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C. R. W. Nevinson, A Bursting Shell, 1915
from ‘Salutation’
“And see the confluence of our dreams
That clashed together in our night,
One river born of many streams
Roll in one blaze of blinding light.”
George William Russell, 1917
A couple of weekends ago I went to Alicia Merrett’s 2 day Text on Fabric workshop in which I learned how to print on fabric using Thermofax screens and acrylic paints. I’ve been hearing about and seeing this technique for awhile now and frankly had thought it would be a lot more technical and complex than it actually is. A Thermofax screen is basically a stencil and quicker and cheaper to prepare than a silk screen. It can be used with acrylic & textile paints, discharge media or adhesives to use with foiling. I was impressed with the level of detail that can be achieved. There are a lot of ready-made screens about and Thermofax Screens based in the UK has a custom screen service. I have a little shopping list of a few screens to buy – feathers and the Chartre labyrinth AND I am going to have a couple of screens made with an alphabet font so that I can incorporate some of my writing and poetry into my fibre art.
Alicia had brought several screens to the class for us to practice with, along with some of her beautifully vibrant art quilts. Day 1 was spent printing and on the second day, most of us started working on a project. Alicia also showed us her fine line magic piecing technique.
The workshop took place at Cowslip Workshops near Launceston, Cornwall. At lunch on the second day, Alicia’s husband Steve joined us and told us about a very romantic book that they have just published. Darling Alicia chronicles their written exchange of love letters in 1966 and 1967 (between Argentina, where they met, and India) which culminated in a reunion in India and their now forty-plus years of marrriage. We talked about really living life and taking risks. Regrets are for those who never took the chance in the first place and a creative person can always make something new from their mistakes.
The food was excellent by the way – homemade, locally sourced and organic whenever possible. Lunch was butternut squash or parsnip soup, fresh bread, quiche, cheeses, coleslaw, beetroot salad and a greenleaf salad. We also had cake and/or scones and jam with afternoon tea, coffee, cappucino or hot chocolate. You can just go for the food at their cafe and they have a few special food events.
I just finished making a piece called Beannacht from some of the fabric I screenprinted. I used a brown and plum palette with highlights of gold in the fabric, stitch and printing.
Beannacht
Detail
and more detail
On the back, I attached a blessing written by one of my favourite writers, John O’Donohue, called Beannacht. I painted handmade paper with a wash of gold Stuart Gill fabric paint and printed the words onto it in brown ink.
Beannacht is a Gaelic word for blessing or benediction. Here are the words -
Beannacht
On the day
when the weight deadens
on your shoulders
and you stumble
May the clay dance
to balance you.
And when your eyes
freeze behind
the grey window
and the ghost of loss
gets into you.
May a flock of colours
indigo, red, green
and azure blue
come to awaken in you
a meadow of delight.
When the canvas frays
in the currach of thought
and a stain of ocean blackens
beneath you
May there come across the waters
a path of yellow moonlight
to bring you safely home.
May the nourishment of the earth be yours,
may the clarity of light be yours,
may the fluency of the ocean be yours,
may the protection of the ancestors be yours.
And so may a slow
wind work these words
of love around you,
an invisible cloak
to mind your life.
- John O’Donohue
And here is the blessing read by John shortly before his death in 2008. Such beautiful, healing words and what a voice!
I made Beannacht for my friend and finished stitching the hanging sleeve on at work. At lunchtime, I took it outside to the copse to photograph it. I made a circle from some sticks and placed it in the middle. To let the land and the autumn and the now thin golden threads of light bless the piece.
Where does the poetry and artwork come from? Not from me but through me. It’s all already there and I, the artist, am blessed with the vision to see it and gifted with the skills and materials to capture the fleeting, shifting beauty and make it manifest. Each poem, photograph, video and piece of fibre art is a prayer. And what is a prayer but a dialogue with the Divine.
In your light I learn how to love.
In your beauty how to make poems.
You dance inside my chest, where no one sees you.
but sometimes I do and that sight becomes this art.
-Rumi
I love my bicycle journey to and from work, along a road which undulates and curves with the river valley it inscribes. Every day that I ride, I enter into a poem. I read the poetry of the landscape around me in scattered lines of verse – a heron fishing in the shallows as I ride over an ancient stone bridge, a necklace of Devon Ruby cattle strung along a narrow field like prayer beads, a flutter of autumn leaves, mist hanging high over the River Teign, frost-brittle bare hedgerows, lemony sun pools poured through verdant summer trees.
One morning last April, I rode through a dew-drenched morning.
buddha
Night Washed
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Here on the shoreline where night meets dawn meets day
A pearl encrusted dandelion glows like a seacreature brought here by the tide
Mysterious
buddha
No precious spumes of seafoam here, but diamond drops of dew
Stud each blade of grass
buddha
buddha
A seashell scattering of wildflowers is left upon the shore of morning
Now high above the tide
buddha
In a valley washed over by the dark ocean of night
buddha
After dawn had tinged the nightsky
on a birdsong-filled the morning
I dreamt that I woke
to your caress,
feeling your hand warm through the silk
and cool against my bare skin.
But I dreamt.
buddha
And in my dream
you whispered me awake
telling me the story of our first night together.
Candlelit, voluptuous
velvet darkness.
