"How long did THAT take you?!"

Agnes Martin, The Sea, 2003. Acrylic and graphite on canvas. 60"x60"

"How long did THAT take you?!" is a question that I as a weaver am sometimes asked about my work. The topic came up during a recent meeting with my advising faculty as we were discussing a 4' x 8' woven piece that I had just completed. This particular question, when asked by a viewer in place of a reflective comment, can be a sign that your audience is having a very hard time getting beyond the obviously time consuming and laborious processes that created the object of interest. The point was up for discussion, however: rather than simply not having anything better to say, this type of inquiry might also be an expression of wonderment and an attempt to understand an unfamiliar process through something familiar and quantifiable like time. The difference in meaning lies in the quality of the work's treatment, between a surface which is overworked and one which reflects a quiet presence of hand. When I am asked how long it took to make a finished piece, I hope the question is in response to characteristics of the latter . As someone who spends an embarrassing amount of time on processes intended to be unnoticeable in a finished piece, I can recognize the thin line which separates the two reactions. I stitched over 40 feet of cloth together (twice) and touched a glue-dotted pin point to 1900 individual threads in Quietly, Quietly. These labors are completely in service of the final appearance of the piece, and somehow personally satisfying (notice that I myself was curious to quantify my actions...I would be loath to reveal such nerdy statistics to a viewer), but they add to the work only through their invisibility. When someone's imagination draws them deep into the physicality of the piece, prompting them to inquire into some measurement of your labor, you've tapped into the magic of a process which melts into the concept, enhances the idea and stands back for the in-depth investigation rather than jumping forward and announcing the labor first. I believe in slow discovery, in rewarding the viewer who looks longer and gets up close and intimate with the piece. Here process can add another layer to the experience. It's a chance to round out a concept with a subtle history of the mark making. A record of hours will never translate directly, but the fact that all those hours are somehow contained in the work can add a few lines of poetry to the piece. This is my philosophy, my justification (beyond personal compulsion and enjoyment) for the tedious actions, hidden and visible, in my work.

"Weaver as collector?"

In response to my Numbers post from a few weeks back, my Fiber studio mate Aaron left a wonderful comment that's had me thinking:

"The validity of repetition is definitely something to ponder. Knowing your work, it is a good thing for you to ponder. Your first complete work in grad school was all about some repetition, and now your second big project is all about the discreet object. Or is it? Weaving is an accumulation and organization of hundreds, thousands even, of strings of yarn. Even though they are mostly one long connected strand of yarn, their treatment is as individual threads (weft variations). Rhythm, the flow of individual parts put together, is integral to weaving. Weaver as collector?" (Aaron McIntosh)

There are so many aspects of weaving that I enjoy, the process rich in metaphor and symbolic content. My loom is a meditative space, where action is slow and rhythmic. I go there with purpose: to create a cloth structure which captures my idea or contains the qualities I desire for further manipulation off the loom. I have woven a lot of cloth. I have sat at my loom for hours at a time passing thread back and forth through the opening in the warp. The low shimmering hiss of steel, wood tapping wood, a soft friction of threads moving against each other: these sounds create the familiar score which plays each time I work. With this as my backdrop, I have had a lot of time to contemplate the significance in the action and product of my labor. It is so important to me that the woven aspect of my work is necessary to the concept, and I feel that the themes of my work in general are very much related to the metaphors I see in weaving. My work is introspective, evocative in some way of a human presence. I reference the body, figure, or spirit, playing between senses of sadness, loss, quiet strength, and hope. As I weave, I believe I infuse these elements into cloth: each pass of the shuttle records the action of my imperfect hand. Time builds cloth, thread by thread, row by row. Collecting. Time. My handwoven material becomes the collection of moments, meditations, the warp and weft like an undecipherable text, a secret, something to be sensed but not necessarily understood. If I could look at all the different cloths I have woven, would their variations tell a story? Though I have ventured off on a romantic tangent here, and do not require that these thoughts occur in the mind of someone viewing my work, they are the fuel which drives me to weave and occupies my imagination as the thread occupies my hands. A careful record, taken down slowly: weaver as collector.

