Makin’ a Noise

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”.

buddha

River Song

Sometimes, the essence of a place resonates deep within my soul.  Such a place is Watersmeet, a river crossing in the Teign Valley.  I love to pause on the footbridge spanning the river.  Looking upstream, two waterways come together.  Looking downstream, they have joined and flow together to the sea.

Watersmeet

I love the confluence, the point where the two waterways converge.  The ripples and patterns on the surface of each are distinct and sometimes one or the other is silty or clear.  Each watercourse brings its own unique personality.  When they join each other, a new river is formed.

Steve and I captured this conflux with images and words, and put them together to make River Song.

buddha

buddha

RIVER SONG

Listen, hear our language
Spelt in ripples on rocks,
Chalked in the swirl of current
And the eddies in our stream.

Look, see our soul shine,
Fleet in dappling shades
That bind the sun and clouds
With waterlight in motion.

Touch, feel our breath,
Where waters meet at last,
Released from yearning
In the deepest depths our joining.

Rejoice, for we are river,
Fed by raindrop,
Suckled by cloud,
Maker of ocean,
Carver of life.

Steve Coxon

December 2008

How to make a pillowcase quilt binding

For the last little while I’ve been prancing about in my flea market queen/urban explorer/video artist panties.  Now that the Festival of Quilts deadline has come and gone and I’ve settled back into my non-routine routine, back to work on some fibre art – my ‘Winter Trees Wept’ quilt.  I have some ideas for collaging some text onto the back telling the story of the forced Muscogee removal to Indian Territory, circa 1832-1836 and to stencil and stamp some feathers onto the front.  What to do?  Where to start?  What if I screw it up?

Sometimes when I feel stuck, the best thing to do is what I need to do next.

I know I want to make a pillowcase border, so decided to go ahead with that and will add the rest as the piece develops.

How to do it:

1. Square up the quilt top.
2. Cut the backing fabric length and width about ¼” smaller (this is so it will ‘pull’ the front fabric around the edges and the backing fabric won’t show on the front of the quilt.
3. Lay the batting out on a table.
4. Spray with adhesive and lay the quilt top face up onto the batting.
5. Lay the quilt back face down (right sides facing) and pin at the edges leaving about a 10″ gap for turning it inside out after stitching the edges.
6. Beware of puckers!  You’ll need to ease in the fabric backing to account for the size difference.
7. Machine stitch with a fairly tight stitch.
8. Trim to 1/8″ and clip the corners.
9. Turn it inside out and slip stitch the opening shut.

Sounds simple, eh?  Well my backing fabric was about 1″ too narrow, so rather than splice in some more white silk or some commercial fabric,  I decided to surface design a strip of silk and stitch it in.

Time for a coffee break!  I have to show off another find, this one from a car boot sale just outside of Sidmouth.  I made a pretty good score from a guy with ‘Jedi Knight’ and ‘Made in Space’ tattoos.  This Piquot Ware coffee jug for a fiver.  Never been used, absolutely pristine condition.  This is a beautiful little design, cast in a single piece from Magnailium with sycamore handles.

I’ve been collecting feathers for the past year, mostly delicate, downy breast feathers.  Lately, I’ve  been picking up skrunjy trashed ones to use for stamping and stenciling.  I used silver and black fabric paint on a strip of white silk dupioni and also a hand-carved, wooden, vine motif stamp from India that I picked up at the market last Sunday.

Sewed my backing fabric together and did the pillowcase binding as above.

Front and back

I’m using my new typewriter to type the text onto a long skinny (5″ x 36″) piece of white tissue paper.  I’m reading a couple of textbooks: The Trail of Tears - The Story of the Native American Removals 1813 – 1855 by Gloria Jahoda (1975) and A History of the Indians of the United States by Angie Debo (1977).  Both very good historical surveys.  Of course I am currently focusing on the Muscogee (Creek) Indians, my ancestors, but it is utterly appalling and difficult to read about the 400 year long history of the relations between European intruders and the native American people.  Yet, it is my story and tightly woven into the fabric of my family’s story and needs to be told.