Of beauty that lit up your soul.
buddha
And as I turned to you,
I woke again.
buddha
Am I still within a dream?
buddha
-Melinda Schwakhofer, 2009
Today, September 5th is my mother’s birthday. Nell Rose Schwakhofer née Martin. She was born in 1924 and she died from breast cancer on January 20, 1980. She was 55 and I was 16. Neither myself nor my family coped very well and after she died, nobody realised the importance of keeping things that belonged to her. Denial and then ‘Out of sight, out of mind’ were the order of the day. I have a very few of her belongings and some photographs, memories of her from a child’s point of view and some stories and recollections about her from her sisters and some of my older cousins who knew Aunt Nell.
buddha
One thing that I do have of hers is a wristwatch. Nothing special, just a self-winding Timex that she bought from Long’s drugstore in the 1970’s. The works had sprung years and years ago, but I found a clock-maker/repairer in Birmingham who was able to replace the innards with a self-winding clockwork. On the days that I need to keep track of ‘topside world’ or chronos time I wind it up, set the time and wear it.
buddha
When I went away to college and started to look away from my family, hometown and childhood and forward into adulthood and the life that stretched before me, I thought of my mom. In her late 40’s, she started taking evening classes at a Community College. She wanted to get a degree in Early Childhood Education and pursue her dream of becoming a Montesorri teacher. She learned how to swim, wore a black armband in alliance with an Indian Rights movement on campus, came home forom her Biology class very excited about having looked at her blood cells under a microscope! A couple of years after that, she left a very destructive relationship with my father. Sadly, she developed breast cancer around that time and died a few years later. So on one hand, I saw her life blossoming. It gave me a wonderful view of an older (to me) person doing something different, trying something new, reaching for a dream. One gift from my mother has been no worries about growing older myself. People can do extraordinary things at any age and it’s probably not as late as you think.
On the other hand, don’t put things off and let chances slip by. At the same time in my early 20’s, I wondered what else she may have done if she had lived. Were there other dreams that never came to fruition, were some simply too late to try, did she have any regrets over opportunities lost or avenues not pursued while she was still in a cage? I’ll probably never know, but for myself from a pretty young age I resolved to live my life so that I would not have any (or many) regrets when I got into the middle part of my life. In fact I started seeing a counselor in my final year at University and the first thing I said was ‘I don’t want to be like my mom and start living my life when I’m 50 and die a few years later’. When I look back at my life so far and where I am today, I truly did and continue to explore many paths and opportunities that come before me. One of my maxims is ‘Will I get this chance again and how might I feel if I pass on this one?’. I am grateful for the insight and awareness that I gained from my mother’s life and death in the relatively short time that I knew her.
Here is a little poem about Time that my mom and I found on a sundial somewhere in New England in 1976. We were on a 6 week roadtrip from California to the East Coast to visit her sisters and where she grew up.
Time flies, suns rise,
Flowers bloom and die.
Let time go by and shadows fall,
Love is forever, over all.
So now, when I wear my mother’s watch, I wind it up and set the time. I become aware of the time now. Chronos time. Time in the topside world of society and cities and doing and goals. Maybe I think of where I need to be that day and where my steps and tasks and meetings are taking me. Some times I think of my mom, of Nell, and I wonder what plans she had for any particular day when she wound her watch and set the time - where did she need to be and why, and where were her dreams taking her. I also remember that love is the only thing that really matters and lasts forever, beyond all time.
Can you remember being held by the earth,
encircled by the trees
and speaking the language of the forest?
Sometimes when I experience a breeze-rippled grass pasture or striped, sea-smoothed stones on a beach, or crows riding the wind like kites, I feel that I am reading a language I recognize, but can no longer quite recall. There is something much deeper than what I am seeing, but I cannot quite touch. Although I try to reach for it with photography or video, or struggle to capture and express it through fibre art or a poem, I think that there is something more than the struggle of the artist and poet inside of me for self-expression. That I have lost a fluency in the language of the earth and also a very deep connection. One of the streams of my artwork is the riverjourney in which I am honouring my ancestors, the Mvskoke, and telling our story. I think it may be time to translate some of my poetry into Muscogee and perhaps find a language and a way to express some of what I feel inside.
I belong to the Muscogee tribe of Native Americans. My ancestors were removed to what is now the state of Oklahoma in the 1830’s. My great grandmother, Melindy Philips a full-blooded Muscogee, spoke Muscogee all of her life and very little English. My father Frank could understand but not speak Muscogee. He was born at a time (1919) when he wasn’t proud to have Native American ancestry and was called a ‘half-breed’ by the white and Muscogee kids he grew up with.
Native languages are dying out at an alarming rate in all of the tribal nations. There are a number of reasons for the extinction of American Indian languages but the most common is the boarding school experience from 1870 to the 1930’s. An Indian boarding school refers to one of many schools that were established in the United States during the late 19th century to educate Native American youths according to Euro-American standards. In some areas, these schools were primarily run by missionaries. Especially given the young age of some of the children sent to the schools, they have been documented as traumatic experiences for many of the children who attended them. They were generally forbidden to speak their native languages, taught Christianity instead of their native religions, and in numerous other ways forced to abandon their Indian identity and adopt European-American culture.
This was part of the plan to “Kill the Indian, save the man” and make Indian children assimilate to white society. To this day some have completely forgotten their language; others just did not pass on their language to their offspring or the younger generation. So one could say the plan worked.
Musician Robbie Robertson (The Band) went back to his Mohawk roots in 1998 with a documentary special exploring his musical history in relation to his Native American heritage. “Making A Noise” is also a glimpse into a future where Native Americans are no longer silenced or ignored — culturally, musically or otherwise. As Robertson says in the documentary, “We need to make a noise to make these voices heard”.
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