience in a different way than I have done so in therapy.

Artist’s Statement:

“This self-portrait uses photographic and stitched images,
layers of memory and text to capture the artist’s experience
of being an adolescent carer;   an experience of a world unravelling
contrasted with the strength of will to hold herself together.”

Handle with Care, 2019

How I learned to be Indian

The first time I exhibited my art work about my Muscogee (Creek) heritage, I was shocked when someone said to me ‘You are so lucky to be part-Indian’.  I wish that I had the wherewithal to ask just what she meant.  The history of all indigenous people in the United States is marked by physical and cultural genocide, and land theft and we have all inherited a legacy of Historical Trauma and Unresolved Grief.

I grew up in the 1960s and 70s with a father who felt very ashamed about his Muscogee ancestry.  My dad Frank was born in 1919 to my Muscogee grandmother Mattie Davis.  His father Ted Schwakhofer was of Austrian-American heritage.  Both of my grandparents were 16 years old.  My grandfather had nothing to do with his son or the mother of his child.  All that my dad received from him was his surname.

My dad said that he could understand the Muskogee language, but never learned to speak it.  The White kids called him a ‘Half Breed’ and the Muscogee kids didn’t like him because he was part White.  From 1920 onward, Native American children in Oklahoma were educated in the mainstream school system, where they and all of the other pupils learned that Indians were ‘savages’, although my dad used to argue with his teachers about this.  My grandmother Mattie would have gone to a residential school where students were actively discouraged from speaking their native tongue by having their mouths washed out with soap, or worse.

My brother, sister and I grew up knowing we’re part-Indian, but not much more than that.  My dad used to get The Muscogee Nation News delivered to our house and letters from distant relatives in Oklahoma, but by and large, he’d cut himself off from his ancestry.  I grew up wearing my Muscogee heritage like a cloak of shame.

I’ve come back to working with fibre and textiles in the past several months.   I’ve been studying an inspiring book by textile artist Rosie James.   I took the plunge into a machine sewn portrait of my dad onto paper printed with the front page of The Muscogee Nation news from 1978.

I made a line drawing from a photograph and printed off some text to make a layout of the piece.

Then I put the front page into Photoshop and added some text directly onto the page.  It is too fine to embroider onto the paper.  I used a glue stick to attach a piece of cotton organdie to the back of the paper to stabilize it and keep it from ripping when I stitched the portrait.  Then I machine stitched directly onto the front of the paper.

This is how it looks from the back.  I had originally thought about stitching through the fabric onto the front of the paper so had traced the picture onto the cloth.  It gives an interesting effect which I may explore in later work.

Back

My Dad used to have The Muscogee Nation News delivered to our house in West Covina, California and kept them in a drawer.   He’d read them at the dining table, drinking a beer,  He’d say: “We’re part-Indian.  We’re Creek.  We’re one of the Five Civilized Tribes.”

Gorgeous gorgets

I’d made some paper clay gorgets for my Road to Oklahoma a few months ago and have decided that I’d rather they be made from fibre.

So far I’ve tried needle-felted fleece, collaged ultrasuede and either back-stitch or trapunto onto cotton, satin or felt.

None of them are quite right and I am so frustrated.   My husband reminds me that I will work it out.  He has seen me in this place many times before!

I love drawing and meditating on these images.  I find the symmetry of the designs within the circles very balanced and harmonious.

Harmony, graphite, 2017

An amusing thing happened when I had drawn a design onto the back of a piece of felt forgetting to reverse it, so that when I finished stitching it, it was a mirror image.  Steve queried if it matters and I said. ‘Yes, it will disturb the harmony of the Universe’.

The movement in many of the designs is counterclockwise.  The Muscogee stomp dance is counterclockwise.  This is because our ancestors knew that the earth and the sun spin on their axes counterclockwise and the planets rotate around the sun counterclockwise.  The Muscogee Way is about finding balance and restoring harmony to the world.

Yesterday I watched a series of short videos about textile artist Sue Stone.
Her mantra is:   ‘Be brave, push boundaries, make mistakes’.  She advocates going deep into just a very few techniques, making way for exploration and discovery.  This makes sense, but I am still figuring out which materials to use.  I think that this is the time to step back and focus on another part of the piece where I know exactly what I need to be doing.

 

On the road again

Well now, I thought I’d written about this next piece two years ago when I started making it.

Working title for a work in progress: The Road to Oklahoma
It is about being torn apart, partings from, partings through, bloodline, arrival, departure, the long straight road that cuts through the land.

September 2015

The base is made from undyed fleece from a Whiteface Dartmoor sheep needle felted onto black acrylic felt. Torn red silk dupioni stitched down with white bugle beads bisects the road.  I machine stitched a sinuous Mississippian riverine motif along the left hand side.

The back side tells a story too.

It has been hanging on my design wall since 2015.  A couple of weeks ago, I have come back to work on it.

I made some gorgets from paper clay.  The original ones would have been carved from whelk shells by the Mississippian ancestors of the Mvskoke.

I stitched them to the top right hand side of the piece with red thread,

but then decided to change to cream thread.  The metal disc is the cremation remains disc from my father’s ashes.

On the lower left side is another Mississippian gorget, printed onto organza of a Red Stick warrior.  This represents and honours my Mvskoke ancestors who lived in what is now the state of Alabama until we were ‘removed’ to Indian Territory in the 1830’s.  We were called Upper Creeks by the European invaders to differentiate us from the Lower Creeks who had settled in what is now Georgia.

This is also about my dad Frank Charles Schwakhofer, who was born in Muscogee, Oklahoma in 1919.  Because he was half Muscogee (Creek) and half white, he never felt like he fit in anywhere.  Both the white and the Indian kids called him a ‘half breed’. He never learned to speak Creek, but he could understand it.  He left home as soon as he could.  First, riding the freight trains out to California in the mid 1930’s when he was 16.  Then when he got older, he always had a car.  He drove off and never looked back.

I printed a map with the city of Muscogee in the middle onto cotton organza.  This map is from 1905, when it was still Indian Territory, soon to become the state of Oklahoma.  I hand embroidered the roads in red thread and sewed a gold bead right smack on top of Muscogee.  The photo of my dad, also printed onto organza, is from June 1955. On the road somewhere.

an Indian and his car