(Un)Establishing some rules

Having made it over half-way through the first semester of graduate school, I am really beginning to understand a few things about myself and my artistic processes through the eyes of my peers and professors. OK, I'm not to the point of understanding, but I am developing a deeper self-awareness that goes beyond my studio practice. The concept of "rules" has come up recently, as in rules that I set for myself when I am making something. There is my process, the thoughtful procedure I develop in order to turn an idea into a work, and then there is the process of my process, the subconscious barriers that keep me thinking along specific lines, following specific patterns as I make. I really thought I had some things figured out when I started school. RULE: there must always be a set direction and plan. I thought I was ready to make make make, be an artist, produce work, etc. RULE: once a path has been established, it must be followed to the end. But I feel like I'm starting from scratch, redefining what I thought I knew, creating foundations more than work. It is very uncomfortable: I don't really feel like I've made a resolved piece yet! RULE: everything I make must be a finished and successful piece of art. But I am learning a lot, discovering many questions and NO answers. How did I let these rules establish themselves to the point where I don't even see them anymore, only feel discomfort when I push away from them? RULE: the rules cannot be broken. You ARE your rules. How deep might they go? How are they affecting my work? Which are fundamentally important and which are holding me back? This goes much deeper than artwork, unfortunately. I am a carefully constructed and regulated being. And yet, as scary as it might be to allow myself to swim out into the unprotected waters beyond my understanding, it is also very exciting. I have a feeling that the only way I will truly succeed is to just go for it, really put myself out there. First rule to break: failure is not an option.

Vitamins G-S and G.V. for my artistic soul

A wonderful thing about VCU is that while the challenges and intensity of the MFA program might weigh quite heavily on a young and idealistic art student, there are also so many opportunities to be inspired, invigorated, encouraged, and enlightened. This is why I'm in graduate school, bombarded from all sides with stuff to read and look at and listen to, discovering things I might never have found on my own. I feel like I'm in an information accelerator...this can be overwhelming and I must admit that I often feel stressed and off-balance, but maybe the high intensity serves its own purpose...a break-down of barriers, an overload of information, an escape from the comfort zone...will I leave here having grown more than I could imagine? I certainly hope so. Meanwhile, I will hang on, enjoying the ride through all of its ups and downs.
The catalyst for this warm and fuzzy graduate school moment (I must remember to read this one day at 3am when I am wondering why I thought not sleeping for 2 years would help my personal path as artist and human) was a recent lecture from art critic and VCU faculty member Gregory Volk, who was kind enough to visit my critique class and share a bit of his passion for the search of thoughtful, profound, dare I say existential contemporary art. His lecture employed the works of Francis Alys and Ayse Erkmen as examples for thinking outside the box, making art outside the studio, and moving beyond the art world into a universe of limitless opportunities for expression. Quoting Emerson, he emphasized that "art is the path of the creator to his work" and not the final product. This idea, and the connection of the visual artistic process to Emersonian principles in general, is an inspiring and empowering one. Art making is not about being serious, or serving up great profound truths to the masses below. Art is about the creative process...MY creative process...it's about respecting that journey, paying attention both inwardly and outwardly along the way. Like a walk through the woods, the joy lies not in the destination but the experience itself...the smells, the sounds, the thoughts that occur in that magical environment. This way of art making is a way of living, an embrace of wonder.
It's always so helpful when someone can illuminate an idea or value which is important to you, but might not yet be fully materialized in your own consciousness. I truly enjoyed Mr.Volk's obvious passion for literature, and the way in which it informed and enriched his experience of visual art. Though I love to read classic literature from America and elsewhere (Borges, Marques, and Lorca are among my favorites from abroad) and feel incomplete without a wonderful book on the table by my bed, I am ashamed to admit that I never consciously connected the profound beauty I experience when I read the words of these and many other authors, to their ability to teach me something about my own studio practice. And yet it is so obvious: I want to evoke the feeling I get from their words: I want to be a channel for that poetry, that profound beauty, that melancholy and ache. While listening to Mr.Volk's lecture, I realized that this connection I feel to literature is not only valid, but an important voice to listen for when walking along through the forest of my ideas, dreams, and ambitions. So it seems that 100 Years of Solitude might be an appropriate textbook for my artistic study. In addition, as Mr.Volk suggested, I will be breaking out my Emerson, my Whitman, my Dickenson, with fresh eyes and a new context. I think I will need a bigger nightstand.