Next steps will be collaging the text onto the back and stenciling a few feathers onto the front. Then, I’m going to hand and machine quilt this one.  I bought some really nice crimson silk hand sewing thread and have some ideas about how the stitches will spill down the quilt.  I’ll see how it flows when I get there . . .

Winter Trees Wept

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.

Little honeybee

I had a new experience this morning. After I had gotten dressed I heard a buzzing insect. Since I live in a drafty barn, I often find winged creatures inside. I had a hunt and realized that the buzzing insect sound was coming from my person. It was a honeybee in my left jeans pocket which had apparently settled in there yesterday while they were drying on the line and had spent the night in the dresser.

After breaking the world record for removing a pair of jeans, both the bee and I emerged from the experience unscathed and she flew away out the window, hopefully back to her hive.

I’ve always loved bees and have felt a special kinship with them. When I was about three, a bumblebee landed on my head and several years later a swarm of honeybees rested in a tree in our front yard for a few days. A tree that I often used to climb to sit in and read a book. They left the beginnings of a honeycomb on one of the leaves.

Bees are an ancient symbol of the Soul, industry, creative activity, wealth, resurrection: death and rebirth. I found an interesting website called The Bee Goddess which is filled with images and information about the bee and honey in many ancient cultures.

Egyptian heiroglyphic

From Symbolica: the bee symbol is a good reminder that our works of art can nourish and sustain our community as well as ourselves. Because of the major role of the queen bee and the thousands of female ‘workers’, the bee has long been associated with the feminine aspects of nature. Therefore she can be used to develop the creative feminine aspects within us all.

Maybe this bee came to me with a message, a reminder to set my ego to one side and get on with my artwork. It’s been quiet in my studio for the past 2-3 weeks. The excuse: I’ve been working part-time at the University, but I really need to finish up two quilts I’ve entered into the Festival of Quilts in Birmingham. They are 80% complete and I know what I have to do next, I just procrastinate. This morning I wrote down what I need to do next on each one, then I will do the next step and the next.

I am also designing another quilt in the riverjourney series, or rather this piece is ready to be made. About the winter forest weeping when the remaining Muscogee people were removed to Indian Territory in November 1836. On Monday, I made a monoprint on cotton fabric at the Double Elephant using water-based black ink, which I will set with spray fixative and I plan to buy some white silk dupioni tomorrow. I’ve been experimenting with paper and pastels and working up a design of the piece before I get started.

I’ve written a haiku for the piece:

The winter trees

wept a river of blood

when we were torn

from the land.

Winter trees sketch

Winter trees fabric

Summer River

As I was walking along the River Exe yesterday, I fell into a rêverie watching Impressionistic reflections of trees and the sky on the surface of the water. . . .

The lingering despair of Erik Satie’s Gnossienes and Gymnopédies are among the most affected compositions for piano from the 19th century. Trois Gymnopédies (1888 ) were probably inspired by a decoration on a Greek vase. Satie’s interest in Mediaeval music shows in the simple plainsong-like harmonies of these pieces. Collectively, the Gymnopédies are regarded as the precursors to modern ambient music – gentle yet somewhat eccentric pieces which, when composed, defied the classical tradition.

Although the collection of chords at first seems too complex to be harmonious, the melody soon imbues the work with a soothing atmospheric quality which, decades later, would inspire Brian Eno, the pioneering figure of ambient music. Eno would cite Satie as his prime influence.

Gymnopédie No. 3 is is a minor key version of Gymnopédie No. 1 and meant to be played ‘lent et grave’, slowly and solemnly. If played as it is intended, the texture of this piece is as smooth as silk: calming, reflective, ethereal, relaxing, soothing, and elegant.

Pianist Pascal Rogé transmits the fragility of Satie’s piano works with his delicate phrasing and the artistic quality of his pianism. A very comprehensive survey of Satie’s piano works including the gorgeous Nocturnes can be found on a Decca recording by Rogé unfortunately titled “after the rain . . . the soft sounds of Erik Satie.”

“Pascal Rogé has real feeling for this repertoire and conveys its bitter-sweet quality and its grave melancholy as well as he does its lighter qualities. ” Penguin Guide

Further discussion about Rogé playing Satie can be found at a Swedish site called SatieMart.