Wonder and Numbers

During a recent trip to the MoMA I was able to visit the Wunderkammer: A Century of Curiosities exhibit, and ran across a modern cabinet of wonder by Mark Dion. This piece, called Cabinet, got me thinking about the relationship between the quantity of a certain object and its ability to interest us or inspire wonder. In Dion's cabinet, the curiosities are collected from an excavation of relatively unexciting building materials, everything from bricks to screws. But as I viewed the objects in their glass covered drawers, neatly organized in collections by item, they became more than simple materials that I understood as existing within the relm of the functinal and the everyday. The repetition of quantity, with unique variations from item to item, made these pieces worthy of display and contemplation. What is it about the repetition of a form that can inspire our curiosity? A bird floating on a current of air is something to notice. But 200 birds doing the same is something to wonder at. A lightbulb is something to appreciate, but 75,000 of them in Dr. Hugh Francis Hick's Mount Vernon Museum of Incandescent Lighting is amazing. There is a lot of interesting psychology out there about collectors: part of it is the desire for order. But it's more than that: I am not a collector, yet I am in awe of anything normal taken out of context and in great quantity. In the same way that a large quantity of things which hold little value on their own gain intersest and value when grouped, sometimes things which are seen as highly valuable on their own will lose that value in quantity. This may be pure economics, but again, that can't be the whole explanation. When value hinges on rarity, wonderful things drop in esteem when we percieve that they may not be so rare. One example are the fruit-stone carvings that, in spite of the feat of their creation, they were so plentiful that every respectable wondercabinet had one, and were dismissed more than marvelled at. In my own work, I often find myself responding to something I've made with "this would be really interesting if there were 100 more!" Fortunately for me I don't necessarily carry out this compulsion, but now I do wonder, what do I make that holds power from being unique, and what would actually benefit from quantity?

Another theory of time

I wonder how long Einstein's Dreams really could have been: how many more theories of time might Alan Lightman have floating around in his head? I came up with one myself the other day: Time exists in multiple channels. It moves at different speeds and in varying numbers of separate occurences which develop off of one central channel. This diagram of time would look something like a bathtub full of bubbles: the main channel is the water in the tub, the time experienced constantly by a person's body, and bubbles that float up from the tub are the renegade channels, short existences that occur simultaneously with the main one but are not necessarily experienced at the same speed. These bubbles float up and out, separating themselves further and further from the main body of time until they finally pop, that channel of time then disintegrating back into the big tub, leaving you in your bubble bath with a feeling of having been somewhere else. I came up with this theory while daydreaming in my bathtub: I was thinking about an event that occurred a few days before while also staring at the tile in the shower, my mind running off to ponder the color and structure. These two separate but simultaneous thoughts then seemed to pop, and I was suddenly aware that I had mentally been off in space while still physically aware of the warm water and steam around me, the smell of bath salts. Had I not read this book I might have overlooked the moment, but instead I made a new theory! In this culture which opperates on many of the not-so-poetic-and-dreamy theories of time laid out in Einstien's Dreams, I find it comforting to imagine that time does not necessarily follow the ridgid structures we impose upon it, and it upon us. Beyond illuminating these constraints specifically related to time, Einsten is an exercise of questioning what is assumed to be proven fact, an exercise in utter abandonment to the imagination and appreciation of the secrets of our minds. As a graduate student in art school, I see this book as a reminder to view my work from as many different angles as I can, to keep asking "what if", to assume nothing and try everything. As a human being in a very stressful and exciting time in my life, I see this book as a lesson in recognizing and understanding the various relationships I have with time and how they might hurt or help me in maximizing the life I have. I plan on critically rereading this book in a few years...I wonder if I might interpret it differently when I am in a new set of circumstances. Until then, I will try to remember to think less literally and more imaginatively: maybe I will document a few more time theories of my own.

Frederico Garcia Lorca

A great poem is like vitamins for my soul. The way Lorca manipulates words is visceral, the connections he makes between images so strange yet so perfect...his poetry is like painting with language (incredibly beautiful in English and Spanish)...here's one that is particularly haunting, inspiring, etc. etc...In reading it I remember the true power of art:

Gacela X
De la huida
(Ghazal of the Flight)

I have often been lost on the sea
with my ear full of fresh-cut flowers,
with my tongue full of agony and love.
Often I have been lost on the sea,
as I am lost in the heart of certain children.

There is no one who can kiss
without feeling the smile of those without faces;
there is no one who can touch
an infant and forget the immobile skulls of horses.

Because roses search the forehead
for a hard landscape of bone,
and human hands have no more sense
than to mimic roots beneath the soil.

As I am lost in the heart of certain children,
I have often been lost on the sea.
Not knowing water, I keep looking
to be consumed in luminous death.

-F.G. Lorca

Who's in charge here???

After watching "The Beauty of Questions," I began thinking about Robert Irwin and what I could learn from him. He spoke so thoughtfully of his journey through art and life...he seemed able to step away from himself and analyze the developmental stages he went through artistically in order to come to the place where he finally felt that his work was communicating in the way he desired it to. It seems like he came upon an awful lot of resistance in his journey: people didn't know how to react to his work. It defied categorization and even enraged some people as he stripped the idea of a painting further and further away from physical object. I wonder if he always felt as sure of his vision as he did in the retrospective angle of the film. I wonder if there were times...and I remember from the film Irwin describing an opening for his work where a woman yelled at him to "stop it" immediately...when he doubted himself and the validity of his ideas. When he sold all his studio equipment and spent a year in the desert, was he searching for his reason for making, the truth behind it? I suppose that a big part of the reason (THE reason?) we make art is because we have something to say, whether or not it is understood may be irrelevant. But even so, it can't be denied that we make work for others to see, that we want someone to hear what we are saying. Irwin seems so sure of himself...maybe the reason that he resonates with me so much is that I am struggling to pinpoint why it is that I want to speak and what it is that I want to say, and the validity of this desire. The question is, how is that validity determined? Who is in charge of deciding if I am valid? Now everybody sees what Irwin doing when he stopped painting with paint, where he was going with the shadow thing...thus the film about him...but what about in the middle of his development when old ladies were yelling at him in galleries? So who can say in the moment what's right or wrong, good or bad? And why do I even care what others think? This is a constant debate in my head. But I do care, and a lot of times I don't feel so confident, so when I see things like "The Beauty of Questions" or read about someone like David Wilson and his Museum of Jurassic Technology I am recharged and inspired. Sometimes it doesn't matter who is in charge, who says what's art or a painting or a museum. What matters is the drive inside that must be obeyed despite external opposition. Trusting ourselves, questioning established parameters...let someone else figure it out later.

Some thought-provoking quotes from Robert Irwin:

"The act of art is a tool for extended consciousness."

"We have chosen that experience out of the realm of experiences to be defined as "art," because having this label it is given special attention. Perhaps this is all "art" means—this Frame of Mind."

"If that state of consciousness I keep talking about became, in a sense, the consciousness of society as a whole, if we really thought in those terms, and were really that aware, . . . really that sense-sophisticated, then our art would be an integral part of our society, and the artist as a separate discipline or art as a separate event would not exist."

art making as investigation

When is content and context given to a piece of artwork? Is it before the artist even begins the act of making, the catalyst for creation and the driving force behind the final product? Or can it be something that seeps in later, even beyond the artist's control? In my own experience it's been a little bit of both: I begin with a certain idea that I wish to wrap my head around through making, usually an observation about myself, and through the course of my project the idea morphs, expands- becomes something that is not about little me at all but about the larger "me" that is not unique, a shared experience among people in a more general sense. The making is an investigation, both into the "why" of a subject that burns in my brain, such as the flaws and tragic beauty of the human animal, as well as into the materials I am using to deal with that "why". Deep into the meat of such a work, the concept takes a back seat as I respond to texture, color, volume, quantity. My investigation turns to questions like, "What would happen if I made 100 of these? What does this weave structure feel like when it is loose and open versus closed? What if I added color?" At this point the work is much more intuitive, though I like to think the concepts are still floating around in the back of my mind, subconsciously influencing my response to the materials and the choices I make about them. Then after the last line is drawn and the last stitch is knotted off, something amazing happens. Not only has my original direction usually changed (often without my realizing it but finally having to admit to it...sometimes it's hard to let go of what you thought you were doing), but lurking in the work are completely new ideas that I didn't even know I was dealing with. I cannot take full credit for these things, but again I like to think that the contents of my brain can affect what I'm doing without me necessarily realizing it- ideas shaking around and bumping into each other up there, leaving all with traces of their collison. But art takes on it's own life once released to the wild and each pair of eyes that takes time to stop and think will invent their own meaning. In this way the piece keeps expanding, the investigation continues. I think I learn just as much about the questions I ask after the work is finished as when I am consciously searching for insight into the themes I investigate.

Things rolling around in my brain right now? Let's play stream of consciousness....people people people communication community war the tragedy of not recognizing our shared humanity complexity of language shared elements of all language unspoken language self destructive behavior isolation need for contact insides guts are all the same blood is all the same social structures popular culture influence of group individuality feeling different not really different personal space self imposed barriers social cues walls ........I could go on. So I guess the thing to do now is to keep thinking, keep wondering, keep investigating, keep storing these things in my brain and we'll see what bumps together.

some visuals:

Diary of a Monster

















alien language?


sign writing


















Bantu symbols

Beauty and wonder in the ritual of making

What drives us as artists and makers to do what we do? The repetitive actions and technical processes that I as a weaver understand as necessary to my creation of art may seem to some as mind-numbing, tedious, and even unnecessary. After a particularly labor-intensive day, I sometimes question my methods: why do I spend hours guiding hundreds of threads individually through my loom when I could just buy a piece of cloth? This care, this attention to the single units that are eventually swallowed into the entirety of the work, what purpose does it serve? Like many artists, part of it is related to compulsion: the performance and ritual of making a sculptural raw material like cloth feels as natural and necessary as breathing, it's something I must do to feel like myself. After reading Weschler's Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder, I found that there was one particular story that I kept returning to, and I realized that it spoke to me on this very level of artistic obsession. It's about a man named Hagop Sandaldijan, a sculptor who carved his work not out of blocks of marble but individual strands of human hair. In the book, Sandaldijan's son describes his process:

'He would wait until late at night,' Levon said, 'when we kids were in bed and the rumble from the nearby highways had subsided. Then he would hunch over his microscope and time his applications between heartbeats-- he was working at such an infinitesimal scale that he could recognize the stirings of his own pulse in the shudder of the instruments he was using.'

The act itself is a work of art, a ritualistic performance only for the maker: but what does it satisfy? I imagine this sculptor hunched intensely at his microscope, barely breathing, knowing the only evidence of his toil will be tiny marks in a strand of hair. Underlying this process is the search for an innermost essence or truth: that which might be seen through a microscope, between the pulse of one's own heart. In the irrationality of his work we catch a glimpse of living poetry, a testiment to purity and the human capacity for goodness, beauty beyond what words can articulate. This is the gift we are given as artists, makers, human beings. As I sit at my loom and pass lines of thread back and forth, trapping the evidence of my labor one strand at a time, I understand why Sandaldijan must perform his quiet ritual. In the rythm of my own hands, my breathing, and the soft rising and falling in this machine I conduct: I realize that I too am aware of my heartbeat.